Knowledges from academic and professional research-based institutions have long been valued over the organic intellectualism of those who are most affected by educational and social inequities. In contrast, participatory action research (PAR) projects are collective investigations that rely on indigenous knowledge, combined with the desire to take individual and/or collective action. PAR with youth (YPAR) engages in rigorous research inquiries and represents a radical effort in education research to value the inquiry-based knowledge production of the youth who directly experience the educational contexts that scholars endeavor to understand. In this chapter, we outline the foundations of YPAR and examine the distinct epistemological, methodological, and pedagogical contributions of an interdisciplinary corpus of YPAR studies and scholarship. We outline the origins and disciplines of YPAR and make a case for its role in education research, discuss its contributions to the field and the tensions and possibilities of YPAR across disciplines, and close by proposing a YPAR critical-epistemological framework that centers youth and their communities, alongside practitioners, scholars, and researchers, as knowledge producers and change agents for social justice.

In this article we first trace the history of “management,” particularly in the United States, from the plantation to the factory to the corporation, with the intention of understanding and contextualizing “classroom management” in today‘s educational lexicon. To do so, we look at the intertwining history of racial knowledge and the management of enslaved persons; the subsequent development of scientific management; social efficiency educators‘ application of scientific management to education; and conceptions of classroom management in today‘s neoliberal environment, in which education is increasingly positioned as a consumer good subject to individual choice and competitive markets. We further look to examples from post- -colonial Africa to demonstrate the ways in which neocolonial forms of scientific management comingle and entwine with neoliberal policies and procedures. The global phenomenon of scientific management, rife with neoliberalism and racism, is finally examined in the context of (so-called) Culturally Responsive Classroom Management, a neoliberal project that claims to advocate social justice through the process of managing bodies in classrooms.

In this essay, Brian D. Lozenski explores why Gloria Ladson-Billings's 2006 pronouncement of the nation's “education debt,” as opposed to “achievement gap,” has not gained traction in the national discourse around educational disparity. He contends that education debt is a more nuanced, historically based, and generative framing of racialized educational disparity, which has been marginalized by the narratives of crisis in education, specifically with black youth, that necessitate a frantic urgency allowing for ahistorical, quick-fix solutions to complex problems. Through a tracing of four major epochs in African American education, including the mid-nineteenth-century era of slavery statutes, Reconstruction, post–Brown v. Board, and today's early twenty-first-century “crisis,” of the underachievement of black youth in schools, the author considers how African American education has always been precarious and, thus, able to be labeled a “crisis.” Using a combination of synchronic (snapshot) and diachronic (longitudinal) analyses, he demonstrates how the achievement gap logic does not allow us to address historical constructions of contemporary disparity. Lozenski concludes the essay by suggesting that African American self-determination, and not the reification of the nation-state through state-centered reform efforts, should be the driving force behind educational decisions that impact black youth.

This article explores the outcomes of using participatory action research with youth (YPAR) as an entry point into Africana Studies. The author draws from empirical research and anecdotal narratives to document a program where youth of African descent in the US engage in Ethnic Studies through the lens of action research. Beginning with a tracing of the development of Ethnic Studies in the US, the author shows how combining Ethnic Studies and YPAR builds a dual-subjectivity within youth where they are subjects of their own curricular exploration and simultaneously developing a subjectivity as researchers and knowledge producers. The article highlights three major implications of this dual-subjectivity for the political agency of youth of African descent living in a midsized US city.