Getting Schooled: Reconciling Research Goals and Collective Community Research Fatigue in a Brooklyn Participatory Action Research Project

• In Event: 58.055 - Praxis of Participatory Action Research: Generating Equitable Educational Experiences With Youth and Communities

Abstract

Purpose:
Critical participatory action research (PAR) centers the expertise of those most impacted by a research question and is concerned with producing rigorous knowledge for public science and justice (author et al, 2012). Historical conceptions of objectivity call for the “researcher” to claim a neutral and outsider stance. In contrast, in critical PAR, a core assumption is that the biography, experiences, and perspectives of each researcher strengthen the research. Taking up Sandra Harding’s (1993) notion of ‘strong objectivity’ reconciled with critical race theory (Crenshaw, 1991), this paper traces the methodological decision points in a critical PAR project where the geographical/socio-political/historical context of the research presented ethical and therefore methodological challenges. In this study, in order to engage as participatory researchers interested in educational equity, including the outsider, white author, we first had to grapple with a legacy of over-research within the community. This paper will consider the dilemmas that arise when the social justice goals of a PAR project are in tension with the methods and demands of university-based research (Smith, 2012; Guishard, 2009; Cahill, 2007).
Methods:
Between 2014 and 2016 a multigenerational research team of majority young people of color conducted research on experiences of education and structural oppression in the neighborhood of Red Hook, Brooklyn, New York. The neighborhood of Red Hook is majority Black and Latinx residents living in public housing. It is geographically separated by a highway, a tunnel, and the Hudson River/Upper Bay and surrounded by white, affluent neighborhoods. Much of Red Hook is a small, close-knit community that can feel like a village. When one walks down the street, everybody knows everybody.
Over two years, the multigenerational community-based youth research team conducted a two-phase PAR project on lived experiences of policy dispossession (Harvey, 2004; Fine & Ruglis, 2009) particularly for young people within the neighborhood. The study included two surveys and participatory ethnography on education inequality and on getting in and out of the neighborhood. Each phase of the study raised further research questions and produced data for potential use in local organizing efforts. However, though the study provided rich evidence on collective experiences of structural oppression, and though the data was of some use for the cooperating community organization, the potential for the participatory research to produce generalizable knowledge was limited in part due the steady, unrelenting gaze of outside researchers and journalists on the Red Hook community. The community was experiencing a kind of collective research fatigue (Clark, 2008).
Findings/Significance:
Pulling from the data collected via participatory ethnography including reflexive field notes, this paper will reflect on unit of analysis, researcher positionality, and the agency of youth researchers in participatory research in order to explore the decision to leave data un-published and instead work towards building a public community-based research archive.

Author

• Maddy Fox, Brooklyn College - CUNY