Research for us, by us: A Black community activist research collaborative

• In Event: Part 2: Advancing peace, justice and human rights through community-engaged praxis in education

Proposal

In the very instance of oppression, resistance is necessarily born; the history of Black people across centuries of subjugation is replete with the birth rebellion and fugitivity (Robinson, 1983). Even when education has been denied to Black communities (compulsory ignorance laws, segregation, and underfunding, for instance), Black people have carved out spaces to learn in subversive educational settings, in public and private institutions, in historically Black institutions – sometimes under threat of punishment and almost always without necessary resources (Givens, 2021).
The education of Black people is dangerous to a society that profits from anti-Blackness. Just existing as a Black person with the audacity to be Black in a classroom offends the sensibilities of schools which adultify, harshly punish, ignore and overlook (and yet surveil), hold back, and track Black youth (Noguera, 2009; Crenshaw et al., 2015; Dumas 2016; Morris, 2018). Even now, education perceived to be “Black-adjacent” remains under attack. The slow dismantling of affirmative action, the attacks on truth-telling in K-12 schools, the defunding of DEIJ initiatives in higher education and the proliferation of disinformation about critical race theory are but a few examples. Yet, in both formal and informal educational spaces, efforts to access learning are abundant.
Building on such legacies as, for example, the citizenship schools of Septima Clark and the grassroots organizing of Ella Baker to educate in the face of suppression, the mayor’s office in San Francisco, in partnership with community organizations, the Office of Economic and Workforce Development and local universities, funded an initiative to co-create Black subversive educational spaces inspired by community-engaged praxis. One such space, funded by this initiative, was this three-year program to train Black adults in what we termed Black Community Activist Research (B-CAR). B-CAR is rooted in freedom schools, citizenship schools, popular education models (such as used by Highlander) and activist scholarship (Cann and DeMeulenaere, 2020) which argue that communities hold the knowledge they need to define issues and determine solutions.
Students in this program spent the first year learning theoretical frameworks to make sense of the economic, social and political necessity of anti-Blackness in a society structured by racial capitalism. In the second year of the program, they learned about methodological approaches that center Black communities and Black researchers; such methodologies reconceive the purposes, processes and outcomes of research as a vehicle of reflection, healing and freedom dreaming. Training researchers learned to define their own research questions, conduct “townhalls” (rather than focus groups), analyze their data and present their findings back to their communities. In the third year, they determined with their communities what actions they wanted to take to bring about the changes they identified. In this presentation, we describe the program in detail and describe the experiences, hopes and challenges met in this educational partnership to put research out into the world “for us, by us”.

Authors

• Colette Cann

• Tamra Gertrude Jenkins, University of the Pacific

• Eghosa Obaizamomwan-Hamilton, Stanford Graduate School of Education

• Linda Ross, RISE Institute