Promise and Provocation: Humble Reflections on Critical Participatory Action Research for Social Policy

Abstract

This essay reflects on the promise and challenges of community-engaged, critical participatory action research (CPAR) hinged to social policy in times of racialized state violence and massive community resistance. With cautious optimism, we argue for the potential of CPAR to facilitate more just social policy, by enhancing research validity, policy integrity, and organizing capacity. Drawing on a series of CPAR projects, we also raise a series of ethical, political, and power-laden dilemmas we have encountered in this work and offer, with humility, provisional solutions for advancing activist-scholarship linked in struggle with communities under siege.

Keywords

participatory action research activist-scholarship community engaged research research methods activism social urban social policy social justice

President Trump’s plan to deport millions of people appears to be underway. Last week, federal immigration officials arrested more than 600 people at their homes and workplaces in at least 11 states . . . The abruptness of the raids provoked criticism from local officials, including Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York, who vowed to “stand with” immigrant communities. But mass deportation under President Trump will also happen through a more routine policy that is in the mayor’s control: endless, unnecessary arrests for low-level offenses, which end up feeding immigrants into the federal government’s deportation machine.

—Rahman and Steinberg (2017)

For dispossessed and overpoliced communities, the lofty promises of social policy too often fall painfully short. As public interest lawyers Shakeer Rahman and Robin Steinberg describe, there is a huge, insulting space stretching between even “progressive” policy and everyday life for those they serve: low-income, communities of color routinely and historically assaulted by racialized state violence, savage inequalities, and multigenerational disinvestment. We stare into this abyss when our so-called “sanctuary city” is shattered by ongoing, draconian “broken windows” policing in New York City (NYC); when the Mayor’s policing policy imperils the very neighbors he promises to protect.

Working at the activist-scholar hyphen, we venture into this chasm as university-based researchers collaborating with communities and activists to conduct research to fuel policy change. We enter this uneasy space—knowing social policy is so often inadequate—because we believe in the potential of critical participatory action research (CPAR) for narrowing the rift between promise and practice. But we embark with apprehension, attuned to the provocations of this liminal ground. We understand that even massive policy wins (Sanctuary City!) can be undermined by sustained state violence (broken windows policing); we understand why many “on the ground” view policy platitudes as just that.

We write this article to unpack why we believe, when we pause, and how we engage when conducting critical, participatory research pitched toward policy change. Drawing on a long legacy of participatory and community-based researchers, we raise critical, delicate questions born from our collaborative research with those intimately acquainted with structural violence and manufactured inequality. Our projects include CPAR with incarcerated women documenting the impact of college in prison; collaborative research with youth studying surveillance in schools; partnerships with mothers, youth, and other community members in the Bronx investigating aggressive policing; and, a project with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (LGBTQ+) and gender nonconforming (GNC) youth of color, tracing their desires, strengths, and struggles as they navigate institutional violence and daily precarity.

In the spirit of Ignacio Martín-Baró (1994), our work is guided by the belief that to develop more genuinely “public” policies, research must be shaped by the perspectives and critical participation of the public, particularly those who have paid the most for cumulative dispossession. By critical participation, we mean that those most marginalized contribute distinct knowledge to shaping and implementing research; university researchers work alongside community researchers in design, data collection, analysis, and dissemination. In intentionally diverse research teams that María calls “participatory contact zones,” dialogue and disagreement are greeted as generative as we attend to questions of power, privilege, hierarchy, Whiteness, academic arrogance, and fragile solidarities (Torre, 2005).

But the critical in CPAR also signals a larger commitment to challenging prevailing power inequities, within and beyond our research. Relying on critical race, feminist, postcolonial, queer, and Marxist theory, we position our work to make visible and interrogate histories and structures of injustice and resistance (Fine & Ruglis, 2009; Weis & Fine, 2012).

And yet, CPAR is no panacea; its interface with policy is aching with tensions—some existential, some political, and many logistical. Scholars have documented issues inherent in collaborations between academics and policymakers, including conflicts of time, language, and values (Choi et al., 2005; Greenhalgh & Russell, 2006; Nelson, 2013); some have described the precarity of the endeavor as “the tightwire we walk” (Serrano-García, 2013) and “waltzing with the monster” (Shinn, 2007). Engaging in CPAR does not create such challenges, but it insists that we reckon with them, however difficult. In doing so, we believe that there is great potential to enhance research validity, policy integrity, and organizing capacity. And so, we pursue CPAR for social policy because marginalized communities have a right to research and policy formation (Appadurai, 2006), and because we are firmly opposed to leaving policy in the hands of elites and corporate lobbyists. We take the opportunity of this article to be collectively reflexive—and humble—about the challenges we have stumbled into in this work and to share our provisional resolutions and paths forward.

Who We Are and Why We Write

We write as five researchers and activists affiliated with the Public Science Project (PSP), a theory-method-political hub for CPAR conducted by diverse research collectives spanning university borders; we are joined, in the epilogue, by postcolonial scholar Leigh Patel, our close friend and colleague. Founded at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center in 2008, PSP is committed to interdisciplinary projects forged at the nexus of critical theory, participatory research, social action, and public policy. Collaborating with community-based organizations, activists, and other community members, our work addresses human rights, public education, and the criminal punishment system. We have focused on increasing access to college while people are in prison and after release; exposing and contesting aggressive, racialized policing practices, including stop and frisk; and challenging harsh school discipline policies in favor of more respectful, restorative, and transformative responses.

Dedicated to documenting what we call circuits of dispossession and privilege across marginalized and more elite communities (Fine & Ruglis, 2009), we conduct mixed-methods research with activist co-researchers, work in delicate partnership with government institutions (e.g., facilitating access to study college in prison), and collaborate with community members outside of academia. In addition, we have provided research support to class action lawsuits, and assisted grassroots organizations to conduct participatory evaluations of their advocacy.

We do this work from diverse personal and professional standpoints, with varied experiences of privilege and oppression. We are university faculty and graduate students; we are Black, Latinx, and White; we claim various sexualities and genders. Activists, writers, teachers, and researchers, we are partners and parents, in debt and investing. We have worked as policy advocates, youth workers, nonprofit researchers, community organizers, and public intellectuals; with personal and familial histories of incarceration; educated in public and private schools; conducting research with PSP, grassroots organizations, nonprofits, and government agencies. We all see research as only one part of our larger, multifaceted struggles for justice and transformation. And, as we have engaged in CPAR together and with others, our diverse positionalities have sparked (com)passionate debates, activated embodied fears, and generated mutual teachings.

As the authors of this article, we reflect on our ongoing conversations with each other and our personal experiences in this work—but we draw on collective projects shaped and carried out by a much wider range of PSP-affiliated researchers.¹ We begin by highlighting the promise found at the interface of CPAR and policy advocacy, elucidating the ethical necessity of critical participation in policy research and its strategic, methodological advantages. We then discuss some interrelated provocations that arise in this work. We conclude with reflections from Leigh Patel, who writes on a CPAR project interrogating intrauniversity injustice.

The Promise of CPAR

The Right to Research: The Ethical Necessity of CPAR for Social Policy

Arjun Appadurai (2006) argues that communities—particularly those most disenfranchised—have “a right to research.” Rarely granted freely, many activist communities have fought for this right: Gay men reclaimed HIV/AIDS medical trials through the ACT UP movement (Halcli, 1999); indigenous communities have demanded community approval and ownership of research (Smith, 1999); and disability rights activists have insisted “nothing about us without us” (Charlton, 1998).

This nonnegotiable radically changes who guides research, whose expertise is recognized as legitimate, who uses and controls the data. It changes who gets paid, speaks for the work, and has veto power over what goes public—all key considerations for decolonizing research (Smith, 1999). With project teams made up of both university-trained and nonconventionally trained researchers, we hold “research camps” to pool our distinct knowledges and learn what each other knows best (Torre, 2009). When investigating aggressive policing, members bring in research papers, news articles, memories of being stopped and frisked, hip hop lyrics, music, stories of relatives murdered by the police . . . Together, we build a dynamic library of our sources.

At their best, CPAR teams work across difference, with those most marginalized driving decisions about research questions, methods, analysis, research products, policy demands, and actions (Stoudt et al., 2016; Torre, Fine, Stoudt, & Fox, 2012). These ethical, epistemological, and political commitments grow out of our engagement with Latin American critical community research (Fals-Borda & Rahman, 1991; Freire, 1982; Lykes, 2013; Martín-Baró, 1994; Zeller-Berkman, 2014); North American traditions of action research (e.g., Kurt Lewin, see Cherry & Borshuk, 1998); critical feminist, race, and decolonizing literatures (Anzaldúa, 1987; Chataway, 1997; Harding, 1994; Hill-Collins, 1986; hooks, 2015; Smith, 1999); and recent writings on impact validity (Massey & Barreras, 2013). Our attempts are always works in progress, iterative and evolving.

Our ethical responsibilities radiate to the communities with whom we collaborate beyond the university (recognizing of course that the university is itself a community made up of so many intersecting constituencies). But these responsibilities also reverberate inward, in our commitment to challenging academic traditions: the positivist notions of objectivity, expertise, and neutral distance that have long dominated social science and evidence-based policy (Greenhalgh & Russell, 2006; Martín-Baró, 1994; Nelson, 2013). Through our activism, labor organizing, critical scholarship, and administrative engagements, we contest the ongoing neoliberalization of the academy, the chilling of intellectual freedom, and hegemonic views of expertise and Western, Whitestream knowledges that reign within the university (Chatterjee & Maira, 2014; Fine, 2017). Instead, we claim the tradition of CPAR as a rich (even if recessive) strain of critical social science as an alternative path forward (Fine, 2006; Torre & Fine, 2011).

Finally, we take seriously our location at a public university, believing that knowledge production is a public good that should support and enrich communal life. In this spirit, PSP is designed to pierce the membranes that separate—but should join—the academy and social movements defending the “right to the city” (Harvey, 2008).

Methodological Assets of CPAR for Social Policy

Like all deliberative dialogues across power lines, vigorous debate about critical research among differently positioned people is a delicate process, sometimes clumsy and contentious. But in privileging multiple forms of expertise, CPAR also results in better thinking, more relevant research data, and more direct paths toward transformative change (Guareschi & Jovchelovitch, 2004; Torre, 2005). This section describes two key methodological strengths of CPAR as a framework for policy research: enhanced construct validity, by clarifying the complex shape of the “issue” under study (Torre et al., 2012), and fortified impact validity, or the potential for research to fuel social change (Massey & Barreras, 2013).

Strengthening construct validity through critical participation

In our work, we have repeatedly seen how critical participation—of those most affected by social policy but typically excluded from its formation—changes the shape of the very issue we are researching. Consider Changing Minds (Fine et al., 2001), a participatory evaluation of college in prison conducted by women in prison and from the outside—and a precursor to and foundation for PSP. When President Clinton made incarcerated people ineligible for Pell grants in the 1990s, college programs in prison plummeted from 350 programs in 1994 to eight in 1995. At Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in New York State (NYS), women in the prison organized with community allies (college presidents, church groups, activists, politicians) and successfully resurrected their college program. Unsatisfied with this localized and fragile win, however, the women sought out a program evaluation, hoping to build an empirical argument for reinstating Pell grant eligibility for people in prison.

Invited as the evaluator, Michelle suggested that the research be conducted by a participatory team spanning prison walls. The collective included several women from the “inside” at Bedford Hills—who either took a master’s-level research methods course taught in the prison by CUNY doctoral students or were otherwise instrumental to the college program—and some women from the “outside,” including María, Michelle, and a few other CUNY researchers. The “inside/outside” division remained stark, but other synergies emerged: Some in the collective were involved in grassroots advocacy; some were mothers; some spoke Spanish as their first language; some were raised in poverty, some with wealth; some had confronted serious health issues; some held multiple degrees, some had just begun college while in prison. Meeting every other week for almost four years, these connections grew and complicated, as the team documented the broad and deep impact of college in prison.

The study included an analysis of recidivism outcomes for program participants—a key concern of most politicians. Produced by the NYS Department of Corrections at the request of the research collective, the analysis revealed remarkably low recidivism rates for the 274 college participants tracked over a decade: For those with some college, 7.7% returned to custody over a 36 month follow-up period compared with 29.9% of those with no college (Fine et al., 2001). But the women in prison knew the effects were still wider reaching than reduced recidivism, and they illuminated other complex dynamics that unfold in the shadows of incarceration.

In the participatory contact zone of the hybrid research collective, the women in prison argued that the research should demonstrate how college at Bedford Hills permeated many other aspects of life: discipline, children’s education, and interactions on cell blocks and in the yard. With this enhanced understanding of the construct “college in prison,” the collective expanded the evaluation to track the many capillaries of the program. And so the research team interviewed participants’ children, corrections officers, participating university faculty, community volunteers, and incarcerated women not engaged in the program; assessed disciplinary records; and followed up with women post release and their employers. The collective heard,

From a Correction Officer: Now that there is college in prison, there are fewer fights at night; instead of arguing they are doing homework.

From a 14 year old daughter of a woman with a sentence of 20 years to life: Now that my mom is in college, on trailer visits, all she wants to talk about is homework, what books she is reading and poetry!

From a woman sentenced to 25 years, not in the college program: At night, the women will knock on the walls to ask “how do you spell rehabilitation” or “do you have Alice Walker’s book?” We have a Walker and a Foucault “study group” on the yard.

These and other findings demonstrated that college was not simply an add-on, but a catalytic intervention throughout the prison, infusing interactions with corrections staff and families; vibrating in recreation time and late night conversation; echoing in letters with professors and calls with children (now dominated by homework talk). College in prison also traveled onto college campuses where some women enrolled after release; and college in prison provided an opportunity for the women to “complete something in a life of incompletes” (Fine et al., 2001). Bolstered by the improved construct validity made possible by critical participation, the study not only documented the remarkable quantitative reductions in recidivism and associated tax savings, but also the more qualitative, holistic changes: the tectonic shifts in prison culture set in motion by the college program, with aftershocks traveling across generations and zip codes, beyond the prison walls.

From research to action: Enhancing impact validity

CPAR not only strengthens construct validity but also what Sean Massey and Ricardo Barreras (2013) call impact validity: “the extent to which research has the potential to play an effective role in some form of social and political change, or is useful as a tool for advocacy or activism” (p. 616). We believe that critical participation is a key strategy to maximize the likelihood that scholarship transforms into action, facilitating the movement of research findings into policy and organizing efforts. Across varied projects, we have worked to bring data into the streets, community meetings, city councils, courtrooms, and state legislatures. In our collaborations, research and action are rarely sequential steps, but necessarily simultaneous and entangled, cumulative and reinforcing.

To provide one example, Brett and María sit on the steering committee of a coalition of community organizations fighting discriminatory and abusive policing in NYC, Communities United for Police Reform (CPR; http://changethenypd.org/). In this partnership, CPR’s pulse on upcoming legislation and organizing has helped PSP prioritize and frame research questions on policing. For instance, through working with CPR, Brett was aware of a burgeoning campaign to decriminalize certain low-level offenses (e.g., public urination, littering, riding a bike on the sidewalk), which guided the launch of the Discretionary Arrests Research Project (DARP). The study documented experiences of people who were arrested for particular low-level offenses, when police could legally choose to fine them for these infractions instead (Jashnani, Bustamante, & Stoudt, 2017). By launching DARP alongside the decriminalization campaign, PSP enhanced the likelihood that organizers could mobilize the results for immediate legislative advocacy. For instance, with CPR guidance about policy timelines, the DARP team created a brief report immediately before a key legislative session.

Much like using a theoretical framework to contribute to an existing body of academic literature, these collaborations provide policy frameworks to place our research in dialogue with upcoming policy, legal, and activist agendas. As “streamlining” into policy struggles increases the potential for our work to have an impact on the issue at hand, impact validity increases.

Provocations in the Space Between CPAR and Social Policy

Even as we believe in the ethical, theoretical, methodological, and political benefits of CPAR, we are also well aware of the ethical binds, political dilemmas, and frequent ruptures in these fragile relationships. CPAR engaged with policy advocacy gives rise to what Gloria Anzaldúa (1987) calls choques—the tensions, contradictions, or oppositions that result when multiple identities inhabit a single body; migrating this concept into CPAR, choques arise as varied perspectives collide and conflict in the participatory contact zone of a research collective (Torre, 2005; Torre & Ayala, 2009).

By design, these research spaces are fraught, as we collect and interrogate portfolios of evidence across power differentials and divergent experiences. We engage in dialogues that are uncomfortable, even improbable: Why would communities long colonized and brutalized by the State, corporations, and “science” trust researchers or policymakers to work in solidarity with them? Why would researchers admit that our expertise is hugely limited and partial, or even colonizing? Yet, participatory contact zones are simultaneously liberatory, as they facilitate democratic theorizing, collective data gathering and analysis, a serious reframing of today’s problems, and imagining transformations to policy for what should and could be (Stoudt et al., 2016; Torre, 2005).

We reflect next on two realms of tension, or choques, that we have encountered in CPAR pitched toward organizing and policy transformation: (a) the constraints of narrow “policy windows” and (b) the delicate balance of academic privilege and activist solidarities. In each domain, we describe specific “speed bumps” and some of the hopefully “good enough” passages we have attempted to move us forward (Luttrell, 2000).

Tension 1: The constraints of narrow policy windows

Policymaking is guarded closely by those in power, frequently inaccessible to activist-scholars, usually out of reach for the broader public. Occasionally, however, fleeting opportunities arrive when “policy windows” (Kingdon, 1995) crack open: a grassroots campaign gains national momentum, a class action lawsuit is filed, political leadership changes, a community tragedy (and ensuing outrage) makes the news, or relationships between activists and empathic officials come to fruition. When a policy window opens, we are sometimes invited or inspired to race through—with evidence—before it slams shut: before the news cycle diverts attention, the political opposition organizes, or your new ally loses power. The threat of “now or never” looms large.

Others have described the conflicting relationships that policymakers and researchers have with time: Policymakers demand immediacy, researchers demand . . . as much time as it takes (Choi et al., 2005; Shinn, 2007). This tension is heightened for activist-scholars living on both sides of the hyphen: CPAR requires sustained presence and patience to build trust and facilitate iterative and collective knowledge building. When a policy window opens, critical researchers have little time but much to do: check in with allies, decide if and how to introduce evidence, meet with policymakers, strategize so collaboration does not degenerate into collusion, check power relations within the research team—all while taking to the streets in protest. And sometimes we cannot do it all; research meetings are canceled for last-minute direct actions, we fail to produce research products for next week’s community hearing, the research team cannot assemble in one place to make quick but still collective decisions.

But policy windows are not just temporally narrow (“Limited Time Only!”). They are frequently also narrow in imagination, with political openings accommodating only the most slender policy solutions: uncontroversial and uncreative, incremental or even neoliberal. Below, we elaborate on interrelated dilemmas that arise when we attempt to take advantage of these slivers of political opportunity.

Winnowing wicked problems into tame policy

When ephemeral policy windows open, researchers are often asked to share a single thread of the larger research story—an advocacy “script” of sorts—to assure that at least one message (however incomplete) slips through. Organizers ask for “stories” or “data” to support well-rehearsed lists of demands. Or, lawyers building a class action lawsuit seek evidence to prove that “extra learning time” is a civil right. A well-intentioned legislator seeks “expert” advice on college in prison. The desired solution is simple and straightforward, but often inadequate given the scope of the problem. Such sanitized policy stories constitute what Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber (1973) call “tame” problems: contained and isolated, receptive to remedy or intervention. Yet, Rittel and Webber note that most policy issues are not tame, but “wicked”: entangled and intractable, with myriad origins and mutations. As activist researchers, we agree: We know that the problems of capitalism, racism, sexism, xenophobia, and grotesque inequality gaps are unlikely to be “solved” by a single policy intervention. And, yet, we still often stay up all night with our community allies to complete our analyses and produce the policy documents.

When we wade into these murky waters, our research collectives spend hours debating: Politically, should we tell an oversimplified story? Ethically, can we tell any story but the full story? Should we offer data that advance incremental wins or hold out for transformational change? Will more training for police-employed “school safety agents” (SSAs) interrupt the school-to-prison pipeline, or reaffirm the place of law enforcement in schools? Will college in prison for “nonviolent offenders” eventually increase access for all, or just reinforce false and harmful distinctions between “violent” and “nonviolent”? Moving toward “good enough” (but never adequate) policy recommendations (Luttrell, 2000) requires painful decisions among a community of researchers, only some of whom are directly affected.

Wicked problems and tame solutions haunted the Bushwick Action Research Collective (BARC; http://bushwickactionresearch.org/), an intergenerational collaboration between Make the Road New York (MRNY) and PSP that set out to study harsh school discipline policies in NYC (Cahill et al., in process; Matles et al., 2015). One of MRNY’s policy goals—one PSP supports—was the removal of SSAs from schools. But when we solicited the perspectives of our youth co-researchers, we learned that they were somewhat equivocal about SSAs, with views spilling over the boundaries of the tidy advocacy script. Some young people railed against abusive SSAs while others described them as the only caring, even familial adults in school—often women of color from similar neighborhoods as the students (unlike most teachers). Some in the research collective worried that any apparent defense of SSAs could obscure structural critiques, others feared the loss of employment for these women. The group questioned each other: Would removing SSAs do harm, if some students see SSAs as their only adult allies in school? But also, does the relatable adult need to work for the police?

And so, the collective tried to complicate the “tame” policy solution. To this end, the team pivoted toward another policy window, just beginning to crack open: a mayoral initiative to expand community schools in NYC (Office of the Mayor, 2014). Building on ongoing MRNY advocacy in this arena, the research team reframed the findings within the more holistic community schools campaign—making it possible to call for the removal of SSAs without eclipsing the importance of having adults in schools who are from the same neighborhoods and share history with the students. Such agility was made possible by MRNY’s expansive activism, enmeshed in multiple policy struggles—but it was also the result of a serendipitous, but not necessarily replicable, political moment.

Problematic “justice narratives.”

Sometimes “tame” policy solutions take shape as predictable, flawed, and even disturbing “justice narratives.” We describe three such narrative tendencies below—emphasizing damage, focusing on “populations,” and stratifying “deservingness”—with some provisional strategies for navigating these conflicts.

Centering damage

A common strategy in legal advocacy and grassroots activism is to provide evidence of harms committed against a particular group and then lobby for remedies for that specific harm. In so doing, however, we often render the “victims” as “broken” or damaged. Brown v. Board of Education may be the most vivid example of “damage” evidence (Black children’s alleged internalized self-hatred) admitted into court in exchange for “justice” (school desegregation; Fine & Cross, 2016). As critical researchers, we are familiar with and highly skeptical of this strategy. At best, it has limited capacity to inspire meaningful change (Cross, 2003; Fine & Cross, 2016; Smith, 1999; Tuck, 2009). Documenting damage spurs remedies to “help” injured individuals via social services or compensation, but rarely challenges the violent structures and dynamics that caused the harm (Martín-Baró, 1994); this trend has accelerated with the neoliberal professionalization of social justice work (Fabricant & Fine, 2013; Patel, 2014; Spade, 2015). At worst, damage narratives reproduce stereotypes used to justify continued subjugation of marginalized groups (Smith, 1999; Teo, 2010; Tuck, 2009) and further legitimate the role of “professionals” who are usually White.

Yet, documenting the scars of injustice is still an indispensable tool to mitigate daily suffering as we struggle toward large-scale transformation. And so we use the dual lens of critical bifocality (Weis & Fine, 2012) to catalog not only wounds but also resilience and resistance; to not only chronicle lives but also contextualize them. We design research to trace circuits of dispossession and privilege (Fine & Ruglis, 2009) to understand how individual pain (and privilege) unfolds amid histories of structural violence, oppression, and power. And we crosshatch complex stories of harm with tales of survivance, desire, and demands (Fine & Cross, 2016; Tuck, 2009; Vizenor, 2008). We hope such research lays the groundwork for immediate redress of the symptoms of systemic injustice (e.g., racial disparities in school suspension), without losing sight of the causes (e.g., criminalization of youth of color, divestment from public education).

An emerging example of navigating this contentious territory is seen in What’s Your Issue? (WYI; http://whatsyourissue.org/). This national participatory research project was born from the observation that most (of the already limited) national studies about LGBTQ+ youth had majority White samples and primarily documented damage: bullying and assault, low self-esteem, homelessness, depression, and suicidality. Partnering with nine locally rooted community organizations throughout the country, PSP launched WYI to document the dreams, desires, and priorities of LGBTQ+ and GNC youth of color to support local and national advocacy based on more than “what’s wrong” (Torre, Fine, Cabana, & Frost, 2018).

While all involved want to decenter damage, many young people and organizers still seek better information about suicide, police violence, bullying, housing insecurity, and the betrayals of family and State. Thus, when María and Michelle momentarily considered “leaving out” survey questions on bullying and suicide, youth co-researchers were adamant about including them alongside questions about activism, relationships, desires, and coping. Although “damage” stories are deeply flawed, overly simplified and romanticized “resilience” stories are equally troubling. Lives caught in the crossfire of structural injustice are a complex blend—of course—of pain and struggle, wounds and resilience, resistance and despair (Gordon, 2008). As the research progresses, the WYI team plans to leverage the findings to support LGBTQ+ and GNC youth organizing demands that build on their strengths, address daily experiences of injustice, and call for change that prevents—rather than simply reacts—to such violence.

Focusing on unidimensional identities, obscuring structural forces

Many injustice narratives emerge from research and advocacy for particularly vulnerable groups: girls and women; LGBTQ+ and GNC people; Black youth; those who are formerly incarcerated, undocumented, or Muslim . . . This approach may be considered strategic as (seemingly) discrete groups of constituents make for tidier stories to squeeze through narrow openings in policy discourse. But as Du Bois (1899) recognized in The Philadelphia Negro over a century ago, focusing on “The Negro” keeps our scholarly gaze on the effects of injustice, while distracting us from the causes; the structures, histories, and policies that produce oppression and privilege too easily disappear (Stoudt, Fox, & Fine, 2012). Furthermore, such unidimensional notions of identity (“The Negro”) can obscure a more intersectional reality—both limiting our understanding of the nature of power and injustice, and restricting our imagination for new solidarities or forms of resistance (Hill-Collins, 2015).

But we still sometimes participate in group-focused research. On its face, WYI is akin to “population research,” diverging from our preferred focus on structural dynamics and circuits. To give room for the desires, dreams, and demands of LGBTQ+ and GNC youth, the WYI team decided there is utility in placing their bodies at the center—bodies so often marginalized, silenced, and pathologized in social science. Recognizing the challenges of this approach, however, the collective engages it with two commitments.

First, the WYI team is working to unravel how the marginality and structural injustice faced by LGBTQ+ and GNC youth is the result of a heteronormative culture that rejects them. Mounting research demonstrates that queer and GNC young people are disproportionately suspended from schools, pushed into the juvenile justice system, and exiled to foster care or homeless shelters (Birkett, Russell, & Corliss, 2014; Chmielewski, Belmonte, Stoudt, & Fine, 2016; Irvine, 2010; Payne & Smith, 2012). Actively guarding against suturing these negative outcomes onto embodied genders or sexualities, there is a WYI commitment to theorizing how systemic precarity derives from pervasive homophobia and heteronormativity—not from “being” LGBTQ+ or GNC.

Second, the project embraces intersectionality. WYI recognizes that these young people are not only queer or GNC. They are also Black, migrants, dancers, scholars, siblings, workers, partners, dreamers, and more, with many accompanying strengths and struggles. WYI youth co-researchers have also made it clear that they refuse to be confined by social science categories, defining themselves more dynamically (“I am not gender nonconforming, I am a woman born as a male”; “I am race fluid”). So, the WYI team is working to simultaneously attend to and destabilize identity markers like race, gender, sexuality, (dis)ability, class and immigration status—and all of their intersections.

To summarize, while we have serious concerns with population-based research, we also honor the desire to document collective struggles and forms of resistance. And, we understand that the law has carved out some “suspect categories” that can be litigated for immediate, even if minor, relief. When we engage such projects, we attend carefully to the wide variability within groups, vibrant intersectionality within persons, and structural betrayals that accompany group membership(s). Thereby the “group” becomes relational and dynamic—rather than isolated and static—as we unravel the essentialist trappings that sometimes “stick” to the category.

Stratified justice: Policy for the “deserving”?

Another common policy strategy is to seek fast, “easy” justice for the most “deserving” few, while others are (perhaps inadvertently) represented as “not-as-deserving.” We witness the triaging of justice across many social movements with advocacy prioritized for cisgender lesbians and gays who marry, over trans people; undocumented students, before their kin working in the kitchens; people convicted of “nonviolent” charges, but never those labeled “violent.” Advocates and policymakers often justify this tactic with the hope that small “wins” will accumulate into long-term justice for all. But this strategy dubiously relies upon deciding—and dividing—who is (un)deserving of immediate justice (Patel, 2016). We resist research that supports stratified justice. An essay by Sonia Sánchez Carmen, Diego A. Hernández Arellano, and Eric Nava-Perez (unpublished) sketches these “deservingness” dilemmas in immigration struggles, asking organizers not to settle only for the rights of “dreamers” if it shuts out those family and community members consigned to the fields, backrooms, and detention centers. We work hard to refuse complicity in the stratification of justice . . . but, at times, painfully, our work has been co-opted to facilitate just such divisions.

Tension 2: Navigating academic privilege and activist solidarities

We turn to the tensions of differential privilege and respect accorded to members of the research team. While we try to contest power dynamics among us, that doesn’t stop people on the outside from relying on the academics, patronizing community members, privileging Whiteness/maleness/academic credentials, or trivializing the collaboration (Kelman, 1972; Paradis, 2000; Smith, 1999; Tuck, 2009). Those of us in the academy are often in a position to leverage ties to university administrators, funders, bureaucrats, and politicians; sometimes, we gain access to resources and policymakers generally out of reach for broad swaths of the public. And, no small matter, most of us in the academy are “read” as White, granting us another form of illegitimate privilege. The question for diverse research teams is how to “work” these dynamics within and beyond the research collective.

In Changing Minds, we strategically used our privilege for multiple ends: Michelle regularly met with the prison Superintendent alone, shielding the incarcerated women from an extreme power imbalance; María and Michelle met with the NYS Legislature’s Black and Latino Caucus to learn how the research could best influence state policy. With most of the women now released, the research collective travels together and the formerly incarcerated women lead presentations while “allied researchers” step back. But this dance is not always graceful as the group tries to fight the choreography of power and privilege, sometimes stumbling over the mutual insistence of “no, you talk first,” disrespectful audiences, or elitist definitions of “legitimacy.” When we present our research in communities of color, however, many of these power dynamics are reversed: Whiteness and multiple degrees become understandably suspect and we must be vouched for by a respected community member—trust may or may not follow.

As activist-scholars, we are always strategic about how we introduce our collaborations into policy conversations. We intentionally disrupt traditional notions of expertise, with one of our team’s nonconventionally trained members as our spokesperson in policy sessions: a young person, a formerly incarcerated researcher, a mother who had been video-recording stop and frisk for years before ever working with academics. Sometimes, our collectives decide collaboratively (often driven by community co-researchers) that it is tactical for the most prestigious university researcher to speak first. For instance, when Michelle suggested that the author list for Changing Minds be alphabetized, the suggestion was appreciated—but firmly rejected. The women at Bedford Hills felt that The Graduate Center affiliation would only help get the report read if Michelle and María were at the top of the list.

These discussions about leveraging power and privilege happen inevitably on what Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2007) would call “tricky ground.” Below, we elaborate on five related tensions that we have encountered in our precarious entanglements with powerful policymakers and state institutions.

Hegemonic hierarchies of expertise

Academic training, credentials, university appointments, and research data lend academics a form of hyper-legitimacy—bound up in Whiteness—routinely denied to the community-based researchers (Chataway, 1997; Kelman, 1972; Smith, 2007). Keenly aware of this dynamic, community activists often seek partnerships with universities, strategically exploiting this perceived expertise to expand the impact of their advocacy—and simultaneously (hopefully) challenge the boundaries of accepted expertise. Yet, if we do this, we must be cautious—and creative—to avoid reproducing hierarchies of knowledge. How might leveraging our power simply reify our status over community members when we are invited to closed-door meetings with policymakers or asked to speak as an “academic expert”? How can we disrupt systems of exclusion and privilege in inventive ways, pushing for change that would contest current power structures?

While some hopeful ideas have emerged in PSP projects, these are never settled questions; Brett, María, and Cory have seen this unfold in the Morris Justice Project (MJP; http://morrisjustice.org), a CPAR project that investigated aggressive policing in the Bronx in collaboration with Bronx residents (Stoudt et al., 2015). MJP is committed to having both community and university members of the research team present at academic conferences, like the American Psychological Association (APA) Annual Convention (Stoudt & Torre, 2014; Stoudt et al., 2015). And yet, when the majority Black research team arrived to speak at APA—dressed in t-shirts reading “WHY DO I ALWAYS FIT THE DESCRIPTION?”—they were stopped and interrogated by hotel security (Stoudt et al., in press). Brett and María then leveraged their academic privilege, including ties to the renowned psychologist William Cross who had invited the group; the MJP team soon received apologies from hotel security and the CEO of the APA. But the incident reminds us that as we work to upend traditional hierarchies of expertise, we still exist inside powerful structures constantly reproducing the very injustices we are contesting.

Internal power dynamics

It is not enough to be concerned with how external actors understand the power dynamics. We must interrogate power and privilege within our research collectives, attuned to power disparities based on academic credentials, but also dynamics tied to race, gender, sexuality, class, (dis)ability, immigration status, and their intersections (Guishard, 2009; Torre, 2005). Given the commitments of CPAR, we try to build in processes and pauses for collective reflexivity, dialogue, and debate. But we are not always successful, and sometimes the tensions fester and explode.

Returning to our example of Changing Minds, after 18 months of data collection, it was time for coding the massive piles of interviews the research team had accumulated. With no place to secure the confidential transcripts at Bedford Hills, the CUNY researchers held them and began analysis. When they returned with coded transcripts seeking feedback from their co-researchers in prison, they heard,

Judy Clark: So we do all the data gathering and you do the analysis? Doesn’t seem very participatory!

Rightfully challenging the process, Judy showed how this “efficiency” was infused with hierarchy and exclusion. Attempting to course correct, the CUNY researchers carried the interview data back and forth to the prison over the next few months so that the analysis could be conducted by the entire research team, together.

Such power struggles are not only waged across the university–community divide, however. In one project focused on the challenges and gifts of long-termers returning home after prison, formerly incarcerated women on the research team felt the formerly incarcerated men were ignoring gendered aspects of their experience. While the men used lots of air time (with wonderful conversation), the women sometimes felt silenced. The women made us pause to remind the men that their experiences were not universal. An ultimately “friendly” but initially delicate moment, the women demanded acknowledgment of their distinct, gendered experiences in prison—and within the research process. Creating space for such internal disagreement is essential, as Umi Kothari (2005) has highlighted how power differentials between university and community-based researchers—but also among community-based researchers—are easily reproduced in participatory projects.

In our projects, we work actively to establish “good enough” levels of trust across borders of difference. Together, we share biographies of wounds and triumphs; we discuss which stories shall remain sacred, not for dissemination; we seek out a common language; we all ask “naïve” questions and check our assumptions. Founding member of PSP, Madeline Fox, introduces performance as an embodied strategy for collective exploration of research team dynamics, as well as to facilitate participatory analysis of the data (Fox & Fine, 2014). Embodied performance provides an opportunity for the collective to illuminate injustice that can otherwise be difficult to see or name, because it has seeped under the skin, or there is no shared vocabulary, or the weight of internal power relations continually presses down. In the participatory contact zone of CPAR collectives, we carve out space for challenges, confusion, and hurt—buttressed by unexpected synergies, laughter, joy, and imagination (Torre, 2005).

Hitchhiking on dominant discourses

Sometimes, policy windows open at a discursive slant that is “palatable” to those in power, but unsavory to activists and critical researchers. We might feel ethically compromised if echoing dominant discourses are the price of admission to a larger policy conversation. For instance, after the Changing Minds analysis found that college in prison leads to substantial decreases in recidivism, the research collective was encouraged by the NYS Legislature’s Black and Latino Caucus to incorporate the argument: “And it saves money!” The recidivism reductions were large enough that they would offset college costs and still generate overall cost savings—a persuasive argument for policymakers most concerned with the bottom line. The group debated this cost-benefit approach, with some researchers uncomfortable about reducing lives to dollar signs and reinforcing stereotypes about the “danger” of people leaving prison. Eventually, the collective moved forward with a cost-benefit analysis on the advice of the Caucus. These legislators were adamant that documenting “tax savings” and “public safety impacts” of college in prison would be essential in garnering interest from rural and suburban colleagues—whose constituents were more likely to be White and conservative, and less likely to be incarcerated. The findings were politically compelling: If a third of adults incarcerated in NYS in 2000 participated in college, tax dollar savings could amount to US$150,000,000, which could be reinvested into social programs to prevent incarceration (Fine et al., 2001). And yet, the research collective remained skeptical of these discursive practices—even while using them—which prioritized saving money over enhancing lives.

Research co-optation

With concerns about the (mis)use of our research hovering, it is critical to consider strategies to ensure that our findings will be handled with integrity. Others have written about the omnipresent threat that research evidence will be co-opted by policymakers: used naively, decontextualized for their own ends, or even manipulated to amplify injustice (Nelson, 2013; Serrano-García, 2013; Shinn, 2007). To minimize (but never eliminate) this threat, we spend time in each CPAR project trying to anticipate and subvert the policymakers who might shoplift convenient findings (e.g., “Some students want School Safety Agents!!”) before discarding all the rest (e.g., what they really want are adults who have similar backgrounds in schools, not police).

We are also wary of seemingly more benign (mis)uses of our research. A few years after the publication of the Changing Minds report, members of the research team attended a meeting of advocates, researchers, and practitioners hosted by the Ford Foundation and the Gates Foundation, both considering a massive investment in college in prison. There, the foundations attempted to use the findings to support philanthropic investment in a national initiative for computer-based college curriculum in prison. The research team dissented: “But at the core of the Bedford Hills college program was the leadership and participation of the women!” “Close relations between faculty, writers, artists, volunteers, tutors, community members, librarians . . . who built the college culture—that’s what made the difference—not just the delivery of curriculum online.” In the philanthropists’ hands, the rich, collaborative culture of college in prison grew anemic, reduced to online courses from disembodied academics. No touch, no participation, little engagement. And yet—maybe? absolutely?—better than no college.

Research is always at risk of being appropriated to support dominant interests, tweaking rather than transforming existing arrangements. Thus, it is essential to deliberate within the collective about how findings should be used ideally, and how they are likely to be misused. We must also facilitate easy access to and use of our research products for community-based organizations and activists, never granting policymakers monogamous access to our results.

This tension of possible misrepresentation and exploitation is particularly important given the political capital that policymakers stand to gain from acting as if they solicited the full “participation” of community members in decision making. Bill Cooke and Umi Kothari (2001) have written eloquently on the potential “tyranny” of participation; they reflect on claims of international development organizations that “third world” communities have “participated” in their endeavors, without recognizing that limited access to international capital elicits a deeply coercive brand of participation. It is essential to guard against such co-option and dilution of participatory processes, ever vigilant against compulsory or tokenistic participation exploited to solidify policymakers’ continued legitimacy to make decisions (Cooke & Kothari, 2001).

We would be wise to learn from Jodi Melamed’s (2006) writing on “official anti-racisms,” by which the language of anti-racist struggles is used to bolster neoliberal structures, diverting from activism for genuine societal transformation. Research collectives need to consider the following: How do we prevent the co-optation of our projects when working alongside those in power? How might we, as critical researchers, contest this shapeshifting coloniality, laying bare these narratives and the hierarchies they reproduce? And how do university researchers avoid playing midwife to illusory participation “by the people”?

Narrowly defined audiences of policy research

The findings of policy research have traditionally been thought of as evidence to be handed off (and up) to those who make policy—rather than those most affected by policy. With the intention of informing decision making, researchers interested in policy change spend significant time cultivating the trust of elected officials and government administrators, writing white papers, and considering how our research coincides with upcoming legislative priorities. In CPAR for social policy, however, we see policymakers as only one (and never the sole) audience for our findings. Always aware of and attentive to power lines that are dangerous to cross—but more dangerous to avoid—we believe these multiple audiences are particularly important given the many limitations of policy as an avenue for change. Knowing that policy windows may never have enough room for us to tell the full, wicked stories of our participatory research, we make sure to find alternative spaces for these stories to breathe, ones that accommodate their complexity and generosity.

So in our work, we seek to democratize not only knowledge production but also its distribution and ownership. Multilayered dissemination is central to our work, as we create products with and for numerous audiences and circulate our materials in varied formats: social media, legal documents, community organizing pamphlets, academic articles, theatrical performances, Op-Eds, and street art.

The MJP research team, for example, used multiple strategies to move their project findings into the world. Capitalizing on moments of access to those in power, MJP shared findings directly with candidates during election season town halls, and attended an invitation-only meeting held by the NYC police commissioner with a range of community members and organizations. At the same time, the collective developed a strategy—what they call “sidewalk science”—for sharing research findings and conducting additional analyses in the same streets where the original data were collected (Stoudt et al., 2015; Torre, Stoudt, Manoff, & Fine, 2017).

During sidewalk science, MJP members asked passerby to help the research team make sense of the data via ongoing collective, community analysis. The team also shared research findings via nighttime projections on the side of buildings with the Illuminator (https://youtu.be/mliuISC2hJk) and via pocket-sized handouts, buttons, stickers, and t-shirts. MJP members also registered voters and spoke about proposed police reform, linking the research to broader political empowerment—a critical expansion on what it means to conduct “policy research.” More recently, the team wheat-pasted portraits of community-based researchers around the neighborhood with the phrase “This is not a broken window,” above a collectively written paragraph unpacking the policy of broken windows policing and a website link. All of these strategies grow from the belief that policy issues are public issues, and we should engage public science for, with, and by communities under siege (Torre et al., 2012).

We have reviewed, and reflected upon a series of delicate tensions that erupt within university–community projects, particularly CPAR projects for radically redesigning social policy with long marginalized groups. We turn, in our epilogue, to another angle of activist-scholarship: a study designed from within the university, on the university as a racialized colonial project. In this instance, as told by Leigh Patel, the tensions of research on injustice within the university fester not “out there,” but “in here.” We end with this story because it is a reminder that there is radical reconstruction work to be done within our own house, the very one we call the academy.

Epilogue

Unsettling the False Borders Between the Community and the University

In the spring of 2015, dissatisfied with institutional response to the ongoing state violence on Black peoples, a group of graduate students at Boston College (now named Eradicate #BostonCollegeRacism), undertook a task that rippled in many different directions. Their initial self-designed task was to speak aloud the realities of institutional racism in a format other than the ubiquitous open letter.

These emerging social scientists conducted a great deal of archival and interview-based research into the history and contemporary structure of institutionalized practices on that particular college campus. They produced two infographics that presented their research and several recommendations for addressing institutionalized racism. (Visit the Eradicate#BostonCollegeRacism website to view the infographics at http://bostoncollegeracism.tumblr.com/Infographics)

The students then faced a series of administrative hurdles and obstacles, because as a self-formed, heterogeneous group in various tracks and points in their studies, they were neither of the two configurations that the university recognized: official student groups nor academic course groups. Not fitting into either of these options for institutional recognition meant that the group was, in essence, stateless, from the view of the institution. One tenured administrator told some of the student organizers, “But you’re not a real group” out of frustration of how to direct their request to post the infographic. Another asked the group if a “revise and resubmit” loop of feedback could be instigated retroactively for their research product. Statelessness scrambles the frequencies of legitimacy.

As with all instances of statelessness, this situation drew into relief the parameters drawn by the state, in this case an institution of higher education, to confer and oversee legitimacy (Cacho, 2012) through categories. Social categories, ranging from race, class, gender, ability, to designations of community and university work to sort and facilitate shorthand understandings. This is both essential in making meaning and in the specific context of ongoing coloniality, deleterious in metering out belonging, opportunity, obstacles, and dispossession. Social categories cannot be separated from the fundamental colonial quest of stratification, the baseline pursuit of coloniality (Wynter, 2003), and one that’s been most successfully wrought by Eurocentric colonization (Battiste, 2013). Moreover, universities and their cultural practices of research are deeply situated within a sociopolitical reality of formal research being part of Eurocentric epistemological dominance. This means that “the community” is dialogically and conceptually made into reality by its contrast, “the university.” Part of the rupture created by these student activists was that this time, the community was the university. The state faltered in seeing itself through its administering of categories.

How, then, can categories of community, university, student, administrator, activist, observer, categories themselves, be unsettled? The work of the student activists at Boston College, and elsewhere, particularly in this social movement moment of Black Lives Matter and the Dream Defenders, reminds us that unsettling categories and hierarchies of social groups is part and parcel of unsettling the present from its past. Pragmatically, both of these groups have unsettled the past bodily through protest as well as textually across media channels.

Arjun Appadurai (1996) asserts that media and migration are the two most consistent ruptures of nation/state order. Part of the challenge, then, for anti-oppressive research is to hear the moment when Eurocentric colonial categories and metrics are applied to discipline border crossing groups into the prevailing social order. How can research, the pursuit of knowledge, listen to examples that border cross and seek the rupture of social categories? How can it create structure to allow for the movement across structure? How can those who have been shaped by institutionally invested definitions of research hear the epistemologies when they speak them? The explorations in this article present some of the complex ways that knowledge, like learning, are far from perfect but contain within them the ever-present possibility to collapse categories and unsettle epistemic borders.

Footnotes

Appendix

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author Biographies

Michelle Fine is a distinguished professor of Critical Psychology, Women’s Studies, American Studies, and Urban Education at The Graduate Center, CUNY. A pioneer in the field of youth Participatory Action Research, Michelle is a founding faculty member of the Public Science Project and has been engaged in varied critical participatory research projects for over 20 years in schools, communities, and prisons to document, interrupt, and organize for just alternatives to injustice. Her newest book, Just Research in Contentious Times: Widening the Methodological Imagination, was published by Teachers College Press in 2017.

Andrew Cory Greene is a formerly incarcerated co-founder and organizer with How Our Lives Link Altogether! He is also a 5th year PhD candidate in Critical Psychology at The Graduate Center, CUNY where his/our research justice efforts engage in Radical Healing and youth community organizing as a praxis of Human Justice. Cory attributes his work, motivation and success to his son’s existence.

Leigh Patel is a writer, sociologist, and educator. In addition to her work in the academy, she is a proud board member of the Education for Liberation Network. Prior to working in the academy, Leigh was a 7th grade language arts teacher, journalist, and state-level policymaker.

María Elena Torre, PhD, is the founding Director of the Public Science Project and faculty member in Critical Psychology and Urban Education at The Graduate Center, CUNY. She has been engaged in critical participatory action research nationally and internationally for 20 years with communities in neighborhoods, schools, prisons, and community-based organizations seeking structural justice. She is co-author of PAR EntreMundos: A Pedagogy of the Americas (Peter Lang Publishing, with Jennifer Ayala, Julio Cammarota, Melissa Rivera, Louie Rodriguez, and Margarita Berta-Avila).

Talia Sandwick is an activist-researcher and PhD candidate in Critical Psychology at The Graduate Center, CUNY. She has been engaged in collaborative, social justice research for 10 years, working with varied partners in grassroots organizations, schools, jails, nonprofits, and government agencies. Talia is also currently a researcher with The Center for Court Innovation, and previously worked for the Vera Institute of Justice.

Brett G. Stoudt, PhD, is an associate professor in the Psychology Department with a joint appointment in the Gender Studies Program at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, as well as the Psychology Doctoral Program at The Graduate Center, CUNY.

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