“No, We Should Do It”: Youth Training Youth in Activist Research Methods

Abstract

This article explores a 9-month process of youth research capacity-building, beginning with the training of high school and college aged researchers in qualitative methodologies and concluding with both tentative and comprehensive policy recommendations, at the behest of the youth, for altering the landscape of a major Southeastern city to ensure greater equity of opportunity in particular for minoritized youth and their families. Our analysis led us to consider the ways in which community-engaged youth and their adult partners created a culture of reciprocity and respect as they worked together to train other youth to conduct their own justiceoriented inquiry projects.

Generative Dissensus in a Youth-Led Coalition-Building Enterprise

“…The ART managed to respond to (though not dispel) these difficulties by leaning into and adapting the communicative practices—norms, routines, and “joy-bringers”—they had relied upon in past face-to-face gatherings (Hadley et al, 2019; Wright et al, 2020). They were adamant, in other words, about taking time to establish trust and build a sense of community upfront with youth outside the ART who were in attendance.…”

“…The present study takes this perspective to heart, seeking to contribute to existing literature on youth-led community activism by considering how youth deliberated with their peers and navigated through hotly contested debates in an effort to build consensus (this in a transitionary online forum during a global pandemic and a time of heightened political tumult, which were all unusual in and of themselves). Although the historic moment was without precedent, our focus on tensions that arose within these youth-to-youth negotiations stands apart from the bulk of YPAR literature, which—if focusing on internal dynamics at all—has tended to call attention to the negotiation of power, roles, and responsibilities between youth and adult co-researchers (Akom et al, 2008; Anyon et al, 2018b; Minkler, 2004; Wright et al, 2020).…”

“…These tensions in belief coexisted throughout the project because space was held for a communal understanding of the value of discussion and disagreement, in the direction of consensus. Quite often this directional bent was waylaid by the all-too-human nature of individual experience and belief and yet, because of the village-making process so prominent in the work of the Yamacraw Center and exemplified in the work of ART (we have written about this process in the past; for details see Wright et al, 2020), such slippages served as contraction joints, dispersing disagreement without eliminating it, providing just enough flex while holding the group and its mission together throughout the work.…”

“… 4. For more concrete examples with close examination of pedagogy and practices that foster this kind of productive dissensus, please see Wright et al (2020). …”