Small Group 2: Learning From and Alongside Community Grassroots Organizations: Arts as Coalitional Justice

• In Event: Challenging Extractive Epistemologies and Fostering Participatory Justice: Reflecting on More Than a Decade of Community-Based Research in Philadelphia

Abstract

With our long-term partnership, university and community researchers have continued to learn from and alongside community grassroots organizations in our city. Grassroots organizations in Philadelphia, for decades, have advocated and fought for our historically marginalized Communities of Color against inequitable schooling, housing displacement, and other injustices. Learning alongside our community thus cannot be separated from the social organizing mobilized across borders and differences, all toward building coalitional solidarity.
In pairing scholarship with social organizing, we recognize that our research together is a social practice that can never be neutral. In the summer of 2022, a sports team and their billionaire-backed developers announced their proposal to build an arena a block away from the Chinatown neighborhood. Following the inquiry of one youth participant, the collaborative arts chapter in our book and Chinatown Photovoice project naturally integrated the community’s collective organizing against the arena. The youth on our project sought to learn from the past and reimagine the future through their project. We centered the questions: What can we learn from the past fights against gentrification and displacement in Chinatown? How can we learn from current and former Chinatown residents? As a part of this small group, we invite participants to consider: how are we learning from community grassroots organizations? How can our research and scholarship be in alignment with and support what the community is prioritizing and advocating for?
The data sources from the study remained flexible to the ways the inquiry developed with the youth participants and community. The inquiry unfolded with a historical inquiry, that invited youth participants to explore a range of historical resources about Philadelphia Chinatown, an intergenerational community panel featuring members from the Chinatown community (including an elementary school teacher, a student organizer, and a leader from a community organization), an ethical interview workshop, a photography workshop, and then a series of community interviews. The community panel, as an example, was suggested by the youth, who sought to learn about Chinatown from active organizers and members. At each phase of our inquiry, youth researchers have been intimately involved in the planning process, from thinking through the structure and focus to the guiding questions and activities, and how we reflect on our process as a group. In between each youth inquiry meeting, we met with youth to both reflect on the previous meeting and plan together for the subsequent meeting.
This form of intellectual activism has allowed youth and university researchers to learn about our community and its organizing and see these legacies as inextricably connected in collective efforts toward educational justice and equity. Youth participants continually remind us to stay rooted in and responsive to the community’s needs and wants. This small group hopes to share conversations about how we can cultivate meaningful, ethical, and aligned relationships with community grassroot organizations in our own local contexts, and to consider how we might foster coalitional justice in our community-based research.

Authors

• Claire Wan, University of Pennsylvania

• Andrea Lie, Youth Teams in Education Research

• Maria Hernandez, CARE Initiative

• Maria Paula Ghiso, Teachers College, Columbia University