Situating Youth Participatory Action Research Within a Nepantlera Methodology

• In Event: 42.083 - Roundtable Session 17
  In Roundtable Session: 42.083-5 - Reflexiones From Nepantlerx Researchers: Exposing the Tension-Rich Realities of Working With Latinx Youth

Abstract

Bridging empirical data collected through a Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) study with im/migrant youth alongside critical reflection, I highlight the tensions, nuances, and powerful shifts in collaborating with young people in community-engaged research. I review the interconnected components of a reflective methodology that were central to approaching data collection and analysis with youth, conceptualizing what it means to approach YPAR as a nepantlera with a desire to engage in anti-colonial research. I incorporate personal narrative as it relates to this particular project to not only answer how I approached this study but also why.

Nepantla is a transitional space, where competing ideologies, discourses, and ways of knowing intersect. It is also a marginal, liminal space where new ways of being are constructed. In nepantla we exist in the midst of chaos y calma (Anzaldúa 2002) and undergo the anguish and happiness of transition and constant shifts, making meaning of our experiences and realities. For me, nepantla has been a space where the contradictions of my identities, the many threads of personal and political work, and the roots of my epistemologies merge and create new possibilities for theorizing. It has also been a space where I can critically examine my subjectivities, experiences, and how they influence the ways in which I engage in research and work with youth. From this methodological standpoint, this paper addresses issues that arise YPAR around relationships, communication, ethics, and the politics of leaving, or exiting the community collaborating in the research.

Drawing from audio and written field diary entries alongside fieldnotes and interviews with youth, this paper focuses on the significance of researcher subjectivity within methodology. As such, this paper is in conversation with the methodological interventions by Chicanas, Third World feminists and Women of Color feminists that create spaces for resistance and decolonial possibilities within educational research (Calderón et al., 2012; Cruz, 2001; Delgado Bernal, 1998; Hill Collins, 1990; Mohanty, 2003; Saavedra, 2011; Tuhawai Smith, 2012). This piece will conclude with implications and a discussion of how researchers might work towards engaging in transformative and more equitable methodologies while acknowledging the risk and potential to reproduce the very approaches to research we aim to resist. The goal, in other words, of decolonizing methodologies, is always in practice—en route (Calderon, et. al., 2012). In many ways, those of us who aim to challenge colonial reproductions within educational research and engage in decolonial praxis often find ourselves within nepantla—the crossroads of competing, challenging, and conflicting discourses, theories, positions, and worldviews. Nepantla is home (Anzaldúa, 2002). This is where we live, las nepantleras.

Author

• Monica Gonzalez, University of Colorado - Boulder