Practicing Good Relation: Youth, Grief, and the Ethics of Participatory Research

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 3:45 pm
  In Roundtable Session: Participatory Action Research for Educational Justice

Abstract

This paper offers a methodological reflection on a critical participatory action research study with Black, Indigenous, and racialized youth who co-theorized grief through visual and arts-based inquiry. Grounded in critical youth studies, queer studies, and Indigenous feminist epistemologies, this study reframes methodology as relational and ethical practice, not simply a set of tools. Through collective community commitments, creative expression, and reimagined research ethics, youth reshaped the project’s questions, methods, and outcomes—including co-creating the Good Grief Commons, a digital space for shared mourning. From this site of co-creation, we examine how good grief emerged through practices of good relation, attending to the conditions that make co-theorizing possible. This study advances participatory research as a site of collective care, accountability, and transformation.

Author

• Tiffany T. Hill, University of Toronto