Curating Healing and Restorative Spaces for Inquiry: YPAR Through Epistemologies and Ontologies of Resistance

• In Event: Research as Restorative Practice: Reparative and Recognitive Approaches to Critical Participatory Inquiry

Abstract

This youth participatory action research (YPAR) project commenced with the objective of curating and co-constructing a healing and restorative space for inquiry (Author, 2024; Stanfield, 2006), one where youth co-researchers (aged 13-15) could see themselves as experts. The aim was not to identify a problem for youth to research, but to envision, co-construct, and share space to build on their knowledge. To curate a more holistic and transformative space alongside youth co-researchers required us to critically examine traditional research training, which often frames questions through deficits (Weiner, 2006). Rather than emulating deficit-oriented research training and definitions of validity for youth co-researchers, we sought to demonstrate how our collective could offer the potential to radically redefine the education research landscape (Caraballo et al., 2017). As we explored this site of possibility alongside youth co-researchers, we saw our space as an opportunity to repair and remedy the harms youth witnessed through research and their schools. These harms include the type of deficit-oriented research that often defines youth as problems, rather than the solutions behind the harms they experience within their schools.

During our project, youth were most interested in exploring how violence (e.g., physical, emotional, cyberbullying) in their schools led to their mental health issues. However, during initial conversations, youth often saw themselves and their peers as the problems that adult administrators and authority figures were most interested in fixing, as well as incapable of conducting research. In formulating our work through culturally relevant (Ladson-Billings, 1995) and culturally sustaining (Paris, 2012) pedagogical practices, we sought to curate a space where all (university-affiliated and youth) co-researchers could learn about the skills and expertise they brought to this project while (re)affirming their cultural identities. This required us to see the worth of our space not simply as one measured by capitalistic productivity, but through relationship-building. Rather than designing a space for youth, our co-creation/co-curation included occasions to work while listening to music, discuss current cultural events and language/slang, and explore what youth viewed as the most pressing problems to be solved.

Through YPAR, we significantly emphasized the knowledge production of youth as active contributors/researchers to their educational context, demonstrating how they could question their experiences and environments, and the oppressions that directly impact their lives (Caraballo et al., 2017). To curate this space meant attempting to create caring relationships and a safe space where youth could exhibit their expertise. As Ginwright (2010) notes, adults can provide a form of care when they offer activist opportunities for young people as legitimate political actors, especially as the youth co-researchers in our collective sought to counter the violence and traumas they often faced.

This meant not simply “training” youth co-researchers on our methods (e.g., face-to-face interviews), but learning from them on the most effective ways to engage their peers, as well as alternatives to text data analysis (e.g., voice memo analysis). By opening lines for open communication, our space became a political act of resistance, where youth not only noticed their epistemic expertise, but their ontological worth.

Authors

• Giovanni P. Dazzo, University of Georgia

• Ashley Williams, University of Georgia

• Carlyncia McDowell, University of Georgia