Participatory Action Research (PAR) and its many variants are rapidly gaining prominence as viable research tools and methodological alternatives to address histories of exploitation, surveillance, and social exclusion, deeply embedded in mainstream research. However, it is at this transgressive intersection of theory, action, expertise, power, and justice that a host of new challenges to the conduct of research in collaboration with and not just on, or for subordinated people, emerges. This article attempts to intimately describe the challenges of using PAR methods to revise Paulo Freire's notion of critical consciousness in the context of a parent organizing group and a youth research project, while taking seriously the speed bumps, multiple subjectivities, implicit racism, sexism, classism, and politics of knowledge production that are too often obscured behind published academic writing.
This article reports on the extensive qualitative and quantitative findings of a multi-method participatory study designed to assess urban and suburban youths’ experiences of racial/class justice or injustice in their schools and throughout the nation. Constructed as a letter to Zora Neale Hurston, who was immediately critical of the Brown decision in 1955, the article lays out the victories of Brown and the ongoing struggles, what we call “six degrees of segregation” that identify systematic policies that ensure an opportunity gap. The article theorizes the academic, social and psychological consequences of persistent inequity on youth of color and White American youth—all adversely affected by systematic educational inequities that persist 50 years after Brown.
In this commentary, I reflect on DuBois, Strait, and Walsh's (2018) provocation, the call for qualitative researchers to ponder the benefits and disadvantages of sharing our data from the standpoint of a Black womanist, a practitioner of decolonial participatory action research, and an ethicist. I begin with a brief defense of critical reflectivity, which is much more than a disclosing practice of qualitative research. Critical reflexivity is a critique of liberalism, a decentering of "whitestream" epistemes, and a refusal of erasure. Working through three examples, I will (a) problematize the notion that funding policies should dictate the foci and direction of qualitative inquiry, (b) argue that positivist conceptions of replicability and validity are incommensurate with the relational analyses and radical solidarities participatory researchers strive to conurture, and (c) detail the few circumstances wherein I would be amenable to supporting the use of qualitative data repositories.
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