Abolitionist Possibilities in Education Research: Methodological Praxis with Black Foster Youth

• In Event: Building Abolitionist Futures in Education Now: Critical Engagements with Freedom, Belonging, and Police-Free Schools

Abstract

Academia has long participated in the surveillance, extraction, and pathologization of Black communities (Esposito & Evans-Winters, 2021). For Black foster youth, research itself often becomes another site of subjugation, where their lives are reduced to data points, framed through deficit logics, and stripped of context. This paper explores abolition as methodological praxis: an orientation that rejects carceral logics and instead centers care, relational accountability, and the full humanity of participants. Drawing on a qualitative study with 22 Black foster youth students, this work asks: What becomes possible when education research is rooted in an abolitionist epistemology grounded in community, care, and liberation?
Black foster youth exist at the intersection of systems, particularly family policing and education, that collude to produce surveillance, punishment, and harm (Roberts, 2022; Meiners & Tolliver, 2016). This study was designed to be responsive to these structural conditions and the vulnerabilities that this multi-system collusion creates (Harvey et al., 2024). Rather than replicate the institutional violence these youth regularly encounter, the research intentionally disrupted extractive norms by centering care, flexibility, and a commitment to relational accountability. Methodological decisions emerged from a set of guiding principles grounded in abolitionist values, ensuring that every aspect of the project honored the complexity, dignity, and agency of participants.
This paper offers examples of how abolition can inform and reimagine education research. Additionally, it calls on researchers to similarly develop guiding principles that reflect abolitionist commitments, not as a universal template, but as context-specific frameworks responsive to participants, place, and the social location of the researcher. In this way methodology becomes a site of practice and a space where freedom, reciprocity, and trust are enacted, where carceral logics are resisted, and liberatory futures can be imagined.

Author

• Brianna Marche' Harvey, California State University - Fullerton