Shifting research power relationships: Tools, best practices, and lessons learned for designing and facilitating inclusive youth-led research

Group Submission Type: Pre-conference Workshop

Description of Session

As international development and education stakeholders and practitioners strive for substantive progress towards positive youth development (PYD) aims (USAID, 2022), critical discussion is needed surrounding “how” to ensure the youth are leaders and protagonists in all aspects of program design, implementation, and evaluation. This requires a shift in power structures so that knowledge can be generated and applied locally. One way in which this has been promoted, is through the bolstering of youth’s pre-existing knowledge, skills, and leadership in conducting and disseminating applied research.

IREX has been exploring how to facilitate locally generated knowledge on gender and inclusion to achieve more effective, impactful, and inclusive development programming. We have been working with diverse youth research teams in different regions to learn how to better co-design and facilitate these processes in ways that are practical, accessible, and inclusive.

Through this participatory pre-workshop, IREX will guide participants through the following: 1. Modeling the importance of situated knowledge and the centering of marginalized perspectives (Haraway, 1988; Reid, Gillberg, Coghlan, & Brydon-Miller, 2014), participants will get to hear from youth researchers within diverse regional contexts ranging from Latin America and the Caribbean to the Middle East and North Africa. These youth testimonials will relay their experiences leading research as a means for decolonizing knowledge surrounding gender, equity, and inclusion for marginalized groups. Participants will be invited to reflect on youth researchers’ experiences with Gender, Equity, and Social Inclusion (GESI) research and gain a greater understanding of IREX’s GESI and Protection approach to localizing knowledge production; 2. Participants will hear emerging lessons learned and best practices from these processes and will be invited to share reflections to strengthen these best practices; and 3. Participants will be invited to reflect on how co-designing strategies that meaningfully engage the youth may serve to advance localized changes to build more prosperous, equitable, and inclusive societies, thinking through how they might apply this to their current and future work.

This session will cover themes including localization, research ethics, resistance and resilience, and the dismantling of dominant power structures when working with youth. In particular, workshop participants will be invited to participate in moments of critical reflexivity (Morley, 2015), interrogating how their own positionality and dynamics of power play a role in their work. They will also get to thoughtfully engage with IREX’s Intersectional Rapid Gender and Protection Analysis (iRGPA) as well as their Research to Change (R2C) Workbook--equipping participants with new research-based tools that can support meaningful action in favor of PYD. This session is designed on the premise that decolonizing research and programmatic knowledge requires leadership from local youth. This leadership protests dominant ideologies and practices regarding leadership in research. Moreover, inclusive data generated by young researchers may enable and strengthen the power of youth collective action. We look forward to collectively furthering attitudes, knowledge, and skills through a learning community format that can do just that.

Sub Unit

• Pre-Conference Workshops, Book launches, and Visual Art Exhibits / Pre-Conference Workshop

Chair

• Maxie Gluckman, IREX

Workshop Organizer

• Maxie Gluckman, IREX

Presenting author

• Indiana J Jimenez, International Research & Exchanges Board IREX

• Brian Batayeh, IREX