77.022 - Bottom-Up Policy Making in an Age of Misinformation: Critical Youth Participation as a Practice of Power

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This symposium will present projects and scholarship that seek to leverage and highlight the diverse mechanisms through which policy-making, a process often assumed to be both “top-down” and “neutral”, takes place as a bottom-up, collective practice of everyday life through which minoritized and marginalized communities are exercising, negotiating, and claiming power. The papers presented explore examples of how educators and researchers, in collaboration with youth, utilize participatory, critical, and action-based methodologies and theoretical groundings to; challenge assumptions, normative notions, and non-political stances regarding policy-making; critically participate in creating, resisting, and appropriating educational policy; expand notions of civic engagement; and create new fields of possibility for those interested in the transformative power of education in an age of misinformation.

Sub Unit

• Division G - Social Context of Education / Division G - Section 4: Policy and Mattering

Chair

• Teresa L. McCarty, University of California - Los Angeles

Papers

• Participatory Action Research as a Tool for Participatory Policy Development: The Case of School Exclusion - Tara Marie Brown, University of Maryland - College Park

• The Policy Maker in Me: Civic Identity and Bottom-Up Policy Making as a Practice of Power - Miguel Casar, University of California - Los Angeles; Joseph Peter Bishop, University of California - Los Angeles

• "On Our Own Terms": School Safety Policy From the Bottom Up - Talia Sandwick, The Graduate Center, City University of New York

• What's Your Issue? Building Policy for LGBTQIA Youth Rights From the Ground Up - Maria Elena Torre, City University of New York - CUNY

Discussants

• Michelle Fine, City College of New York - CUNY

• Ernest D. Morrell, University of Notre Dame