Healing People, Heal People: Enacting Intifada through Transformative Justice Research, Education and Grassroots Organizing

• In Event: Intifada Isn’t a Metaphor: Enacting Education Research That Shakes Sh*t Off and Heals Us

Abstract

Objectives

The primary objective of our youth participatory action research (YPAR) has been: (1) to study how to practice and institutionalize non-punitive forms of justice within a grassroots community organization, Youth United for Community Action (YUCA); and in turn, (2) to empirically examine the development and application of a pedagogy and curriculum designed to prepare students, educators and community members to actively participate in shaking off existing global, interconnected punitive systems from East Palo Alto, California (EPA) to Palestine.

Methodology and Data

The author listed for this paper has been co-researching alongside youth in this paper as part of a research-practice partnership since the spring of 2017 (i.e., youth are participating as “core members” of YUCA). The source of data for this paper are YUCA youth and adult staff, the author listed for this paper, and youth from across EPA who agreed to share their experiences with punishment, as well as their ideas about liberatory forms of justice and collective liberation. YUCA youth shaped the research goals, questions and structure; iteratively and collectively interpreted data; and decided how to share findings (i.e., YPAR; Edirmanasinghe, 2020). Data has been gathered, interpreted and shared within discussions of texts during youth-led “political education” sessions and transformative justice “circles,” as well as during actions and meetings taken to support intifada, uprisings and revolution. Research for this paper was coordinated with a coinciding campaign seeking to organize for housing and migrant justice, as tied to the rematriation of Indigenous lands.

Theoretical Framework, Conclusions and Scholarly Significance

Youth will be presenting and discussing how they applied YPAR, as well as their preliminary results, conclusions, and implications. This will include narrativizing the genealogy of this work in youth questions on how restorative justice (RJ) was being developed and implemented in Oakland, California as an alternative to punitive systems of justice. RJ has come to be widely defined as a way of approaching discipline that seeks to escape frames of victim/perpetrator, and instead, to address harms through communal repair in a manner that strengthens communities (Winn, 2023). When learning about RJ, YUCA youth came across what has been referred to as transformative justice (TJ), which seeks to address the systemic injustices that make harm possible (Kaba & Hassan, 2019).

As part of their overall results, youth will be sharing their primary conclusion: collective liberation is more closely aligned with TJ than RJ (Tuck & Yang, 2018). They will describe how they came to this conclusion based upon reflection on TJ’s alignment, in theory and practice, with YUCA’s use of root cause analysis to identify and act upon systemic injustices impacting their community–as connected to the larger world (e.g., Palestine, “Cop City” in Atlanta). Learning took place within discussions, as well as during protests and organized revolt against strategic local targets of oppression. TJ came to be seen as being about not only healing people and those impacted by an immediate harm, but abolishing harmful systems, and healing the society producing hurt people, who hurt people.

Author

• Casey Philip Wong, Georgia State University