Research on/in Black Youth Movements: Navigating State Violence and Scholar- Activist Researcher Roles within Pan-African Resistance

• In Event: Researching Corporate, State, and Right-Wing Power: the Uneven Power Dynamics between Academics, Activists & Powerful Actors

Proposal

Researching social movements requires understanding and navigating both the dynamics of state power and the ever-present threat of state violence against protesters. In 2020, two historic uprisings challenged state violence in the form of extrajudicial police killings of Black people, facing brutal government repression in the process. The “Black Lives Matter” protests that re-emerged after the death of George Floyd reverberated around the world in May and June of 2020. Equally significant but less widely interpreted, the #EndSARS protests of October 2020 drew attention to state violence and burgeoning struggles to transform policing in the largest Black nation in the world, Nigeria.

Based on ongoing collaborative research and solidarity within the Movement for Black Lives in the United States and #EndSARS in Nigeria, this paper examines the social and political pathways of Black youth activists and organizers, their personal stories and histories that brought them to the streets during the #BlackLivesMatter and #EndSARS movements of 2020, and what has kept them involved or led them away from the continued struggle for Black lives and against police brutality. The study examines whether factors such as historical consciousness, political education, family histories of activism, ideological orientation, as well as the existence of organizational ecosystems and intergenerational learning opportunities, played a role in developing the capacity of young organizers and their impact on young activists' trajectories. The paper also broadly considers why youth organize, beyond street and popular protests, to understand the “long road” to lifelong activism that is pursued by some and not others.

The authors, who identify as scholar-organizers, come to this work as active participants within or in tangible solidarity with the Movement for Black Lives and #EndSARS movement. Using in-depth interviews, focus groups, and participatory, multimodal research methods, the study seeks to both collaboratively document these uprisings from the perspectives of the youth organizers who sustained them, and to understand how to create more sustainable pathways of organizing and resistance that forge stronger movements. The study finds that, while state violence disrupted the course of protests in both Nigeria and the United States, varying factors shaped young peoples’ responses to state violence and their decisions to continue or withdraw from organizing and activism, including their knowledge of past social movements, their historical consciousness, and the ecosytem of organizing they operated within. Young activists who expressed more knowledge of and connection to histories of resistance were more likely to be withstand the experience and threat of state violence to continue organizing. The authors’ experiences as organizers within and researchers of movements encountering and challenging state violence are further examined as methodological practices, which foreground the challenges and possibilities of research on/in social movements as an ethical research practice.

Works Cited:

Authors

• R. Nanre Nafziger, McGill University

• Krystal Strong, Rutgers University