Race Radical Praxis: Community-Engaged Research to Move Toward Freedom

• In Event: "Bout That Action": Community-Engaged Research and the Radical Imagination in Education

Abstract

This paper is a reflection on the possibilities and limitations of community engaged research within the context of contemporary racial capitalism (Robinson, 1983). Identifying as a parent-educator-scholar-activist-[cis]male of Color, I briefly discuss the cultural and political economic conditions that shape the nexus of educational research, preK-12 urban education, urban policy and Black and Brown urban communities--what I describe as racial neoliberal urbanism--and considers what it means to opreate inbetween these worlds that make up the school community nexus. I argued that race radical praxis as “antiracist thinking, struggle, and politics that reckons with the material and cultural violences perpetrated by a social system based on racism and global capitalism” (Melamed, 2011) is an essential mode of community engaged research that moves us toward collective liberation.

This study is couched in a race radical framework that works in both political economy and cultural politics of race as a means of analysis and action. Central to this framework is a practice of mapping institutional processes of dominance in urban space, and documenting modes of individual and collective sobrevivencia, or survivance (Vizenor, 2008) within these conditions.

This paper uses historical analysis and auto-political-ethnographic methods (Denizin, 2015) to gather and analyze historical data, secondary source information, and auto-ethnographic reflections. Historical analysis and secondary source literature will be used to describe historical and current cultural and political economic conditions surrounding higher education in the city of Philadelphia, where I focus my work. Auto-political-ethnographic data consists of field notes and reflections written by the author through two of my research projects: a youth participatory action research (PAR) collaborative and a school-university partnership project at the local urban school district.

There are three primary arguments made in this paper. First, I point to ways that racial capitalism always, already, limits the transformative potential shapes educational research and U.S. cities. These conditions create, what might be better understood as a “racial neoliberal” grammar that circulates through all social systems. Second, given the conditions of racial capitalism, and the contradictions of working/living between the world of the university and the community (viviendo entremundos) I make a case for enacting a race radical praxis that is premised on “systems hacking” higher education and converting university resources into community resources as a means to work toward collective liberation.

Higher education’s growing interest in community engaged scholarship appears to be well-intentioned but it is important to remain vigilant of the ways good intentions are mediated by racial capitalist conditions. Through this paper the author contributes to critical understandings of these intentions and constructing more just alternatives.

Author

• Edwin Mayorga, Swarthmore College