Critical Participatory Action Research: A Feminist Project for Validity and Solidarity

Abstract

We present critical participatory action research as an enactment of feminist research praxis in psychology. We discuss the key elements of critical participatory action research through the story of a single, national participatory project. The project was designed by and for LGBTQIA+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, intersex, asexual, plus) and gender-expansive youth; it was called What’s Your Issue? We provide details of the research project, the dreams, desires, experiences, and structural precarity of queer and trans youth. We write this article hoping readers will appreciate the complexities of identities, attend to the relentless commitment to recognition and solidarities, learn the ethical and epistemological principles of critical participatory action research as a feminist and intersectional praxis, and appreciate the provocative blend of research and action toward social justice. Online slides for instructors who want to use this article for teaching are available on PWQ's website at http://journals.sagepub.com/page/pwq/suppl/index

Keywords

feminist research participatory action research LGBTQIA+ youth

What if psychology took feminist scholarship seriously? As researchers and scholars who have spent much of our lives building a praxis of critical participatory action research (PAR), we take this provocation as an opportunity to reflect on critical participatory action research, an approach that we understand as a feminist response to conventional research practices (see Cahill, 2007; Langhout & Thomas, 2010; Lykes & Moane, 2009; Maguire, 1987); it is research rooted in politics, power, participation, and a deep appreciation of knowledge, created in conditions of oppression and mobilized for social action.

In a highly contentious political moment when “truths” and “facts” are under attack (https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/trump-claims-database), we engage critical participatory research with communities and movements under siege. Steeped in feminist theories and methodologies, with a commitment to both “public science” (Torre, Fine, Stoudt, & Fox, 2012) and activism, our projects are fueled by an urgency produced by extreme injustice, one inspired and informed by the passion and commitments of feminist and critical race and queer theorists (Collins & Bilge, 2016; Maguire, 1987). We aim to generate solidarity studies (Torre, Stoudt, Manoff, & Fine, 2017) for the public good. In this article, we review the key elements of critical participatory action research through the story of a single participatory project designed by and for queer youth, called What’s Your Issue?

Beginnings: What’s Your Issue? Was Born Over Lunch

Just as we (Michelle and María) were about to sit down for lunch, to discuss the possibility of a large grant to launch a national participatory survey by/for lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, intersex, asexual, plus (LGBTQIA+) youth, the foundation officers who ended up funding our work said to us, “Did you ever notice that the leaders of the new youth movements, DREAMERS, Education Justice, the Movement for Black Lives, Immigration Justice, Black Youth Project 100, Standing Rock,…are disproportionately queer youth of color?” Well, we had.

Our funders had approached us about the possibility of a national survey of, by, for, and with LGBTQIA+ individuals, which would specifically emphasize experiences of marginalized queer youth; they wanted to fund research with and by, not research “on” LGBTQIA+ young people. Existing national youth research featuring queer youth focused primarily on bullying, depression, and suicide and relied on samples of youth who identified as lesbian, gay, sometimes bisexual, and on rare occasions trans and/or gender nonconforming; participants were largely White, mostly students, and/or youth in Gay/Straight Alliances in schools (www.glsen.org). Our funders desired a more complex picture. They knew that gender nonconforming and trans youth (especially those under 18) were historically overlooked in most national survey samples. They knew these same youth (especially those who were also youth of color) were disproportionately dealing with precarious housing, in foster care, and involved with systems like child welfare and juvenile justice. (see www.lambdalegal.org/know-your-rights/article/youth-glossary-lgbtq-terms). And so they sought a national participatory project, led by marginalized LGBTQIA+ youth, a survey that could gather intersectional (see McCormick-Huhn, Warner, Settles, & Shields, 2019, the current issue) narratives and quantitative responses from a much wider berth of queer, trans, and gender non-conforming young people living at the margins, especially those of color, who might tell a different story about desires, betrayals, dreams, aches, demands, and radical imaginaries (e.g., a group’s shared values, institutions, symbols). As a result, the What’s Your Issue? project was born. Rooted in the recognition that the stories of poor and working-class queer and trans youth need to come out of the closet and that research would be most valid—that is, it would accurately reflect the perspectives of the young people, across varied contexts—if it sutured political solidarities and was shaped by the perspectives of those who have been marginalized, even within the LGBTQIA+ movement.

At the project’s inception, we (including our funders) used the umbrella of LGBTQ and GNC (gender non-conforming) to describe and reach out to youth. We quickly came to learn from survey-takers, however, that though we hoped the “Q” (queer) would signify the inclusion of all youth who did not identify as straight and/or cisgender, this intention was not explicit enough. We soon shifted to using LGBTQIA+ to refer to lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, intersex, asexual, “plus” any youth who do not identify as straight and/or cis. We also shifted to using GE, or gender expansive, instead of GNC as our team felt more comfortable describing people by what they “are” rather than what they are not.

The Public Science CPAR Project: A Brief History

For the past 25 years, the Public Science Project at the Graduate Center, CUNY, has been engaged in critical participatory action research (CPAR) with communities on key policy questions of educational, carceral, racial, gender, immigration, and sexuality justice (see Torre, Stoudt, Manoff, & Fine, 2017). María Elena Torre is the founding director, and Michelle Fine is a founding faculty member. Scores of research projects have been designed by collectives of vibrant, diverse teams of academic, practitioner, and community co-researchers. At the center of the inquiry are girls and women, immigrants, queer youth, women in prison, school push-outs, young people in foster care, and youth activists, who are fighting for educational justice and against police brutality (www.publicscienceproject.org).

We have documented the impact of college in a women’s prison, with a research team composed half of women in prison and half in the academy (Fine et al., 2003). In another project, we identified the gifts that formerly incarcerated students bring to a university; we have done this work with a team comprised predominantly of college students who had been formerly incarcerated (Halkovic et al., 2013). We have catalogued the devastating consequences of aggressive policing on communities of color—on families, elders, and youth—with a research collective of New York City youth, adults, and elders in the Bronx (Stoudt et al., 2015). We have examined, in coalition with youth organizers, why and how gender non-conforming girls of color are most likely to suffer suspension from New York City schools (Chmielewski, Belmonte, Stoudt, & Fine, 2015). In each project, we worked collaboratively in what Torre (2009) has called participatory contact zones, spaces where very differently positioned people come together—across power, privilege, and vulnerabilities—to develop theoretical and methodological designs that focus on structural dynamics, engage history and contemporary social movements, and assume lives are simultaneously filled with pain, joy, and resistance (Torre, 2009). As an introduction to CPAR, we elaborate each element in its name:

Critical

Once we establish a research team of university and community-based researchers, together we read and share experiences, standpoints, and skills; we draw upon critical psychology, feminist, critical race, queer, decolonizing and Marxist theoretical frameworks, music, art, and folk tales; we catalog various perspectives on the shape of the “problem” we are about to explore. We start with a critical lens because we understand that we are researching in landscapes that are deeply uneven and unjust. Together, from an angle of inequity, informed by a wide spectrum of theory, methods, and life experiences, we carve a set of research questions. Like Maguire (1987), who was so passionately (and humbly) critical of male participatory researchers who silenced women’s voices and lives, we begin with an analysis of power, oppression, and privilege; we ask always, whose voices are smothered, whose are centered, and how might we produce knowledge together?

Participatory

We assemble research teams as “participatory contact zones” (Torre et al., 2008), where very differently positioned co-researchers come together to grapple with a common concern, in the context of their own and each other’s lived experiences. Bringing together vibrant and diverse forms of knowledge, our collectives privilege the perspectives among us that have been most adversely affected by structural injustice. Researching together, our discussions and debates are not quieted by the pressure to reach consensus; instead, we embrace disagreements and what the late Chicana feminist theorist, Gloria Anzaldúa (1987), called “choques”—moments when perspectives clash, arguments erupt, and tensions boil over. These disagreements may emerge across and within power lines, between academics and “community members,” or within cross-class, generation, racial, and gender dynamics. Like MaGuire (1987), as well as Lykes and Moane (2009), we take relationality and non-neutrality as core commitments of feminist inquiry. While choques are often uncomfortable, we have learned to expect and engage them, as they push us to deepen our collective understandings of the issues we are studying (Torre & Ayala, 2009).

Action

CPAR projects are designed as public science for the public good, that is, to “be of use” (Fine & Barreras, 2001), to struggle for justice, that is, to challenge dominant lies, to support social movements, and/or to uplift silenced voices and perspectives. Throughout the process, we seek and create opportunities to weave research and action together: contributing to legal briefs; engaging in organizing opportunities; producing scholarly publications, Op Eds, popular education writings, and workshops; conducting “sidewalk science” (e.g., presenting data to community members and asking them to interpret the data and imagine what community safety would look like); engaging performance; producing social media; creating websites, blogs, comic books, T-shirts, postcards, or—most recently—card games (see publicscienceproject.org). We understand that actions and audiences to whom we are accountable are multiple.

Research

CPAR projects are designed with and alongside communities under siege, blending a range of quantitative, qualitative, visual, and embodied methods, as suits the need. A popular misconception is that CPAR is simply a methodology. It is not. CPAR is an epistemology—a theory of knowledge—that radically challenges who is an expert, what counts as knowledge and, therefore, by whom research questions and designs should be crafted. Together we develop and pursue a set of carefully crafted questions, and together we make sense of the evidence we construct. In our projects, we integrate community-based, secondary analyses of “official” data bases, including education, police, and incarceration statistics; we also develop and implement original, community-designed surveys to offer up quantitative counter-narratives of locally meaningful evidence; we conduct focus groups and interviews and gather identity maps and local artifacts. In sum, we weave visual methods with history, quantitative with qualitative data, and “official” databases with evidence gathered by and for community members.

With this range of methods and some very traditional commitments to being systematic, valid, and theoretically driven, many of our projects, in some ways, can look like conventional research—with multi-level research questions, theoretical frameworks, multiple methods, systematic statistical and qualitative analyses, and triangulation of data—and a commitment to ambitious and creative dissemination aimed at a wide range of audiences. However, two foundational commitments distinguish CPAR projects from conventional research: No research on us without us; and research must be led by those who have been most adversely affected by injustice.

No Research on Us Without Us

Drawing on feminist, Indigenous, AIDS, and disability rights activists, who have refused to participate in top-down or externally generated research, CPAR projects begin with the conviction “No research on us without us.” Rather, we ground our questions in the lives of those most affected by injustice. In our work, we heed the call of liberation theorist, Ignacio Martín-Baró (1994), and foreground those perspectives that are usually ignored and silenced from communities under siege. We believe firmly that people who experience injustice must have a seat at the research table; that no one can speak “their” stories for “them”; that marginalized bodies and tongues carry stories untold; and that together—across generations, race and ethnicity, experience, education levels, trauma, and desires—we can build a research team that practices what feminist philosopher Sandra Harding (1994) calls strong objectivity. Harding argued for research teams of differently positioned people who work through and across their distinct standpoints and are therefore most likely to generate robust, counter-hegemonic evidence. CPAR scholars further assert that those who have been most adversely affected by injustice must lead research collectives or be key decision makers.

In the case of What’s Your Issue?, queer and gender expansive youth of color formed the core of our research team. Working together, as an inter-generational collective of researchers, we moved away from conventional public health frames of “risk” and tried to develop a national, online survey that would capture holistic, relational, and intersectional lives and experiences. The young co-researchers wanted to learn what their peers across the country—LGBTQIA+ youth, and particularly queer youth of color—experience, know, and desire; where they ached; how they resisted, survived, made homes, and built relationships; and how they advocated for change. The young people anchored the questions, methods, and the analyses. And together we formed a participatory contact zone.

Like Harding, Anzaldúa (1987; see also Torre & Ayala, 2009) has written on the many streams of wisdom that flow in the borderlands (the “in-between spaces”) among diverse points of view. Anzaldúa’s writing on Mestizaje animates mestiza consciousness produced in the in-between spaces of intersecting and multiple identities, histories, and social locations that each of us inhabit. Mestizaje recognizes the keen insight and awareness that comes from embodied seeing and knowing at multiple (and simultaneous) levels of power and vulnerability, from both “the eagle and serpent’s eyes” (Anzaldúa, 1987, p. X). Multiple knowledges live within each of us and grow even more powerful when explored among us.

We also borrow and build on Anzaldua’s notion of “nos-otras,” which forces us to hold the ever-present tensions of power, privilege, and vulnerabilities within participatory contact zones of our research collectives. We are a “we” made at all times of revolving “us” (nos) and “others” (otras), connected by a hyphen of mutual implication. Our lives and histories and the “false” binaries that position us are produced in relation to each other, and these dynamics are part of what we interrogate and seek to disrupt with our praxis. We understand the “we” of our collectives as nos-otras, where our many intersecting differences come together; we share the gifts and challenges of our distinct standpoints; and we commit simultaneously to reckon with power and imagine new possibilities, to share, and to build new knowledge and new futures. Participatory contact zones ignite the catalytic insights produced when very differently positioned people join together to critically examine what is and to creatively imagine what could be.

Critical Construct Validity

CPAR projects not only challenge traditional notions of “expertise,” but the research—by design—delicately and deliberately seeks to complicate the very “constructs” that researchers use to frame their work. As if we are heeding the call of Emily Dickinson, the poet who wrote, “Tell the truth, but tell it slant,” and grounding our work in the feminist insistence to question top-down authoritative ways of seeing, CPAR researchers challenge unquestioned assumptions from the ground up. We ask, what is the shape of the problem we are studying and from whose point of view? What do dominant narratives about queer youth leave out, ignore, dismiss, and fetishize? How does the problem look from the bottom up or from the radical margins?

In every CPAR project, we knead pummel, work, pound, squeeze, wring, twist, crush, shape, mold, mix, and blend our constructs and frameworks. When we pause and attempt to unpack the taken-for-granted constructs of depression, bullying, suicidality, homelessness, activism, or pleasure, with queer youth, the conversations change and the blinding narrow-ness of our disciplines is revealed. Our research teams approach and then pause to trouble the very constructs and assumptions that psychologists routinely place on marginalized bodies. We call this critical construct validity, with an epistemological nod to Foucault’s (1974) call for genealogy.

In the early 1970s, in a conversation with Noam Chomsky, Foucault urged social scientists to “…criticize the working of institutions which appear to be both neutral and independent; to criticize them in such a manner that the political violence which has…exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight them” (Chomsky & Foucault, 1974, p. 171). In our research teams, we work hard to unmask the political violence and the embodied dynamics that often result. While we focus on structures, we are careful to understand how structures can induce lives of pain and joy, imbued with complexity and multiplicity, both wounded and resisting.

This kind of conceptual excavation is precisely what happens in CPAR projects, where we challenge, reject, and re-work traditional constructs, even as we birth new ways of seeing the present. Consider, for instance, the scholarship of feminist psychologist Sara McClelland (2010, 2017), who has undertaken a “critical historiography” of the construct “sexual satisfaction” that psychologists, evaluators, and public health researchers routinely apply to measure quality of life. With a blend of classic and original methods, McClelland has studied how people—women and men, trans and cis, straight and gay, and across racial groups—make assessments that they are (un)satisfied. Compared to what? Whether interrogating sexual satisfaction or stigma, “safe sex,” or desire, she catalogs the history of the construct in the field, gathers material from very distinct sources to learn how the construct lives in real bodies and then she generates new constructs that better map onto human complexity, like “intimate justice,” as an alternative to “sexual satisfaction.”

Like McClelland’s program of scholarship, CPAR takes a deep interrogating dive, with quite diverse co-researchers, in real time, often through choques and difficult dialogues, to unearth what we mean (and what we are hiding) when we use taken-for-granted notions like woman, gender, sexuality, bisexual, race, safety, gender-conforming, violence, belonging, mental health, homelessness, trauma, desire, activism, or even trust. In What’s Your Issue?, we spent much time and shed a few tears—as you will see—deliberately unpacking and denaturalizing these “objects of inquiry,” sometimes with sparks flying, from our very varied standpoints. In the remainder of this article, we try to trace our engagements with feminist epistemology, critical race theory, the search for critical construct validity, and our own slant toward solidarity—engagements that stabilize us like bannisters in our work, and hold us steady as we navigate new terrain and run into choques—in our attempts to produce “research of use.”

Building a Research Collective

Once we received funding for the What’s Your Issue? project, we set out to assemble a nationally diverse advisory board of adults and youth, and an equally diverse research collective of LGBTQIA+ young people from across the United States (our participatory contact zone). Starting out, the “we” were three cisgender women: all psychologists; two who identify as queer; one as Latinx, one as Hispanic, and one as White. Over time, a White, cis gay male, critical psychologist and statistician, who had worked for a long time on “queering” research on relationships, joined us; as well as 40 LGBTQIA+ and gender expansive youth activists, most of whom identify as youth of color, from 10 communities around the United States, aged 16–24.

We reached out to LGBTQIA+ artists, scholars, and activists through personal and national networks, and within a month, an advisory group of intergenerational (majority youth and people of color) formed. The group was charged with helping us develop a national survey of open-ended, narrative, and quantitative items that would creatively stretch beyond the existent research on bullying, depression, and suicide, and systematically reach out to youth traditionally left out of national LGBTQIA+ youth surveys: youth of color; trans-identified youth; young people involved with foster care, housing, and shelter systems, and juvenile justice. We also wanted to be sure to avoid what Fine and Cross (2016) and Tuck (2009) have called “damage centered research”—focusing only on problems but not the gifts, strengths, and desires of young people.

Once our advisory group was assembled, we together identified key regions in the United States that we wanted to be represented by the youth participatory research team and sent invitations to LGBTQIA+ youth organizations. As well as general youth groups, in each region. Soon thereafter, we were joined by a stunning research collective of 40 young people from Boston, Seattle, Jackson Mississippi, Detroit, New Jersey, New York, Tucson, Saint Louis, Los Angeles, and New Orleans. This collective worked with us and the advisory group to build the survey and a series of local ethnographies; to document the wide range and place-based specificity of experiences, dreams, struggles, and desires of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, plus and gender nonconforming youth; and to maintain a special emphasis on LGBTQIA+ and gender expansive youth of color.

We built the survey in conversation with youth from the research collective as well as more than 400 other young people who were connected to organizations and groups across the United States that were recommended by our advisory group. This larger group of youth included those focused on LGBTQIA+ issues and involved in performance poetry, youth engaged in immigration struggles and anti-ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) campaigns, groups identified through social media and radio activism, and youth involved in foster care and with unstable housing. Each organization or group that gathered youth to work with us was given a “gift card” to subsidize “survey-making parties” (and later “survey-taking parties” and “survey analysis parties”) from which young people sent us ideas for survey themes, submitted items, and later reviewed and edited the multiple drafts of the survey. We drew items from “traditional” youth surveys on youth’s sense of belonging in schools, the short version of a Clinical Depression Inventory, standardized items on suicidality, and items developed by the Black Youth Project 100 on youth activism and civic engagement. These items sat beside “homegrown” items created by youth to tap issues of meaning, urgency, debate, and desire in the lives of LGBTQIA+ and gender-expansive (GE) youth and their communities. They helped us better understand, for instance, experiences of transphobia, relationships with foster families, meanings of community, gay-affirming services, inclusive curriculum, and more.

From these national phone and online conversations, our research collective compiled what we call our “best bad draft” of the survey that was submitted to a last group of youth who would work with us to review, critique, edit—and, if need be, rip apart. And the journey toward strong objectivity and critical construct validity was launched, in a Korean deli on 41st and Lexington Avenue in New York City, over rye bread sandwiches. It was a Saturday of “bad drafts” and choques galore.

Drafts in the Deli: Critical Construct Validity Over Rye Bread

We had put out a call for LGBTQIA+ in New York City to join us on the second floor of a Korean deli in midtown Manhattan. Expecting a few dozens, we were stunned as more than 150 young people (paid $15/hour for 4 hours) streamed into the deli, climbed the steps to a rather funky, well-lived-in space, with three rooms of tables and couches. We ate, laughed, traded pronouns, and created and presented colorful banners for “what the world should know about LGBTQIA+ youth.” We wanted everyone to place their voices and standpoints in the room, through banners and videos, and then split off into groups (of sometimes 4 and sometimes 20 youth) to critique, edit, revise, and re-mix the survey, producing a final survey ready to go out to young peers, filled with questions about activisms and dreams, betrayals and worries, intersections and anxieties, gifts and desires. We were working on critical construct validity, sharpening our survey to capture the range of issues of desire and dispossession that our youth colleagues understood so well.

Across the upstairs rooms of the deli, with young people (and one mother, who appeared to be in her 40s), spread across rooms, sofas, and cubbies, we invited “Who wants to work on some of the more difficult issues—and how we should phrase the questions?” In one small room, 20 young people wandered in from various agencies, activist organizations, and educational areas. They met to discuss some of the more “contentious issues”—questions on pain, betrayal, and needs and questions that could be misheard as pathologizing or damage oriented. Long, difficult conversations ensued with “lively” discussion and much debate about what to include, how to phrase questions, what to ask, and what not to ask. Before we knew it, we entered a dense conversation about construct validity: “What’s a woman?” “What counts as family?” “If I live on my cousin’s couch, am I homeless?” “Do police really protect?” “Should a White-passing person of color really be classified as “of color?” “If I don’t get harassed by police, because I am scared to go outside as an undocumented person, does that mean I have a lot of stress about police, or none?” “If I am an online blogger, does that count as activism?” and “If I feel most comfortable among trans women of color in social media sites, can I say that’s where I find community?”

We were deep into critical construct validity territory when we realized that basic constructs needed to be interrogated; in an attempt to unpack “what’s gender, what’s sexuality and what’s identity,” we asked the full group: “Should we even ask about sex assigned at birth?” Some applauded, yes! Others yelled out, “That question is offensive!” After much back and forth, another argued,

I want to respect trans experience, if we don’t ask sex assigned at birth, we might miss the experiences of trans people who only check “man” or “woman” [and not or also trans man or trans woman]. I want them to have that right, but I also want to include their experiences as part of the trans community.

The collective of young people were ripping the threads off what many of us thought were coherent psychological categories of gender and sexuality, race and racism, family and police—challenging each other and not always agreeing. We were renovating the survey, bottom up.

What’s a Representative Sample?

The final survey we created was launched online at (http://whatsyourissue.org/), and participants were recruited by sharing the link through social media (Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr) as well as through listserv e-mails, paper postcards, flyers, and posters that were mailed to the organizations and groups that helped build the survey. In the end, more than 6,000 young people across the United States took the survey (which we defined as answering 80% of the questions). A full 5,860 identify as LGBTQIA+. Ranging in age from 14 to 24 years, participants were from all U.S. states, Guam, and Puerto Rico and reflected a relatively balanced representation of the four primary geographic regions of the U.S. We were overwhelmed and excited by the magnitude of responses, the geographic breadth, and the diversities that the young people represented. In comments at the end of the survey, we learned that participants were most excited that the survey—even though it was long—“felt like it was made for us!” “The survey was obviously written by queer youth!” “I felt affirmed by this survey.” We believe the fact that the survey was designed by an intergenerational collective, led by a diverse set of young people who brought experiences and wisdom, in which diverse knowledges (including methodological) were exchanged and collectively built, made the response rate so impressive. Further, we hired social media consultants who were themselves geographically diverse, self-identified as queer and of color, to activate a variety of social media platforms and increase our sample’s diversity. We developed a project website that contained a video explanation of the project, photo galleries of the survey-making parties, and a link to take part in the survey. In the end, we succeeded in generating a sample with a high representation of youth of color (39%, N = 2,300), and transgender, non-binary, or gender expansive youth (58%, N = 3,404), youth with disabilities (39%, N = 2,264), and youth under 18 years old (46%, N = 2,690)—populations underrepresented and often absent from the literature (http://whatsyourissue.org/).

It is important to note that for most marginalized, invisibilized (or more accurately, rendered invisible), or stigmatized groups and communities living under surveillance—for example, young people who are undocumented or court involved, queer or gender expansive, with invisible disabilities, sexually assaulted, closeted gay and trans youth—there is no “random” statistically representative sample. Seeking a sample of young people who identify as LGBTQIA+ or gender non-conforming (whom, during the research, we shifted to calling “gender expansive”), we know that many are not in school, not living in homes, are placed in juvenile facilities, and in and out of shelter or foster care. With the advice of our advisory group and statistical consultants, we sought to recruit a What’s Your Issue (WYI) sample that was intentionally inclusive of those who had been ignored by earlier surveys. We worked hard to capture a sample rich in a range of gender expressions and sexualities, with an overrepresentation of youth of color, those with disabilities, gender-expansive youth, and young people who had experienced negative interactions with aggressive policing, troubles with school discipline or feeling unsafe/bullied in schools, and those experiencing housing instability. Our final sample included young people from urban, rural, and suburban communities and those connected to youth organizations and, of note, those who were not.

Below we offer a “taste of data” so you can appreciate the rich, vibrant, and complex range of participants who generously shared their time, wisdom, and experiences. You will get a snapshot of how contemporary LGBTQIA+ youth speak their gender, sexualities, and racial/ethnic identities; how they responded to standardized quantitative measures of discrimination, depression, police, and school interactions and activism; and how they crafted responses to our request for “banners.” And you will see why, and how, critical participation matters.

Disrupting Categories: Why Binaries Are Bad for Our Health

From our first gathering in NYC, members of the research team battled about the question of “categories.” In a video we produced to highlight some of our findings, J’ai Celestial, a youth researcher and organizer at BreakOUT! In New Orleans (http://www.youthbreakout.org/) argued eloquently and unapologetically: “LGBTQIA+ youth of color reject the binaries and identities that have been placed on us. We have a range of identities and refuse to squeeze ourselves into categories you can understand.” Honoring this stance, we understood that in order to be accountable to the LGBTQIA+ community, we needed to create questions and opportunities on the survey for us to learn about how gender, sexuality, and identities are embodied, experienced in the world, treated by others, transformed, and multiplied. We wanted a survey that would not essentialize gender, sex, or sexuality; would not centralize being LGBTQIA+ as the only or defining feature of respondents; and would feel like an invitation for respondents to be seen, heard, and recognized in their full selves. Thus, together we crafted a number of opportunities within the survey for youth to express a wide range of identities and intersectionalities. As recommended by the youth co-researchers, the survey opened with, “What five words would you use to describe yourself?” Here is a word cloud of the responses, with larger words representing those most frequently used:

As displayed above, we see the range of descriptors, the complex personhood young people offered with “QUEER” at the center (most often) but also cute, brave, poet, gamer, spiritual, witch, bookworm, and so much more, sprinkled throughout.

A bit later in the survey, we asked about demographics but always first in an open-ended way. In response to “How would you describe your sexual orientation?” participants wrote more than 2,000 different detailed responses, and they checked what felt appropriate in the long list of sexual orientation “boxes” we provided. Their responses amounted to 80 different repeated terms or categories, with many including descriptions of their romantic attractions (not sexual) as part of their sexual orientation. Youth descriptions of their sexual orientation were serious, careful, and often very specific: bisexual (used by 1,062 youth), queer (1,060), pansexual (904), gay (823), asexual (631), lesbian (555), and demisexual (216). At the same time, many were tender and filled with humor, including, for example, “Anyone with a heart, I don’t care about the parts,” “,” “Ladies, ladies, ladies,” and “nebulous and changing.”

Because we asked about each “demographic” first, with an open-ended prompt, we learned that sexuality, gender, and race/ethnicity are embodied and described with a rich range of language. Youth used more than 100 different terms to describe their race and ethnicity and another 100-plus terms to describe their gender—43% (N = 2,544) used more than one term. Terms rejecting or critical of binaries, like trans, non-binary, genderfluid, and agender, were each used by more than 400 participants. The vibrant range of subjectivities young people embody and narrate points to why they bristle visibly and audibly when asked to squeeze into narrow identity boxes.

The wide variation in identities excited our collective and validated many of us on the research team, until we stumbled into a choque. The adult researchers—ourselves among them—explained that with a sample of more than 6,000, we should collapse the data into race/ethnicity and gender/sexuality categories in order to analyze differences. We wanted their perspectives on how to “cut” the data. We continued: We were doing this so that we could assess, for instance, disparities in police violence or school push-out by race/ethnicity or gender/sexuality. While we thought this analytic move was obvious, we were wrong. The youth researchers were enraged that the categories were back in the room. They confronted us: Why would we open up descriptions of identity, allow people to define themselves “beyond boxes” and then re-box them? After much heated deliberation, we creatively navigated a compromise that defined the limited conditions under which we would compare White respondents to respondents of color, cis to trans, and precariously housed to stably housed. The categories themselves were an affront (see Torre et al., 2018). And, again, we slammed into the issue of critical construct validity. If you turn to the What’s Your Issue? website (http://whatsyourissue.org/), you can watch videos that warn readers of our research, that the young people refuse to squeeze themselves into boxes, and that viewers should not believe in these categories—even as our quantitative analyses reveal stark racial and gender disparities in treatment by police and in schools. We settled on an awkward compromise: We would investigate and document structural oppression through demographic categories but represent the young people in the vibrant, intersectional, and fluid language of their “willful subjectivities” (Ahmed, 2014).

A Taste of Quantitative Analyses

The quantitative analyses, available in a series of publications including Fine, Torre, Frost, and Cabana (2018), reveal what will come as little surprise: LGBTQIA+ young people experience relatively high levels of structural precarity—unstable housing, aggressive policing, push-out from education, alienation from family—across racial/ethnic groups and yet significant disparities by race/ethnicity and gender/sexuality in negative relations with police and school push-out. There are also painful and predictable statistical relations between structural precarity, mental health struggles, and suicidality. But because our youth co-researchers encouraged us to pursue an analysis of the relation between mental health and activism, we also found a surprising and important pattern: For a significant segment of respondents, the more discrimination they experienced, the more activism they engaged in. And the more activism they engaged in, the better their mental health outcomes and the more diminished their rates of suicidality. These associations were particularly strong for youth of color who seem to metabolize discrimination into activism with greater velocity than their White peers (Frost, Fine, Torre, & Cabana, 2019).

Another intriguing quantitative nugget emerged when one of our youth colleagues, D’Mitry (name used with permission), expressed surprise at the high levels of school-based alienation that respondents reported. The rest of the room was, to put it mildly, not at all surprised that school was considered an oppressive space. When asked to explain, D’Mitry described high school as a time and place of great support and affirmation. The room took a collective, curious gasp: “I went to the Arts magnet in Boston—it was filled with students of color, queer educators, a full and affirming context.” In the stew of these conversations, we decided to try to create a scale from a range of items on the survey, to measure the effects of what we came to call an “LGBTQIA+ dignity school.” A simple additive metric was calculated. Students were classified as attending a “dignity school” if their school included at least five of seven key attributes: “out” and/or trans teachers; LGBTQIA+ material in (a) social studies, (b) language arts, or (c) sex education; a Gay/Straight or Gender/Sexuality Alliance; an anti-discrimination policy; or “adults who care about me.”

We did the analysis of the full sample with our entire collective and discovered that respondents who attended a school we would classify as a “dignity school” were more likely to trust educators and report more positive mental health and academic outcomes. Conversely, students in dignity schools were less likely to report experiences of bullying, mental health struggles, school push-out, and suicidal thoughts. That is, youth in schools that enable LGBTQIA+ educators to be their full selves; schools that use an LGBTQIA+ inclusive curriculum; schools that host Gender/Sexuality Alliances and have anti-discrimination policies report better school experience and fewer negative health outcomes. This is an example of generating a new construct—dignity schools—through the participation of co-researchers and the available empirical evidence. The analysis shifted away from traditional questions, such as “Which students are at risk of dropping out or experiencing psychological distress?”, and toward robust policy discussions of what elements need to be in place in a school to generate a culture of inclusion and affirmation.

This line of inquiry proved to be quite generative. After presenting these data to a series of policy and advocacy circles in NYC, we are now collaborating with the Out & Proud Teacher Initiative in NYC (http://proudteacherinitiative.org/), gathering videos, interviews, testimonies from out and proud educators—stories of harassment and intimidation, but largely stories of radical transformation “after” they disclosed…in elementary, middle, high school, and college. From our youth research collective’s stories of “what could be” and, for D’Mitry, what beautifully was, we launched statistical analyses; we presented findings to various relevant audiences; and new projects have sprouted. None of this would have happened if we were working without the benefit of our young co-researchers. (For a review of quantitative findings, see Frost et al., 2019.)

A Taste of Qualitative Findings: A Peek at the Banners

In addition to the compelling quantitative findings that emerged from our more traditional questions, we have wonderfully colorful responses from some of our more creative, open-ended questions where we tried to uncover the “issues” that were identified as important to LGBTQIA+ youth across the nation. Early in the survey, we asked a seemingly simple question, “If you were going to design a banner about yourself, what would it say?”

Survey-takers offered a palette of incredibly warm, touching, funny, and painful banners. They chose to display their complex intersectionalities, their wounds, and desires. Many wrote in a dialect we now call “radical wit.” Below we re-present the banners with the self-described gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity of the authors in parentheses:

Queer, Trans, Asian, Disabled; Scientist, Artist, Actor. Imagine me complexly

(“I have no idea anymore, really.” Bigender, Japanese)

Woman, queer, immigrant, Mexican…. How much more powerful could I get in this country?

(Dykeness, cisgender, Mexican to the core, Maya/Aztec)

Just because I am a man with a vagina doesn’t mean I can’t be proud about it

(Gay, male, transman, Caucasian)

I was born gay, were you born an asshole?

(Natural, queer, woman, White)

My PGP is PRISON ABOLITION

(Queer, GNC, butch, White)

We were all born naked and the rest is drag.

(Goldstar, platinum, double mile gay, male with some drag queer influences, sombrero AF, Latino, Native)

I am #tamirrice I am #sandrabland I am #john crawford

(Straight?, nonbinary, two spirit GNC, Peruvian)

Radical by necessity not choice

(Gay as hell, queer, pansexual, fluid, female, Korean, Asia)

Yellow Peril supports Black Power

(Lesbian, cis, biracial, Japanese/White)

Disability is about a system of oppression, not about me being broken

(Straight, transman, White)

Flexing my complexion over White supremacy

(Gay, boy, multiracial, Brazilian, Latino, Asian, Black)

Hug a Gay Mormon: We Exist!!

(I am a boy who is attracted to other boys for emotional and physical reasons, I am Caucasian and my family stems from Europe…. I am LDS but have Jewish heritage and practice both Jewish and Christian holidays, White)

How am I still here?

(Blackity Black, I’m Black yall and Afrolatinx)

Why Critical Participation Matters

Drawing on long-time feminist commitments to the power of consciousness raising groups, intersectional solidarities, and local knowledge produced on the ground (see Boston Women’s Health Collective, 1971; Combahee River Collective, 1977), our research projects intentionally bring together very different standpoints. And as a collective, we dive into, disrupt, and innovate critical psychological dynamics. With strong objectivity, we aim toward critical construct validity. We curate difficult dialogues within and across power lines, encourage the voicing of divergent lines of analysis, and we explore how opportunity and betrayal, resistance, and “willful subjectivities” (Ahmed, 2014) live in our bodies. Within our research collective, we explore how social categories and even diagnoses (e.g., bisexual, trans, bipolar, neurodiverse, homeless) have moved under the skin. We privilege the views, critiques, and insights narrated from the margins, and we build together with the insight and incites that are fermented in conversations with nos-otras.

Within feminist studies, there are debates about whether or not feminist scholars should rely upon traditional “metrics” of objectivity, validity, or generalizability—or whether we should generate new justice-oriented guidelines for feminist praxis (see Levitt, Motulsky, Wertz, Morrow, & Ponterotto, 2017, on criteria for qualitative inquiry). In our participatory projects, we do not reject commitments to objectivity, validity, or generalizability. Instead, we queer them. We gather toward strong objectivity, pursue critical construct validity, and seek what Fine (2006) has called “provocative generalizability”—evidence that provokes a wide-awakeness, opening new ways of seeing old struggles.

While our major theoretical and political “choque” in What’s Your Issue? was around the use of rejection of gender, sexuality, and race categories, we also debated if and how to compare respondents across racial categories (e.g., especially through the binary of White vs. youth of color—”Hell no! You can’t include White-passing respondents in the ‘of color’ group!”); whether to ask standardized questions about depression, suicide, sex at birth—for some these were essential and for others they were questions that trigger; whether offering a checklist (after an open-ended question about gender) inviting survey-takers to check all that apply: “man/woman/trans man/trans woman/two-spirit” would suggest that a “trans man is not a real man.” We clashed over whether the census data on racial representation is accurate and reliable. “The census?! Who believes the census?! I don’t ever see White people in my neighborhood, they aren’t the majority in the country.” We generated a wide bottom-up list of injustices that may induce stress and elaborated a broad base of activisms enacted by young people on the streets and young people in their pajamas online. Other tensions erupted (fortunately) because we were such a diverse group and led by the standpoints of the young people. If D’mitry hadn’t attended a “dignity school,” we might not have imagined that such an analysis would be possible. If we didn’t ask for banners, we might not have uncovered the radical wit that so many young people express. If we didn’t ask for five identifying characteristics as an opening inquiry, we might never have learned about the rich intersections of neuro-diversity and queer identities—still being unpacked.

We, two of the academics on the research team, did not consider including questions about religiosity that proved to be really meaningful to our co-researchers and many of the respondents. Some of our co-researchers were sure that sex and gender were real, essential, and embodied, while others fiercely rejected all categorical identities and preferred to think about fluidity (Diamond, 2009). Some wanted no “damage” analyses—of pain, wounds, troubles—and others insisted that we gather this material—“this is my life!”—to reveal the scars of oppression. As a collective, we decided to ask about the wounds of oppression, betrayal by public authorities and intimates, and the psychological scars of homophobia, misogyny, xenophobia, and racism always alongside evidence of activism, desires, radical wit, and vibrant, willful subjectivities (Ahmed, 2014; Fine & Cross, 2016). All of these tensions—and the analytical debates they inspired—resulted from deep participation and a collective commitment to dive into our differences as if they were gifts—nos-otras, indeed.

Practice Implications

We write this piece with the hope that the process, participation, and findings of this study are useful to educators, youth workers, advocates, activists, and also to mental health practitioners. We have worked with lawyers, social workers, and youth organizers on revising their forms, so that all intake demographics start with an open-ended item, “Please describe your gender/sexual orientation/race ethnicity,” thereby inviting people to present themselves with complexity and authenticity. We have been honored to sit with youth workers, social workers, and child care advocates as they consider forms, gender-segregated units, and how to honor the complex identities of young people in the system (juvenile justice, foster care, shelter). We have worked with therapists eager to help young people understand the range of identities, words, fluidities that they may want to try on—rather than being squeezed into categories adults find familiar. We have collaborated with youth workers and group workers who are interested in building participatory democracy, governance, and participatory research into their therapeutic spaces, research spaces, youth spaces, and popular education spaces, and construct with young people participatory evaluations of services offered. We have consulted with lawyers about opening up legal categories of sex discrimination to include a range of gender preferences and performance, and we have collaborated with schools about the importance of inviting educators, staff, administrators, and students and their families to be their full selves in the classroom—it’s good for the LGBTQIA+ young people, but really for everyone in the school community.

Practitioners from a variety of settings have used our findings about correlation between the presence of “out” teachers and school staff and the inclusion of LGBTQIA+ material in school curricula and reduced levels of school bullying, reports of mental health struggles, and suicidality; therapists have asked for postcards of the amazing range of gender and sexuality identities for their clients; health care practitioners are using our findings to think through reproductive justice for all young people, cis and trans, fluid, heterosexual, bisexual, asexual, lesbian, gay, questioning; child welfare and juvenile justice advocates are thinking with young people about gender segregation and how to better honor gender expressions of trans and gender expansive youth. We believe our findings, and our commitments to participation, can open doors for more inclusive classrooms and mental health settings if the adults break the silence on diversity of identities and intersectionalities and share power.

What’s Your Issue? revealed in statistics and stories that queer youth, especially trans and gender-expansive youth and youth of color, are more likely than straight, cis, or White youth, respectively, to encounter difficulties, discrimination, and violence in schools and public spaces (on streets, in subways, in airports), and by public agencies (the police, service providers), and, too often, even at home. In many contexts, youth are also punished for speaking aloud and embodying the strength of their convictions. Queer youth of color are particularly vulnerable to structural violence at the hands of state institutions, specifically by police and in schools (Stoudt, Fine, & Fox, 2011). And yet, through our critical PAR design, we were able to see, recognize, and honor the full, vibrant, complex, subjectivities of LGBTQIA+ young people who refuse to assimilate, who voice a bold critique of dominant categories and hierarchies, and who yearn to participate fully in radically transformed institutions and communities.

In terms of action: We have co-authored publications and presentations at professional, activist, and queer organizing conferences. We are co-authoring white papers and legal briefs on “dignity schools,” providing regional analyses for policy makers, and developing a hilarious youth-designed card game called “Radical Wit,” produced from the clever banners that the more than 6,000 respondents produced. We have written expansively about the debates we engaged, with much anticipated and sometimes surprising, dissension (see Fine, Torre, Frost, Cabana, & Avory, 2018; Torre et al., 2018). We have produced a video, centering the perspectives of the youth researchers and laying out the arguments against categories (http://whatsyourissue.org/). We invite you to consider not simply how we resolved these impossible epistemological/political tangles but, more importantly that, and how, we opened up spaces for dissent and struggle.

Conclusions

This brief travelogue through the biography of What’s Your Issue? has the great fortune to sit alongside the powerful essays of Jeanne Marecek and Kaitlin McCormick-Huhn, Leah Warner, Isis Settles, and Stephanie Shields, in this issue, reminding us of the wisdom of Carolyn Sherif, the power of “rich talk,” and the crucial significance of intersectionality in feminist research. Marecek reviews the wit and wisdom of Sherif who challenged categories, as our youth co-researchers do; insisted on “equitable knowledge,” as PAR does; and refused the “boxcar” of gender binaries, as did the respondents to the survey. Offering a rich sedimentary layer atop Sherif’s writings, Marecek invites us to consider how analyses of “rich talk”—about masculinity, bodies, suicide, and mental health struggles—complicate and destabilize—as Sherif would have wished—these notions that too many in psychology consider self-evident. Through close discursive analysis, Marecek and colleagues advance thick understandings of how we live gender, sexuality, embodied (dis)comfort, mental health, and dis-ease, through culture and always in context.

Like Marecek, McCormick-Huhn, Warner, Settles, and Shields (2019, the current issue) dedicate their essay to developing another key feminist commitment to intersectionality. With a simple four-part invitation to attend to power, oppression and opportunity, multiplicity and fluidity, and the dynamics of social relations, they make evident how these four vectors move feminist analyses into theory, design, method, and analysis. We like to think that through critical participation, questions of power, oppression, multiplicity, and dynamic relations are visible and able to be theorized.

To end, we return to why CPAR—with intersectional feminist, critical race, and queer commitments—is crucial to psychology as a public science for the public good. As many have argued before us, feminist inquiry explores and unveils the hidden (and woven) transcripts of desire, despair, identities, relationships, wounds, and fantasies of those who have been marginalized (Comas-Díaz & Greene, 1994; Fine, 1988, 1992; Hall & Fine, 2005; hooks, 1984; Hurtado, 2003; Romero & Stewart, 1999). And as Marecek (2019, current issue) suggests, CPAR helps to destabilize taken for granted categories. By centering queer youth of color as co-researchers, who are living and flourishing in deeply precarious contexts, our research gained in validity, hilarity, urgency, and complexity. Without our co-researchers, we would not have understood so deeply the vibrancy of intersectionality and the fundamental problem with categories, the demands for fluidity, the tensions between structural oppression precisely carved along demographic lines, and the complex intersectional subjectivities embodied and enacted by young people and their social movements.

And finally, in deeply disturbing times, as inequalities widen, hate speech grows more familiar, the government threatens the lives of immigrants, trans people, people of color, LGBTQIA+ rights, sexual assault survivors, it is crucial for researchers in universities and in communities to ask: To whom we are accountable? While many of our departmental and American Psychological Association (APA) colleagues engage research partnerships with pharmaceutical companies, surveillance or testing companies, Homeland Security, or the military, CPAR scholars partner with movements for justice and dignity. Truth be told, all of these partnerships are infused with dilemmas, ethical troubles, tensions and, we hope, choques. The former partnerships are not objective, just as the latter are not biased. We would argue that, particularly today, solidarities between critical science and social movements are crucial to our collective well-being; they are essential for authentic, community-responsive policy making; and they are oxygen for nurturing the soul of activists, policy makers, academics, and perhaps even the APA. Standing with INCITE (2007/2017), we recognize that working with social movements is not about lucrative payoffs but a commitment to justice. As urgent as they are joyful, these collaborations stand in a long, proud tradition of feminist and critical race psychology, rooted in commitments to intersectionality, validity, and social justice. A sweet spot in contentious times.

Supplemental Material

Supplemental Material, Fine_CPAR - Critical Participatory Action Research: A Feminist Project for Validity and Solidarity

Supplemental Material, Fine_CPAR for Critical Participatory Action Research: A Feminist Project for Validity and Solidarity by Michelle Fine and María Elena Torre in Psychology of Women Quarterly

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to express deep gratitude to Allison Cabana, David Frost, Emerson Brisbon, and the What’s Your Issue? Research Collective for their keen analysis and insights; all the youth across the country who helped create the What’s Your Issue? survey; and the Ford Foundation, Arcus, and Borealis Philanthropies, without whom this research would not have been possible.

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.

ORCID iD

María Elena Torre

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