“Don’t Drink the Water!”: Desert Stories of Environmental Justice, YPAR in an Afterschool club

• In Event: Revolutionizing Education, Revitalized: The Rise of Creative Resistance in Youth Participatory Action Research

Abstract

This presentation explores the Sunnyside Arts-Based Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) Environmental Justice Project, a collaborative initiative engaging high school students in South Tucson, Arizona, in critically examining and responding to environmental injustices through arts-based inquiry. The project emerged in response to a longstanding lack of formal mechanisms for incorporating youth perspectives into local environmental decision-making. Led by a veteran educator in partnership with University of Arizona scholars and a graduate researcher, the project aimed to position youth as co-researchers and public intellectuals through a sustained arts-based YPAR process.
The objectives of the project were threefold: (1) to elevate youth voice in environmental justice discourses affecting marginalized communities in South Tucson; (2) to utilize arts-based methodologies to surface local knowledge and critique structural inequities; and (3) to foster intergenerational, school-university-community partnerships grounded in relational accountability and critical pedagogy.
Theoretical frameworks informing this work include Youth Participatory Action Research, as a methodology that centers youth as epistemic agents; creative resistance (Dominguez & Cammarota, 2022), which conceptualizes artistic expression as a political and pedagogical act; and critical pedagogy (Freire, 1970; hooks, 1994), which frames education as a dialogic and transformative practice. In addition, decolonial and feminist epistemologies inform the praxis of this project, particularly through the instructional leadership of Argumedo, an Indigenous Mexicana graduate student whose facilitation emphasized cultural relevance, affective labor, and Indigenous knowledge systems.
Methodologically, the project incorporated a range of participatory and arts-based techniques, including collaborative visual art production, environmental mapping, photo elicitation, digital storytelling, and zine-making. Students also engaged in literary analysis of environmental texts in their formal coursework, which informed their critical framing and artistic outputs. Over the course of the 2023–2024 academic year, youth participants collaboratively identified water justice as the project’s focal issue, citing its existential significance in a desert region and its deep entwinement with issues of racialized neglect, public health, and sustainability.
Empirical materials include youth-generated art, field notes, transcribed interviews with community members, reflective journals, and public-facing creative outputs such as zines, spoken word performances, and posters. These artifacts function both as research data and as political interventions intended to influence community discourse and institutional policy.
Findings indicate that arts-based YPAR practices not only deepen critical consciousness and community engagement among youth, but also serve as powerful tools for reclaiming narrative authority and articulating place-based counter-knowledges. Youth participants demonstrated sophisticated analyses of structural inequities and a profound investment in sustainability, asserting their rightful place in shaping just and livable futures.
The scholarly significance of this work lies in its contribution to interdisciplinary conversations in environmental justice, critical youth studies, and participatory arts-based research. It offers a model for how public schools, universities, and local communities can collaborate to disrupt dominant research paradigms and create generative spaces for youth leadership and collective inquiry. In doing so, the project affirms the central claim of the broader volume from which it emerges: that creative resistance is not only a mode of critique but also a practice of world-making.

Author

• Julio Cammarota, University of Arizona