Abstract
Historically, critical dialogue has excluded low-income communities of color and youth voices, and today academic spaces remain geographically, structurally, and intellectually inaccessible to non-academic members of our communities. Omitting the voices of young people in academic spaces reifies the assumption that expertise on resistance is legitimate only when it is taken up by credentialed actors working within educational institutions. In this article, we reflect on two feminist decolonial methods that we believe are necessary for conducting youth-centered research: (1) locating youth, or critically contextualizing demonstrations of youth agency within particular global, local, and institutional settings and (2) confronting our own insider-outsider positionalities in the research process. Theresa Hice Fromille, Roxanna Villalobos, and Valeria Mena critically analyze the community-engaged and participatory action research they have conducted in solidarity with Black and Latinx youth. Karina Ruiz and Lesly Martinez Ibañez discuss three undergraduate research programs offered in three different Hispanic Serving Institutions. Collectively, we aim to de/re-construct what it means to be a knowledge-producer in sociological research, and we advocate for scholars to recognize the political and epistemological significance of making space for youth expertise in academic spaces.
Introduction
This article begins with a single premise: research methods are not neutral (Bonilla-Silva and Zuberi 2008; Fine 2011; Hunter 2019). Whether by utilizing action methods to collaborate with communities of color or rejecting geographical particularities in favor of conventional objectivity, scholars consciously select their research methods (Harding 1992, [2004] 2014). In this article, we explore two methods enacted by women of color researchers who work in solidarity with communities with whom they share a race, ethnicity, socioeconomic class, and/or geography. For the authors, this has meant collaborating with Black young women participants of a community-based roots travel organization (CBRTO), returning to hometowns in California’s Central Valley to partner with young Latinx rural activists, and working with university undergraduate research (UR) programs for underserved communities. Each section of this article attends to the urgency of feminist decolonial 1 research as Black lives continue to not matter, the numbers of eligible Latinx voters in historically conservative rural districts participate in political processes that invisibilize many of their family members, and marginalized students struggle to navigate universities settings that don’t know how to serve them.
We assert that conducting youth-centered research requires feminist decolonial methods. We hold a deep respect for the imaginative, critical, and driven young people with whom we work; at the same time, we refrain from what Greg Dimitriadis and Lois Weis (2001) have called “dipping into excessive romanticism” regarding youth agentic practices (p. 224). We also recognize that despite our commitment to youth of color, we are tangled in what Savannah Shange (2019) has called the late liberal double-bind as “we work for institutions that we know are soaked in bias and inequity, even as those same institutions have (more or less robust) commitments to ending bias and inequity” (p. 4). Yet, within these institutional borders, we find ourselves looking forward to the creation of social science projects that are designed by and for diverse collectives of researchers (Fine 2011), exhibit the same nuance and sophistication as demonstrated by our youth participant-collaborators (Small 2015), and awaken a collective sense of injustice in order to motivate societal change (Fine 2006). Collectively, we employ a multitude of feminist decolonial methods that reflect youth in their various capacities as researchers, organizers, and valuable community members in order to illuminate critical tools for enacting justice-based academic research. Here, we discuss two such methods: (1) locating youth, or critically contextualizing demonstrations of youth agency within particular global, local, and institutional settings and (2) confronting our own insider-outsider positionalities in the research process.
Youth scholar Jason Hart (2008) cautions against “the localisation of children’s participation” (p. 412) by claiming that the politics of difference “has blinded us to commonalities in the experience of disempowerment and impoverishment due to global capitalism” (p. 413). However, we contend that locating youth is a necessary method for recognizing those who are cast within the transparent spaces (Rose 1993), or not quite spaces (McKittrick 2014; Spillers 1987), that attempt to render marginalized people—including youth—as undecipherable within a contemporary hegemonic logic. By locating youth, we acknowledge their agency and positions as knowledge producers. Furthermore, we are able to recognize the constitutive ways that youth shape the spaces and places that constitute their existences even as their individual presences are obscured by hegemonic logics of power. By locating ourselves in what bell hooks (1984, 1990) calls the “margins” and Katherine McKittrick (2014) calls the “last place they thought of,” we acknowledge our insider-outsider positionalities as researchers from marginalized communities and critically reflect on the hierarchies that exist within the research sites we encounter. As insider-outsiders, we inhabit a different sense of place that allows for the pursuit of transformative knowledge (McKittrick 2014). We honor our positions within this space as it is here that we may find “the possibility of radical perspective from which to see and create, to imagine alternatives, new worlds” (hooks 1990:150).
In the following sections, we individually consider both methods as it pertains to our individual research, experiences, and positionalities. In the first section, Theresa Hice Fromille reflects on how accounting for mobility and youth agency assists her in critically contextualizing (or “locating”) the youth participation in BlackGirlTravel (BGT), a CBRTO based in the East San Francisco Bay, as well as considers how her marginalized positionality within the university influences her qualitative research methods. In the second section, Roxanna Villalobos and undergraduate researcher Valeria Mena argue in favor of a critical examination of rural youth resistance by locating youth agency within the local contexts of California’s Central Valley and analyze how their insider-outsider positionalities in their agricultural hometowns afford them the skills and tools to conduct youth-centered research that is ethically and politically attuned to community needs. In the final section, Karina Ruiz and undergraduate researcher Lesly Martinez Ibañez explore how UR programs reflect institutional identities (Garcia, Nuñez and Sansone 2019) and the factors that go into serving marginalized students.
“This Is How Black Girls Make Magic” 2 : Conducting Research in Partnership with Radical Black Youth Organizations
BlackGirlTravel (BGT) is a non-profit organization based in the East San Francisco Bay area. As a community-based roots travel organization (CBRTO), BGT addresses the histories, politics, and cultures within the African diaspora through out-of-school programming that culminates in an international excursion. Youth participants—Black/girls of color 3 ages 15 to 18 from low-income families—are recruited from the larger San Francisco Bay area. BGT curriculum is grounded in radical Black feminism which is highlighted by BGT founder and director, Kyla Chance’s assertion that marginalized youth who lack the opportunity of travel “stand to gain a great deal from the opportunity to live in contexts cultural [sic], politically, socially different than their own” as well as have “a great deal to teach the world.” BGT programming “utilizes travel to explore the intersections of race, class, gender, [and] citizenship on other intersecting oppressions” and aims to provide participants with a creative outlet—for example, by using photography and writing workshops—through which they are encouraged to imagine a liberatory Black future. The organization’s ongoing construction of a non-traditional space grounded in radical Black feminism was a focus of Fromille’s analysis but also provided the foundational values among leadership that ultimately enabled her partnership.
Locating Transnational Youth Solidarity in BGT
Fromille’s work of critically contextualizing, or locating, BGT youth participants is assisted by Katherine McKittrick’s (2011) understanding of a black sense of place and Setha Low’s (2014) embodied spatial analysis. According to McKittrick (2011), a black sense of place is a process of situating anti-colonial practices and narratives within a global “plantation logic” that spatializes the simultaneous practices of modernity, land exploitation, and anti-black violence. A black sense of place requires that Fromille locates youth within a social system that denies Black youth the rights of a protected childhood, for example, through the promotion of neighborhood surveillance, diversion of funds away from city park maintenance and community programming, and a general disregard for planetary wellness. Yet, it also compels a recognition of the ability of these youth to enact resistance and collaborate with one another in order to effect meaningful social change. Low (2014) uses embodied spatial analysis to signify the “theoretical premise that individuals as mobile spatiotemporal fields realize space” (p. 36). Employing an embodied spatial analysis is useful in highlighting the role of the body as a mobile entity and determining how individuals make space at the same time that space is making them. Taken together, a black sense of place and embodied spatial analysis can be employed to locate the BGT youth participants whether they are engaging in program workshops in California or traveling internationally.
The importance of locating BGT youth was particularly important in one instance during the organization’s 2018 trip to South Africa. During a focus group on one of the last nights of the trip the girls reflected on the assumption, from their South African counterparts, that they were wealthy because they were engaging in international travel. One participant stated bluntly, “I wonder if they’ve seen Black Panther ‘cause in the beginning of that movie when they show California—they live in the hood.” The participants, most of whom grew up in or near Oakland, drew upon this popular cultural artifact in order to articulate their positions as members of working-class families from an urban region that has faced “deliberate death” in favor of the reproduction of plantation hegemony (McKittrick 2011:951). This participant was also drawing attention to the potential for collaboration with South African youth similarly situated within a global system of oppression. By evoking the conditions of Oakland while in South Africa—not to mention evoking a film that blends African American and continental African cultures and histories—the young women made possible a multi-sited narrative of racial oppression and called for an international coalition of racialized youth in opposition to the hegemonic logics that had rendered them and their communities disposable.
Mobilizing an Insider-Outsider Positionality in Qualitative Research
Fromille’s position in the field, where her primary role was to provide support to the director and offer mentorship to the youth participants, challenges institutionally constructed boundaries that seek to convert marginalized researchers into objective community outsiders. In other words, her earnest desire for BGT’s longevity and accomplishments and her position as a program mentor disrupts positivist methodology and contributes to her effective mobilization of an insider-outsider position while conducting qualitative research.
Fromille facilitated the focus group where the aforementioned quote was recorded. Researchers typically design focus group protocols to align with their pre-determined research questions but, instead, Fromille asked the participants to write down topics they felt should be discussed. Some topics included on the list were as follows: “Interactions with locals (good + bad); Opinion on the norms here vs home; Similarities and difference between the U.S. and Africa.” The result of this focus group was an hour-long, deeply reflective conversation that accounted for individual and collective experiences, surprises and realizations throughout the trip. Fromille’s utilization of this facilitation method, which is a common method in participatory action and feminist research (Gardner, Snyder, and Zugay 2019; Pini 2002), confirmed the correlation between her ethnographic observations and the information that participants felt needed to be acknowledged. It also signified Fromille’s encouragement of youth leadership within the research they knew she was conducting, and thereby demonstrated a recognition of the youth as agentic knowledge-producers.
In her book, Yearning: Race, gender and cultural politics, bell hooks (1990) critiques marginalized scholars who are eager to greet other marginalized scholars “as colonizers” (p. 151). The former is associated with the tactic of silencing and would only call forth youth voices if they intend to share stories of deprivation and pain in order to confirm, for example, Black girls as hypersexualized and Black youth as permanent targets of punitive surveillance. This is not the position of an insider-outsider, but rather of one who is content with relegating others to the transparent space that makes them unvisible (i.e., present but rendered invisible) (McKittrick 2006). This is not the position that Fromille sought to uphold. Instead, the focus group allowed Fromille to sit with the youth participants in the “last place they thought of,” where she has built her home (McKittrick 2014). Such an exercise reinforces Fromille’s non-belonging in the academy—as a Black-queer-low income-young mother—and reinvigorates her passion for the lessons to be learned in that space of unvisibility.
The Politics of Place and Rural Youth Agency
In 2018, University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) professor Veronica Terriquez launched Central Valley Freedom Summer (CVFS), a participatory action research (PAR) project. The main goal of CVFS was to build political power among low-income, young people of color in California’s Central Valley (henceforth, the Central Valley) which is an area that is both predominantly conservative and home to a large Latinx immigrant population. CVFS was inspired by the Freedom Summer of 1964 which aimed to increase African American voter registration in the Southern United States which, at the time, was plagued by violent government-endorsed voter suppression. Similarly, voter suppression and conservative politics in the Central Valley have resulted in low voter turnout rates among youth ages 18 to 24, a majority of whom belong to low-income rural communities of color.
CVFS implementation included one year of research training for undergraduate students recruited from UCSC and University of California Merced who were raised in the Central Valley. Following their training, students were assigned summer internships with non-profit organizations across the Central Valley. An essential aspect of this project was a research team of both graduate and undergraduate students from the Central Valley conducting research in the Central Valley.
Locating Youth Agency in the Rural
Rurality is a multi-faceted geopolitical spatio-social location that creates a myriad of experiences for youth and, therefore, youth organizing and resistance in rural communities can take many shapes and forms. Youth resistance does not look the same everywhere, nor do researchers know all the ways that youth resist. Villalobos and Mena contend that researchers working with youth should start from the bottom-up, listening and learning about the world youth inhabit in order to build research that attends to their urgent and immediate needs and desires. Researchers need to make an effort to locate or meet youth where they’re at—be it geographically, politically, or culturally.
Geographer Cindi Katz (2001) states, “[s]uch connections [between places] are precise analytical relationships, not homogenizations [and not] all places affected by capital’s global ambition are affected the same way, and not all issues matter equally everywhere” (p. 1229). Through their involvement in CVFS, Villalobos and Mena were able to identify the ways in which Central Valley youth activism was socio-spatially informed. One example of this is the impact of infrastructure deficits on community organizing efforts. Specifically, the lack of public transportation in the Central Valley noticeably limits the opportunities that youth have to mobilize (quite literally) their political knowledge and community organizing skills. This makes the very act of driving youth from one rural town to the next an important effort in political mobilization efforts. The politics of place shapes the local life of youth in precise ways even as they are impacted by the same systems of oppression that youth face in other socio-spatial locations, leaving scholars with much to learn about all the ways that youth resist the social conditions around them across a variety of social contexts.
Mobilizing an Insider-Outsider Positionality in Youth PAR
Villalobos joined CVFS as Program Manager with a recognition that the PAR methods utilized by CVFS would allow her to work with youth in her rural community to create the opportunities she lacked growing up. As the daughter of a single mother, a refugee from El Salvador who has worked over 30 years as a farm-worker in the Central Valley, Villalobos knows first-hand the barriers rural youth face in becoming politically engaged. Therefore, her upbringing informs her commitment to continuously work in solidarity with rural youth, making space for them to share their stories while providing opportunities through the methods she engages as a scholar. As CVFS took off, Villalobos developed a deep connection with undergraduate action researcher, Valeria Mena. Mena grew up in Fresno, California with Latinx parents that currently work as farmworkers in the Central Valley. Villalobos and Mena’s insider-outsider positionalities are highlighted by their shared ethnicity, childhood geography, and for being Latinas from agricultural hometowns with immigrant farm-working parents who are also university researchers. Villalobos and Mena’s parallel insider-outsider positionalities allowed them to create an intimate bond and gave them the ability to utilize their privileges as university researchers to create opportunities for youth in their communities to build and share knowledge. At the same time, they realized that as much as they had grown up “inside” the Central Valley, they still had much to learn from rural youth and all the complex differences that constitute their rural and agricultural communities, necessitating that they remain open and flexible while in the field.
As an undergraduate researcher, Mena was able to apply the action research skills she learned during CVFS training to her internship with 99Rootz, located in Sanger, California. Launched in 2018, 99Rootz is a youth organizing program in the Central Valley that serves youth from rural communities connected by California State Route 99. Interning with 99Rootz’s Summer Academy helped Mena recognize the collective power of Central Valley youth to foster the positive changes they sought for themselves and their communities. By helping youth tell their stories and relate their identities to their communities’ histories of struggle, Mena analyzed and reflected on her own past. She realized that rural youth’s stories help us understand distinct experiences in navigating small rural communities. Finally, Mena’s time spent with 99Rootz exposed her to the particular struggles faced by youth belonging to different locations within the same Central Valley county.
Serving Students through UR Programs
Scholarship on undergraduate (UR) shows how programming can be critical for transformative student success (Heager et al. 2018). Karina Ruiz and Lesly Martinez Ibañez identified UR as key to their success in navigating college systems, transferring from community college to a four-year university, and successfully completing graduate program applications. Ruiz and Martinez conducted a content analysis of three UR program webpages. They also reflected on their personal experiences in the UR programs as Latinas in academia, albeit at undergraduate and graduate level, and first-generation scholars.
Ruiz and Martinez draw on Gina Garcia, Anne-Marie Núñez, and Vanessa A. Sansone’s (2019) theory of Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) “servingness” to assess programming efficacy for Latinx students. Garcia et al. (2019) developed a typology for understanding servingness, based on assessment of HSIs’ (1) organizational outcomes for Latinx students and (2) organizational culture reflecting Latinx cultural sustainment. The rationale between assessing culture and outcomes is a differentiation between numbers on enrollment, which is how HSI status is designated, and the actuality of a culture in which culturally sustaining scaffolding is built-in for equitable outcomes. The typology produces four “identities” of servingness for Latinx students at HSIs, from Latinx-Enrolling, Latinx-Enhancing, Latinx-Producing, and Latinx-Serving. Latinx-Enrolling indicates institutions that are “enrolling a lot of Hispanic students in name only” (Garcia et al. 2019:750). Latinx-Enhancing institutions serve Hispanic students by “enhancing self-perceptions of their academic ability and potential” (Garcia et al. 2019:760). Institutions that are labeled as Latinx-Producing “must provide culturally sustaining practices that promote equitable outcomes” (Garcia et al. 2019:748). Finally, Latinx-Serving institutions are those that incorporate all of these aspects and “the organizational culture and campus climate may include the compositional diversity of the faculty and graduate student population,” showing how equitable infrastructure involves creating a campus climate which makes students feel welcome and supported by people who make them feel a sense of belonging (Garcia et al. 2019:748). The typology is a constructivist analysis for organizational assessment of programming outcomes and individual experiences to construct “servingness” in HSIs. Given that the three programs Ruiz and Martinez analyzed are available in HSIs, the institutional typology is effective for measuring the programs’ Latinx-serving “identities.” The authors operationalize the typology to assess program outcomes based on the definitions offered and understand that institutional support is foundational for programming infrastructure to be built.
We discuss three research programs: Koret Scholars (KS) at UCSC, the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROC) at California State University Monterey Bay, and Cultivamos Excelencia (CE) at San Jose City College (N.d.). The first program that Ruiz and Martinez assessed is UROC at California State University Monterey Bay. The mission, “to promote scholarly identity, intellectual vibrancy, and the development of social capital by facilitating mentored undergraduate research,” declares the integral role of mentorship in a UR program (California State University Monterey Bay 2019a). Student engagement statistics from UROC indicate the programming has served 71 percent “underrepresented minority” students (URM), serving approximately 50 percent more URM than California State University, Monterey Bay’s (CSUMB’s) campus-wide 46 percent URM (UROC Student Engagement Statistics). However, there is no clear information on how UROC serves Latinx populations. UROC is a one-stop-shop for UR at varying levels of involvement. In its flexibility to serve students at different need levels and the student engagement statistics, the authors’ assessment is that UROC is between Latinx enhancing and producing.
CE aims to retain “Latinx and other high-need students to complete a degree at research [sic] university.” A notable contribution of this program is the institutionalization of cross-enrollment free of application fees, a feature new to the UC system despite California’s extensive community college network (Cooper et al., forthcoming). The program entails a collaboration between San Jose City College and the UCSC, using graduate research mentors to support students in UR projects. The authors identify CE as a Latinx serving program, reflecting the staff, program, and campus commitment to equity for minority and underserved populations in college, and advocating for their students to transfer to the UC system.
At UCSC, Koret Scholars provides 100 undergraduates with scholarships to carry out research projects while mentored by a graduate student or faculty. In 2019, additional funding from the Office of the Chancellor to provide scholarships for first-generation students allowed for 64 scholarships to be awarded. Although Koret Scholars only supplies financial support, the authors consider it to reflect a Latinx enrolling status because as awardees the authors witnessed a majority of URM students.
Locating Students in UR Programs
Ruiz and Martinez link the model put forth by Garcia et al. (2019) specifically to UR program outcomes and student experiences, which have the potential for transformative student success. University infrastructure for serving students, whether robust or lacking, affects how students perceive and realize their capacities. UR programs, and how equitable they are, shape how students contextualize their educational experiences. In applying this model, we contend that UR can be transformative if the programming involves a university culture and identity that seek to realize a commitment to equity. In this way, Ruiz and Martinez show how students “locate” themselves through university programs which create pockets of community for marginalized students, contingent on what is offered at their institution.
Researching from the “Inside”
A key aspect of this project was understanding how undergraduates experience the UR programs and broader campus climate. As researchers in the university and as members of the underserved communities in these institutions, Ruiz and Martinez identify themselves as insiders for this project. Yet as members of marginalized communities they do not identify with these institutions. In fact, Ruiz and Martinez used reflective methods for this project to draw on their experiences navigating colleges and having been served by these programs specifically. These programs were their guides to a foreign place (i.e., the university itself), and they used their positionality to assess program efficacy from the perspective of the students they seek to serve.
Conclusion
Taken together, the authors’ experiences working with youth in underserved communities reflect that researchers have much to learn from youth in enacting effective feminist decolonial research methods, primarily through locating the youth we work with and reflecting on our “insider-outsider” positionalities as researchers working with and in sites to which we are intimately related, transnationally, locally, and institutionally. As youth push us to consider how to be better researchers and enact more equitable methods, they guide researchers working toward liberatory futures. Our work reflects our commitment to working in rather than of the academic institutions which are oft-colonizing and disempowering to people and communities of color (Harney and Moten 2013). As female members of marginalized communities—working-class, Latinx, Black, first-generation, queer—we recognize in ourselves the historical recruitment of women to fill the void left by the neo-liberal state to attend to human needs and rights (Fine 2011). Although we are happy to continue the work of our sisters/mothers/aunties in the struggle, we invite our colleagues to engage in these and other methods which seek to destabilize the foundation of oppression on which research was built. We see our scholarship as forged in the collective “we” of our diverse and multiple communities of struggle, which will continuously uplift and work in partnership with the youth from our communities.
Footnotes
Author Contributions
Conceptual and theoretical development was done by T.H.F., K.R., and R.V.; research/methodological design was by T.H.F., K.R., R.V., V.M., and L.M.I.; data collection/coding/analysis was performed by T.H.F., K.R., R.V., V.M., and L.M.I. Drafting of the manuscript was by T.H.F., K.R., R.V., V.M., and L.M.I.; critical analytical/writing revisions were by T.H.F., K.R., and R.V. T.H.F. managed/supervised the project.
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.
