Youth-Led Antiracism Research: Making a Case for Participatory Methods and Creative Strategies in Developmental Science

Abstract

In this article, we conceptualize youth-led antiracism research in developmental science. First, we discuss how Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) principles converge with critical race epistemological approaches to knowledge production. Second, we propose that youth-led antiracism research requires a commitment to multiple ways of knowing, countering paternalism, focusing on structural racism, and activist scholarship that advances racial equity. These commitments are necessary to challenge how White supremacy culture shapes social science research paradigms. We weave existing empirical evidence and theory on YPAR with counter-storytelling methodology to identify various participatory methods and creative strategies that exemplify these commitments and emerged from co-creating research projects with ethnically and racially diverse youth. We conclude with implications for developmental science and offer guiding questions that may help scholars reimagine research in partnership with youth in ways that advance racial justice.

Keywords

community-based participatory research race/ethnicity social justice adolescence

Namely, in what ways does our work move beyond simplistic explanations, descriptions, and predictions of youth behaviors?

—Shawn Ginwright

Ginwright’s (2008, p. 14) question poses a challenge to academics focused on youth development. He calls us to interrogate our work critically and urges us to move beyond basic research. We are called to question how we have come to learn about, study, and engage in youth research. Many scholars, Ginwright, among others, ask researchers to reflect on their research assumptions and practices, and in doing so, open new possibilities for disrupting the status quo within the field of youth studies (Akom et al., 2008; Quijada Cerecer et al., 2013). This question is also at the heart of a recent turn to challenge White supremacy within the academy, and its research approaches.

White supremacy culture influences developmental science, other academic disciplines, and social institutions. We define White supremacy culture as the amalgamation of dominant beliefs, values, social norms, and practices embedded in every facet of life that upholds White hegemony and structures the many manifestations of racism. Okun (1999/2021) highlights characteristics of White supremacy culture in the workbook, Dismantling Racism: A Workbook for Social Change Groups, which we applied to academic research. For instance, power hoarding, paternalism, individualism, objectivity, the belief that there is only one way of doing things, and worship of the written word are characteristics of White supremacy culture that manifest in organizations (Okun, 1999/2021). In research, as one example, we often see White supremacy culture laud a positivist epistemology exemplified by individual researchers who objectively observe research participants or investigate social phenomena as separate from themselves. Through the myth of objectivity, White supremacy creates a double standard in which White scholars are afforded the privilege of their perspectives and social analysis as “neutral” or bias-free (DiAngelo, 2018). In contrast, racialized scholars (often questioned about the objectivity of their points of view) contend with the partiality of knowledge mediated by one’s situated experiences and identities (Collins, 2002; Huber, 2010).

In academia, White supremacy culture also emphasizes quantity over quality and a sense of urgency in work affairs, which sets the expectation for academics to “publish or perish.” In qualitative research, dominant research paradigms help reproduce Eurocentric empiricism and the epistemic violence in scholarship that narrowly defines the knowledge production process (Adams-Wiggins & Taylor-García, 2020; Berenstain et al., 2021; Malagon et al., 2009). Accordingly, the prevalence of dichotomous (either/or) thinking and an emphasis on “only one right way” of doing things limit our imagination as researchers and can invalidate Black, Indigenous, and other cultural ways of knowing and doing.

Weaving existing empirical evidence and theory with critical race methodology, we aim to conceptualize Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) as a potential form of antiracist developmental science. First, we discuss how YPAR principles converge with critical race epistemological approaches to knowledge production. Second, we propose that youth-led antiracism research requires commitments to multiple ways of knowing, countering paternalism, focusing on structural racism, and activist scholarship that advances racial equity. Third, we identify various participatory approaches and creative strategies that emerged from our youth-led antiracism research efforts in discussing these commitments. Finally, we conclude with implications for developmental science and offer guiding questions that may help scholars (re)imagine research partnerships with young people in ways that advance racial justice.

Conceptualizing Youth-Led Antiracism Research

Before we conceptualize youth-led antiracism research, it is necessary to define racism. Since the inception of the United States, racism has employed patriarchal, colonial systems of oppression to maintain White, male, heterosexual, Christian political, institutional, and economic power (Adams-Wiggins & Taylor-García, 2020; Malagon et al., 2009). Therefore, we conceptualize racism as a dynamic system, interdependent with multiple forms of subjugation, that (re)produces oppressive ideologies, practices, and structures that affect the well-being and livelihood of racialized people.¹ In contrast, antiracism is an ongoing process of social change aimed at eradicating racial bias, racial inequities, White dominance, or promoting racial justice and healing through interpersonal, group, and institutional efforts (Aldana et al., 2019).

YPAR broadens scholarly assumptions about what constitutes research, who can conduct research, the procedural elements of scientific inquiry, and disseminating research findings. In addition, YPAR allows researchers to engage young people in an intergenerational and collective process of critical investigation that addresses the social conditions that affect their lives (Cammarota & Fine, 2008; Checkoway & Richards-Schuster, 2004). When intentionally embodied as a form of antiracism, YPAR may engender youths’ epistemic agency in ways that challenge White supremacy culture within and outside of developmental science research.

It is necessary to clarify that YPAR is not a method but rather a “radical epistemological challenge” to dominant social science and educational research (Fine, 2008, p. 215). In particular, YPAR’s epistemological stance is most critical of who may create knowledge through research. Critical YPAR scholars are cognizant that social scientists, as creators of knowledge, hold power over others. As developmental scholars, we have the power to define the youth we study, codify their behavior, and conceptualize “the problem” under investigation (Best, 2007). For example, psychological research has contributed to the dominant discourse on racialized youth, often referred to as “urban adolescents,” as misbehaved, damaged, and dangerous (Fox, 2015). YPAR aims to shift power over to one of power with research participants. Thus, a principle of YPAR is the notion that youth are experts in their own lives with the ability to name, interrogate, and address the social factors that oppress them.

Scholars who employ YPAR create opportunities for young people to be involved in knowledge production to transform youths’ experiential knowledge into new social change possibilities. The pedagogical approaches in YPAR projects vary and include theories such as critical arts pedagogy, sociocultural learning, and intergroup dialogue (Aldana et al., 2016; Anyon et al., 2018; Wright, 2020). Nevertheless, most YPAR scholars recognize the contributions of Paulo Freire’s (1970/2018) seminal work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, to YPAR’s critical pedagogical approaches. Freire proposed that marginalized people (adult learners) enhance their ability to recognize and challenge their oppression through dialogic and problem-posing pedagogy. Building on Freire’s work, youth scholars have conceptualized critical consciousness as a dialectical process of critical awareness, action, and reflection (Watts et al., 2011). Previously, John Dewey’s scholarship established the assumption that youth can transform their realities through experiential learning and participatory social inquiry (Dewey, 1938; Miettinen, 2000). Thus, YPAR, which has integrated general notions of experiential and critical pedagogy, leverages the transformative power of young people through a dialectical research process to generate knowledge that directly improves their lives.

YPAR, as a form of action research, aligns with critical scholars whose scholarship seeks to reveal and challenge social inequity. Scholars such as Kurt Lewin, Gordon Allport, Patricia Gurin, and Isaac Prilleltensky have advanced action research in psychology. The legacy of action research also begins with interdisciplinary scholars of color like Mary Frances Berry, W. E. B. Du Bois, and John Garcia, whose contributions also advanced social science and social advocacy. The advancement of action research continues with scholars such as Caroline Wang, Lorraine Gutiérrez, and Eve Tuck. Their scholarship has informed the integration of photovoice methodology (Wang, 2006) and empowerment approaches (Gutiérrez, 1995) into our theories of change that decenter Whiteness within our YPAR work (Tuck, 2009). Yet, developmental science has not fully embraced the ethos of research for social change. Accordingly, YPAR remains at the margins of developmental science despite its expansion among allied fields, such as public health, education, and social work.

Critical Race Theory (CRT): Centering Antiracist Methodology in YPAR

YPAR, which intentionally integrates antiracism praxis (theory in action), can be one approach to developmental science that counters White supremacy culture in research. While YPAR is a radical departure from dominant developmental science, the application of YPAR is not antiracism research on its own. YPAR projects that do not intentionally attend to racism can reproduce racist practices, structures, and dynamics. As YPAR scholars, we must be careful not to assume we are engaging in antiracism research because our projects examine racial experiences or include Black, Indigenous, and other racialized youth. Instead, we need additional theoretical perspectives that intentionally enact YPAR as antiracist praxis. CRT is one framework that may assist YPAR scholars in centering antiracism work in their research. CRT surfaced in legal scholarship in the late 1970s, through the early 1990s, to critically interrogate racism and the “colorblind” ideology entrenched in the law (Delgado & Stefancic, 2017). Since then, scholars in social psychology, sociology, social work, anthropology, and political science have integrated CRT into their research (Carbado & Roithmayr, 2014). Through its tenets, CRT enables the critical analysis of institutional racism and the intersectionality of multiple systems of oppression.

Its voices of color tenet, also referred to as counter-narratives or counter-storytelling, suggests that racialized people are holders of knowledge that can disrupt dominant ideology. As an oppositional strategy and critical race methodology, counter-storytelling sheds light on systemic racism and advances racial justice (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002). Critical race methodology is an approach to research grounded in CRT that attends to racism throughout all research processes. In concert with critical race methodology, YPAR epistemology presumes that young people who have been most systematically marginalized, excluded, discriminated, and exploited hold specific insights about the systems of oppression that structure their lives (Bertrand, 2018; Fine, 2008). Critical race methodology focuses on expanding our understanding of racism and challenging White supremacy by emphasizing situated and multiple ways of knowing. Accordingly, CRT can be employed within YPAR projects to reframe the research space as an opportunity for counter-storytelling (Goessling, 2018).

In addition to epistemological similarities, YPAR and CRT overlap on several fundamental principles (Table 1). In both YPAR and CRT scholarship, academic researchers take on an activist-scholar role that requires being mindful of power, privilege, and difference concerning their research participants and the study context. YPAR scholars must be particularly attuned to how ageism against youth may manifest at various stages of intergenerational research collaboration. On the other hand, CRT requires scholars to attend to one’s positionality as a target of racism, a benefactor of White privilege, or as occupying the liminal space in-between socially constructed racial categories. Both YPAR and CRT seek to use the process and outcomes of research to create social change. Educational researchers who have consistently integrated CRT and YPAR (Akom, 2009; Akom et al., 2008; Baker et al., 2020) provide valuable models for developmental scientists to consider.

Table 1.

Key Overlapping Principles in YPAR and CRT.

Item	YPAR	CRT
Origins	Research paradigm stemming from multiple critical theories and transformative pedagogical frameworks	Theoretical framework rooted in legal studies movement in the late 1970s that critiqued the colorblindness or race-neutrality of policies, laws, and societal structures
Epistemology	Reject positivist assumptions about objectivity in research; commitment to plural and subjugated knowledge; centers the localized knowledge of young people	Rejects notions of objective, single-truth knowledge; emphasizes multiple and cultural ways of knowing; validates racialized lived experience as critical and legitimate knowledge
Conception of the population of interest	Children, adolescents, and young people are experts in their own lives; youth are holders and creators of knowledge; youth as research partners	BIPOC and other racialized social groups are knowledge holders and creators
Conception of the academic researcher	Activist-scholar in intergenerational partnership(s) with youth mindful of power differences afforded by multiple markers of power and privilege	Activist-scholar mindful of research positionality as racialized member of the group targeted by racism, privileged White ally, or occupying the liminal space in-between socially constructed racial categories
Core aim	Leverage youth expertise and participation in advancing social justice and transformational change	Center the lived experiences of BIPOC to critically examine structural racism and advance racial justice

Note. Within the United States, the acronym BIPOC, in contrast to POC, seeks to underscore anti-Blackness and Indigenous oppression, which shapes the relationship to and experience of White supremacy for all (racialized) people of color. YPAR = Youth Participatory Action Research; CRT = Critical Race Theory; BIPOC = Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.

Integrating critical race methodology into YPAR projects helps scholars better align this participatory approach with antiracist research principles (Dei & Singh, 2005):

Recognize the pervasiveness of intersectional power and dominance in a racialized, gendered, and classed society.

Problematize colonial practices within research processes of knowledge production and validation to challenge the unidirectional flow of information.

Critique the practice of seeing research participants as “objects and subjects.”

Move beyond examining individual manifestations of racial bias and discrimination to uncover structural racism and racial inequality.

Center the lived experiences of racialized and marginalized people.

Adhering to these antiracism principles and critical race methodology can help YPAR researchers employ youth-led antiracism research. In calling for this methodological and epistemological integration, we do not presume that previous YPAR scholarship has not demonstrated antiracist praxis. Instead, we recognize that YPAR scholarship, including our work, has not always explicitly described or discussed its methods and approaches as antiracist research (for exceptions, see Langhout et al., 2016; Toraif et al., 2021).

Background

We draw on over 15 years of collective practice experience—using personal counter-storytelling—to identify innovations in designing, facilitating, and reporting YPAR projects that advanced antiracism. As a form of critical race methodology, counter-storytelling may include three types of narrative inquiry: personal, other, or composite (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002). Scholars can share personal counter-stories, present third-person narratives relating to other people, or draw from multiple people’s stories to recount a composite narrative. As a form of self-study narrative inquiry (Lyons & LaBoskey, 2002), we use personal counter-storytelling to provide examples² of what youth-led antiracism research can look like within developmental science.

Research Positionality

In line with counter-storytelling methodology, we must first establish the social position that informs our perspectives as YPAR scholars. I, Adriana Aldana, am a cis gender Chicana. I was born and (primarily) raised in the San Fernando Valley, California. I am a daughter of working-class Mexican immigrants who received amnesty after the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. As a young girl, our family moved around a lot due to my father’s work. As a pre-teen, I spent a year living with my maternal grandparents in Baja California, Mexico. Today, I recognize that these relocations allowed me to observe the effects of racial segregation in housing and schooling inequality early on. Living and attending school in both the United States and Mexico, I also learned that history and other academic subjects—as presented in textbooks—were not facts but rather situated truths with sociopolitical consequences. These experiences and my interest in empowering marginalized youth motivated me to complete a joint doctorate in developmental psychology and social work.

I, Katie Richards-Schuster, am a cisgender White European-descent woman born and raised in the suburbs of metropolitan Detroit. Growing up 2 miles from the Detroit city border, I came to see racial segregation as an everyday part of my life. My parents taught me about race and racism from an early age, despite being raised in a primarily White community and school. Although I grew up in a middle-class household with college-educated parents, my high school was mainly working class, with only a handful of students attending college. Many of my classmates went to jobs in the auto industry, following their families’ footsteps. This context created an environment where most of my friends accepted reality as given and did not see alternative possibilities for themselves. For me, there was a profound desire to question reality and to dream big, but there were not many opportunities to do so. I wanted this not only for me but also for my friends. This desire drove my interest in creating spaces for young people, which led me to work in community organizations, engage with YPAR, and eventually, a social work faculty position focused on social justice, youth participation, and social change.

As part of our professional training, our social work education incorporated transdisciplinary knowledge and practical models from psychology, sociology, education, public health, women’s studies, and ethnic studies. We are macro-practitioners that specialize in community organizing, policy advocacy, program development, and evaluation. In many ways, our engagement with YPAR began as a community-based practice modality. However, we were also strongly motivated by the belief that young people’s wisdom and voice should be centered within scholarship. Over the last 15 years, we have worked closely as partners in research and community practice. Our partnership has developed over time on a foundation of reciprocity, building trust, directly and continuously talking about power differences due to our racial identity and positionality, and engaging in practices that promote deep listening and critical reflexivity.

We have grounded our YPAR work in a series of community-based projects involving various models of youth engagement—citizen participation, youth organizing, intergroup dialogue, and sociopolitical development (for a review of these forms of youth engagement, see Checkoway & Aldana, 2013). In addition, we played leading roles as adult allies, research team members, and workshop facilitators. Our discussion of these YPAR projects is not an exhaustive review of YPAR methods or pedagogical strategies used (for systematic reviews, see Anyon et al., 2018; Caraballo et al., 2017). Instead, we draw on personal counter-storytelling as a tool for advancing the conceptualization of youth-led antiracism research. We briefly describe three of these projects next.

Summer Youth Dialogues (SYDs)

The Summer Youth Dialogues on Race and Ethnicity in Metropolitan Detroit has operated since 2006. The SYD program engages adolescents, from across the city and suburbs, in intergroup dialogue to address racism in the region. Intergroup dialogue programs are social justice education efforts that involve sustained and structured discussions between two or more social identity groups led by peer or near-peer facilitators. In the SYD program, adolescents of African, Asian, European, Latinx, and Middle Eastern descent learn to think and discuss racism with young people who are ethnically and racially different from them (for more information on the SYD program, including recruitment and facilitation strategies, see Fisher & Checkoway, 2011; Richards-Schuster & Aldana, 2013). Participation in this race-based dialogue program has promoted youths’ exploration of their ethnic-racial identity and increased racism awareness (Aldana et al., 2012). Each summer, a team of racially diverse youth, often past participants in the program, use YPAR to document and evaluate the program from young people’s perspectives. The youth shared their findings in evaluation reports, programmatic videos, and community action projects.

Metropolitan Youth Policy Fellows (MYPF) Team

The MYPF program is an outgrowth of the SYD program. Every year following their participation in the summer program, some young people “refuse” to leave and want to continue working on the issues they began to address in the summer. Thus, we formed a policy and action team that uses YPAR to further understand and address racism and segregation issues in the metropolitan region. The MYPF team, which has generally consisted of 10 to 15 racially diverse youth representing both the city and suburbs, meets to identify YPAR projects, develop plans, and take action. Facilitating this group has involved integrating empowerment-oriented group practice and intergroup dialogue pedagogy (for more facilitation details, see Aldana et al., 2016). Although the youth participated in the SYD program, we always saw this team as a new start for the group, and we focused on building relationships, developing trust, and creating the space for young people to investigate racism in the region together.

The MYPF youth have developed compelling projects to document and assess segregation, racism, and social justice in the region. Their work resulted in a youth-authored book titled, My Dreams Are Not a Secret: Teenagers in Metropolitan Detroit Speak Out, in which they discussed their experiences growing up in segregation. As another example, in 2007–2008, the team—which at the time consisted of nine adolescents (14–17 years) who identified as Asian American (four), African American/Black (two), Arab American (two), and European American/White (one)—used photovoice techniques to document segregation across one central thoroughfare region. The project known as “Down Woodward” became the basis for an art exhibit, community outreach, and policy advocacy. This specific project used photovoice methodology, a YPAR approach that includes youth taking pictures as part of the data collection process (for more details about the Down Woodward project, see Aldana et al., 2016, 2021). The youth shared their findings with local, state, and national policy makers.

Another team of the MYPF launched a “social justice assessment” of the metropolitan region. This team developed an online survey and gathered over 1,000 young people’s ideas about the region. The youth shared their findings in a video and written report, a regional youth forum, and a state-level civil rights hearing (Richards-Schuster & Brisson, 2016; Richards-Schuster & Timmermans, 2017). They shared their findings in a youth-authored book, My Strange Outfit: Ruminations on Diversity From Nine Metro-Detroit Teens. This assessment project also led to creating a social justice fund that supported 18 youth teams to develop action projects to address topics related to the research findings. The project culminated in a series of local and national presentations and a televised town hall.

Tri-City Youth Project

The Tri-City Youth project brought together youth leaders from St. Louis, Chicago, and Detroit. In partnership with a university, each city formed youth teams to document and assess segregation in their schools and communities. Youth who attended the Tri-City YPAR training spent months working on the YPAR project in their home community. Examples of projects included the Down Woodward study in Detroit, discussed above, a study documenting racial profiling of police in a suburban school context (Chicago), and the impact of ending a school bussing program aimed at desegregating schools (St. Louis). The teams then gathered in Chicago for a weekend meeting where each team presented their findings, engaged in collective analysis across YPAR projects, and the groups developed cross-site recommendations for action. Through the weekend, the young people had opportunities to learn from one another, give each other feedback, and discuss their findings’ local and national implications. The weekend also allowed young people to meet each other, collaborate with other young people who wanted to have a voice in their communities, and have fun.

Participatory Methods and Creative Strategies: Reflections From Our Work

As we reflected on where and how we aimed to engage antiracist practices in our YPAR projects, we found that we had not previously framed our work as youth-led antiracism research. We first spent time in dialogue with one another to reframe our work, discussing how we conceived of YPAR as complementary to critical race methodology. We also discussed what motivated our engagement in this work and how we engaged in antiracism within our YPAR collectives. With this reframing in mind, we assessed our YPAR projects and our own experiences as adult researchers working in YPAR projects, using the following commitments:

Multiple ways of knowing: Demonstrating openness to multiple and creative ways of knowing to reject strict adherence to dominant research methods and the myth of objectivity.

Countering paternalism: Creating spaces of shared power by facilitating dialectical processes that support youth in developing their ideas, strengthening their voice, and bringing their full participation in the joint decision-making. This involves recognizing power, bias, and privilege within a collaborative research process.

Structural racism focus: Generating critical awareness of racism that centers young people’s experiential knowledge, creativity, and voices—particularly the experience of Black, Indigenous, and other racialized youth. This commitment includes the documentation and intersectional analysis of structural racism to inform social change in policies, practices, and institutions.

Activist scholarship: Challenging traditional norms of the academy by serving as advocates and adult allies who partner with diverse youth to envision new possibilities for social action.

Although we discuss our commitments to youth-led antiracism separately, they are not mutually exclusive but rather overlap. Figure 1 gives an overview of how these commitments relate to one another to inform youth-led antiracism research. We describe youth facilitation practices and considerations that reflect these youth-led antiracism research commitments in the following sections. Given our positionality as adults working with young people, we will speak to these commitments and the challenges that emerge through the lens of adult allies in YPAR projects.

Figure 1.

Youth-led antiracism research commitments.

Commitment I: Multiple Ways of Knowing

The notions that there is only one correct way to do things or that it is possible for a researcher to remain objective are two attributes of White culture supremacy (Okun, 1999/2021) within social science. On the contrary, our commitment to multiple ways of knowing is evident in how we have worked to embody our assumption that there are varied and situated ways of knowing. While open to methodological pluralism and subjectivity, post-positivist and qualitative approaches still privilege the perspective of adults, academic researchers, and their methodological preferences. Engagement in YPAR requires an openness to creative ways of knowing that center the lived experiences of diverse youth to ground the work in meaningful and authentic ways.

Throughout the three YPAR examples described before, we have sought opportunities to challenge traditional research methods and challenge objectivity by being open to new ways of knowing. We engage youth participants in discussions on questions of knowledge production. For example, what constitutes knowledge? Is it a young person’s right to be part of the process of knowledge production? As a group, we analyzed who traditionally has power in society to create knowledge and what could happen if young people from diverse ethnic-racial backgrounds participated in that process. These questions conclude with discussions about youths’ ideas for knowledge production.

Our commitment to multiple ways of knowing has included trying new research methods and approaches that our youth partners proposed. Across the years, youth have used qualitative and quantitative research methods, including surveys, interviews, and focus groups. At times, however, they wanted to develop new research methods or integrate more creative ideas that they thought would enhance how other young people participated in their projects. To this end, they used techniques like cartooning, murals, theater, participatory evaluation games, and photovoice approaches. We describe some of these approaches in more detail below.

Our youth-led projects have integrated different creative forms of expression and art as research tools alongside written forms of data collection and dissemination. For example, in one project, the youth used “voting boxes” to gather SYD participants’ feedback, graffiti walls to track young people’s skills, and a “four corner walking scale” to assess participants’ feelings on issues. They felt that the more engaging a process, the more likely young people might share their thoughts and learning. As another example, the Down Woodward project used photography to capture young people’s observations of racial segregation. Youth hung their pictures and excerpts of their written analysis intermixed along with a graphic representation of the street. The MYPF included a “comment box” that asked the gallery viewers to interact with the pictures by reflecting on their observations about the exhibit to use as another data source.

Youth-led research methods have also embraced collaborative and situated ways of knowing that counter individualism and objectivity as characteristics of White supremacy culture. For instance, one SYD youth evaluation team asked participants to use “one word” to capture their learning. The youth evaluation team collected one-word responses at the beginning, middle, and end of the summer program and developed word clouds. In analyzing the word clouds, the team reflected on their own experiences in the program to make meaning of the word clouds (data analysis) while also generating new data grounded in their situated knowledge. They presented the word clouds with the SYD program participants to disseminate key findings in the evaluation report. Their evaluation report included practice implications and recommendations for program improvement. Although we (the authors and youth) were unaware of this then, the team was engaging in what Heron and Reason (2008) call an “extended epistemology of experiential, propositional, presentational, and practical ways of knowing” (p. 366).

However, holding a commitment to multiple ways of knowing and creative expression is not without struggle. One summer, the SYD team wanted to “think outside of the box” and develop an innovative research tool for evaluating the program. They came to us and suggested the idea of cartooning as a method for gathering young people’s opinions about their experiences. Their suggestion was to have the young people create a simple drawing (i.e., cartoon) that expressed themselves before the program on one half of the paper sheet and then draw a picture that reflected themselves at the end of the program on the other half. Then the participants would write a short statement to explain the difference between the two self-portraits they cartooned.

At the time, we pushed back on the approach and questioned its feasibility. Our main concern was that the cartooning would not provide measurable data and that the youth would not take the activity seriously. We also assumed that opting for a more traditional method, such as a focus group or survey, would be more efficient given the time available for data collection. The youth confidently maintained that a cartooning method could work. However, we remained stuck in thinking that this was not a viable approach. In reality, we were asserting a dominant mindset—a White supremacy mindset—that could not consider a different approach. After pausing to reflect on our roles, we recognized that we needed to step back in the decision-making process. In doing so, the youth team engaged a group of 20 youth in the cartoon drawing activity. Just as they had anticipated, the SYD participants were excited about the prospect of drawing their experience. SYD participants took it seriously and provided a profound reflection on their experience. They drew pictures that showed locks on their minds before and wings that showed openness to new ideas afterward. They drew pictures showing the power of leadership and the shifts in their own beliefs that emerged over the summer. The activity had been a successful way to produce powerful insights about the SYD experience and, on top of everything, had created incredible artwork that illustrated the change that the program fostered. In the end, the youth were right! Now, we wholeheartedly agree with Goessling and colleagues’ (2020) argument that “art is a rigorous medium for analyzing, producing, and sharing knowledge” (p. 2).

Facilitating YPAR projects to honor multiple ways of knowing and youth voices in decision making has allowed us to counter White supremacy culture’s emphasis on the written word. In the cartooning example, pausing, reflecting, and being open to new ways of knowing led to new creative and artistic research methodologies. By following the youths’ lead, we practiced what Fox (2015) calls artistic embodied methodology, or the use of art and creative approaches as a collective process of scientific discovery, knowledge production, and epistemological liberation. In honoring multiple ways of knowing, we elevated youths’ voices in the research design, methods used for data collection, analysis, and how we discussed our findings.

Commitment II: Countering Paternalism

Countering paternalism speaks to the necessity of facilitating processes to support diverse young people in developing their ideas, strengthening youth voices, and bringing their full participation in intergenerational research collaborations. Paternalism, or the idea that those in power can make decisions for those without power, along with power hoarding, are also two characteristics of White supremacy culture (Okun, 1999/2021) that run counter to YPAR antiracism praxis. In the contexts of childhood and adolescence, paternalism originates in White colonial patriarchy that characterized youth—along with racialized groups and women/femmes—as subordinates that require paternal control (often in the guise of protection) and discipline (Liebel, 2007). Given its intersectional nature, addressing paternalism within antiracist YPAR projects requires creating spaces of shared power across age, gender, class, and ethnic-racial differences. Next, we discuss countering adult-to-youth paternalism before turning to how we attend to power differences and intergroup dynamics in youth-to-youth interactions.

Just as the example of our initial resistance to youths’ cartooning method described above illustrated, practicing our commitments to counter paternalism was not always easy. In retrospect, we, as adult facilitators, needed to check ourselves, our power, and our roles throughout the process. We needed to ask ourselves questions about why we were resistant to using new arts-based research methods. For us, this has meant critical reflection on adultism, our own social identity, and exploring notions of power, bias, and privilege. We practiced critical reflexivity in debriefing sessions to unpack our experiences and discuss how we can strengthen our practice. Nevertheless, countering paternalism and power hoarding is something that we will continuously struggle to curb.

Our work also involves creating multiple roles or responsibilities for young people throughout the research process to share their ideas. For instance, we have used specific strategies to ensure we center youths’ voices on all aspects of the research process, including icebreakers, team builders, co-creating agendas, co-sharing facilitation responsibilities, and co-designing structured feedback loops. Youth voice is essential to YPAR. For adult allies, this means listening to and genuinely engaging young people’s ideas throughout the process. Centering youth voice does not mean always doing what the youth want or dismissing the contributions of adults. It means prioritizing youth perspectives and listening to their suggestions as a vital component of the process.

Across all our projects, building trust has been essential to working together and for youths’ ability to push back on paternalism and power hoarding issues when they occur. Thus, creating a reciprocal teaching-learning community so that all youth could bring their whole selves to this work was crucial. However, it was necessary to remember that the foundation of trust and relationship building needed attention throughout the project. Over the years, we have come to reflect on this experience of being an adult ally as a “dance,” in which we continually balance supporting the development of youth as researchers and getting out of their way as they move forward.

In our work, countering paternalism has also involved creating the space for collaborative work across ethnic and racial differences among the youth. Most of our projects have brought young people together from across city and suburban regions, across racial and ethnic backgrounds, and across socioeconomic status (SES), among other social identities. Torre (2009) refers to YPAR collectives that intentionally create spaces for differently positioned youth and adults to engage in critical inquiry as a contact zone. In reframing a YPAR collective as a contact zone, or an opportunity to bring youth together to work through power differences, we aim to enhance youths’ capacity for sharing power within and outside the research context. Our work has required empowerment-oriented group facilitation strategies (Breton, 2017), youth intergroup dialogues (Fisher & Checkoway, 2011), understanding of sociopolitical development (Watts & Flanagan, 2007), and transformational pedagogy (Cammarota, 2017) to create inclusive collaborations.

An antiracism approach to YPAR involves paying attention to intergroup relations within the research collective. Attending to power differences in our YPAR collectives required multipartiality when facilitating research dialogues. Multipartiality, as opposed to partial or impartial mediation, requires the facilitators to notice and disrupt power dynamics that may reproduce systems of oppression in group interactions (Gurin-Sands et al., 2012). We constantly paid attention to the group process and noted who was participating and how. There have been multiple times where we, as facilitators, had to stop the process to ensure equity and inclusion in our research spaces. We aimed to ensure that all participants shared power throughout the process. For example, we noted if hierarchical leadership patterns emerged where the boys took up more space during a meeting or White youth kept volunteering to be the lead speaker at public events.

Regularly revisiting our commitment to shared power and taking time to unpack the power dynamics at play with our youth partners was necessary. To this end, we led discussions of power dynamics in society and asked the youth to identify how these dynamics might complicate our group processes with our youth partners. Discussions about sharing leadership focused on not replicating hierarchical dynamics centered on maleness, Whiteness, and other forms of privilege rather than reprimanding specific youth for not upholding the group’s commitment to shared power. We also shared strategies and created learning opportunities for youth to practice allyship and shared leadership. Sometimes there were issues that we had not realized were happening among the youth or between youth and other adult partners/community members. In these instances, having a relationship with the youth, and structured feedback loops, were essential to addressing their concerns and working through any issues they had with a peer or other adults. Therefore, countering paternalism meant a deep understanding of how power, privilege, and social identities shape democratic processes and intergroup relations.

Commitment III: Structural Racism Focus

A commitment to focus on structural racism in YPAR exemplifies how young people’s knowledge, creativity, and voices—particularly the experiences of racialized youth—can uncover and challenge systemic racism. A focus on structural and institutional manifestations of racism, rather than only looking at individual differences or interpersonal racial bias, is congruent with CRT and antiracism research methodology (Dei & Singh, 2005). Since centering young people’s voices has been influential across all our work, we begin by reminding young people that they are the experts in their lives. Their lived experience is the basis from which they should develop their collective work, and the intersections of the group’s lived experiences create an opportunity for fostering critical awareness, reflection, and social action (i.e., critical consciousness). Watts and Flanagan’s (2007) sociopolitical development model proposes that “opportunity structures” strengthen the relation between critical awareness and social action. Our work finds that YPAR serves as an opportunity structure to engage youth from diverse ethnic-racial backgrounds in a collective empowerment process.

For example, in the MYPF project that focused on a social justice assessment, the team was interested in examining specific notions of safety. In doing so, different youth spoke to what safety meant to them. For a group of White students from the suburbs, “safety” focused on car traffic and welcomed police presence. For the racialized youth from the city, “safety” meant avoiding police and feeling safe walking to school. They also discussed safety in the context of what was not safe, including dealing with broken street lights. These very different understandings of what safety meant led to an in-depth discussion about the underlying social, racial, and economic contexts of what that term can mean. The young people needed to have opportunities to speak to what safety meant to them openly—and challenge one another’s assumptions—in this case, the Black youth challenged their White peers’ understanding of safety. It was critical to pause the process to explore and deepen understanding of the more structural implications of what safety feels like and means before finalizing the types of questions included in an online survey we were designing. Discussions such as these also required us to be mindful not to tokenize racialized youth involved in the project while centering a structural analysis of racism within an inter-racial research space.

When given the opportunity, youth are keenly able to critically examine the institutions, contexts, and practices that negatively affect their lives. Accordingly, our work has focused on enabling youth from diverse racial-ethnic backgrounds to explore how structural racism shapes young people’s lives and builds their capacity for collective action. For example, in the Down Woodward photovoice project, to help the young people think about the implications of segregation and the impact of this structural form of racism, we worked collectively to develop a process to capture their school experiences and then share them. Each participant took pictures of their school and wrote comments about their day-to-day experiences. We then had them share their photos and experiences. As they listened to one another, they came to realize the inequities that existed from school to school.

The discussion of school inequities led to additional dialogues on the mechanisms of school funding. When they learned that property taxes are a primary source of funding for public schools (through further research), the youth decided to do a project that looked at segregation through the lens of economic development. Using photovoice methodology, windshield surveys (an assessment of environmental conditions in a community observed through one’s windshield), and unstructured interviews with residents and leaders, the project allowed youth to critically examine how the intersection of racial segregation and poverty drives inequity in schools (see Aldana et al., 2021). In this project, we needed to create a dialogic space that enabled young people to dig deeper than their experiential knowledge to collectively analyze the structural issues that affected them, albeit in different ways (see Aldana et al., 2016). Once they began to systematically investigate the history of residential segregation, inequity in economic investments and taxation, among other issues, they started to explore ways they could advocate for structural change in their schools.

The Tri-City project work offered a unique opportunity for young people to examine racism and institutional segregation across a broader region. While each team was developing their local projects focused on individual schools and communities, it was important for the young people to begin to see the larger institutional threads of racism once they began to see that the issues facing youth in St. Louis were similar to the problems facing youth in Chicago and Detroit. In this process, YPAR work provided a platform for collective consciousness that helps identify additional structural root causes that could be the basis for critiquing policy and taking policy action (Quijada Cerecer et al., 2013). This project helped initiate young people’s ideas for further action in their home community and helped support a collective policy brief to acknowledge the impact of segregation across a Midwest region and a network of youth collaborators. Thus, youth used structural racism documentation and an intersectional analysis to advocate for change in policies, practices, and institutions.

Analyzing structural racism enabled youth with diverse racialized experiences to transform personal experiential knowledge into collective critical consciousness. We have found that centering youths’ experiential knowledge, the individual wisdom from lived experiences, is essential to fostering critical analysis of structural racism in YPAR. While it has primarily been measured and reported as individual attributes, critical awareness includes a dialectic, iterative, and collective process of social analysis of oppressive conditions (Carmen et al., 2015). In our work, the dialectic nature of YPAR facilitation hinges on an intergroup empowerment process that requires building critical awareness through storytelling, along with an iterative process of critical reflection and collective social action (Aldana et al., 2021). As adult allies, we have created and scaffolded sociopolitical learning opportunities within the research process (e.g., research design planning, data analysis) to help youth transform their experiential knowledge into a collective understanding of systemic racism and oppression (see Aldana et al., 2016). Adults are crucial to creating learning environments within the research process that builds on youths’ knowledge by asking questions to deepen their thinking, introducing tools for critical inquiry, and supporting young people as they envision possibilities for action (Richards-Schuster & Timmermans, 2017).

Commitment IV: Activist Scholarship

At the core of youth-led antiracism research is a commitment to using knowledge production as a tool for social action. In collaboration with youth, we use YPAR findings to advocate for policy, institutions, and practice changes. Our orientation toward activist research reflects critical race and antiracism research methodology (Akom, 2009; Dei & Singh, 2005). Embodying an activist-scholar role within YPAR projects requires recognizing power, bias, and privilege, and challenging traditional norms of the academy. For us, practicing this commitment has meant critically reflecting on our roles as adult allies that partner with diverse youth to envision new possibilities for racial justice.

Across our work, the young people’s research helped spark a regional community development effort to support young people in the region to develop social justice projects. The youth have testified about their findings to the State Civil Rights Commission and other state-level policy makers, have led town halls, participated in media events, and have met with legislators in Washington, D.C., to share their insights. In addition, they have created materials and policy briefs, videos and reports, and written books distributed in schools and communities across the state. As academics, we have the resources to help create conferences, art exhibits, and various writing opportunities.

While youth have felt empowered to share their research findings through various forms of social action, their engagement in the YPAR process has not been without frustration. One of the challenges we have faced is helping young people see the impact of their work in the context of extensive systemic and structural racism. On some occasions, the youth got frustrated with the pace of change, and felt stuck, tired, and discouraged when they did not see any difference in their efforts. Systematic and structural racism is long-haul work, and the youths’ desire for social change was often not fully realized. As adults, we needed to help young people recognize their efforts as contributing to a part of the whole. We visualized the big picture, broke the work into small steps, and celebrated small wins along the way. We discussed the long-haul nature of systemic change and honored their contributions to it. We supported young people to think of their work through a lens of radical hope that their actions had a ripple effect on the future. Reflecting on where we had started and what we had accomplished together helped youth see themselves as part of a broader social movement.

We believe our role as scholar-activists is to advocate for young people to have their voices heard in various settings, including academia. In our work, we created the opportunities, but we stepped back to make room for young people to lead in the dissemination of findings. While we have also written, published, and presented this work in various ways, we involve young people as co-presenters when we can. For example, in the MYPF work, the youth team has presented at two national conferences on their work. For one conference, youth presented to a room of close to 100 evaluators at a national evaluation conference in Chicago. After the presentation, a national organization invited the youth to share their learnings as part of a plenary session, which they presented the following year. The plenary session was attended by over 500 people and broadcast to thousands of evaluators watching across the world. We have also written academic articles, including a recent book chapter in which two youth leaders are the first and second authors of the work. Co-presenting with youth places value on inclusive processes that challenge the academy about who can produce knowledge.

Our work has also opened the opportunity for youth-led antiracism research to transform psychometric scholarship. For example, one of the SYD youth evaluation teams created a “checklist of actions” that youth can do to counter racism. This checklist included individual-level behaviors like “checking a friend or family member” to group-level actions like “joining a social justice club” or “attending a rally.” After a few years of using the checklist for evaluation purposes only, it became clear to us that researchers could use this scale as a valid measure of antiracist actions. We formally validated and published the youth-created tool, now the Anti-Racism Action Scale, with a national sample (see Aldana et al., 2019).

Publishing the youth-developed scale was not straightforward. At first, we received a rejection because the peer-reviewers had significant concerns with the “methodology” used to construct the measure. Fortunately, the journal’s editor saw the promise of our manuscript and encouraged us to submit a rebuttal. In our second submission attempt to the same journal, we underwent three rounds of revisions, in large part to address reviewers’ continued concerns about the use of YPAR to develop the scale. Reviewers were unfamiliar with YPAR and believed that young people could not create a scientifically valid and reliable measure. Despite one reviewer’s concerns that the scale was atheoretical (overlooking the grounded theory approach we used) and was “unpersuaded that it will get used” (peer reviewer, personal communication, September 24, 2019), this scale is now at the heart of multiple dissertation projects, multiple conference papers, and a growing number of academic publications.

We view our role as activists-scholars as both creating the research spaces for young people to take action and using our institutional affiliations to legitimize and push for YPAR within the academy and our fields of study. For us, this includes challenging norms about the roles of young people in academic conferences and journals, creating interest groups within professional organizations focused on YPAR, and raising consciousness about YPAR within institutional settings through panels, workshops, and webinars. We have also used our role to advocate and develop new programs to institutionalize youth voice in government, push for funding of youth voice programs by foundations, and provide training to organizations seeking to engage YPAR in their work. Although there is much more work to be done, including transforming policies and practices at multiple levels, being an activist-scholar means a commitment to continuing to practice and push for youth voice and YPAR to be valued.

Discussion

Dominant approaches to research have limited how we know, what we know, and implications that emerge from our knowing. In framing youth, social science research has and continues to render Black, Indigenous, and other racialized youth as “at-risk,” which perpetuates a deficit representation of these youth (Wright, 2020). As a shift toward positive youth development, scholarship on resilience and grit has underscored racially marginalized youths’ capacity to navigate less than ideal material and social conditions. Although this scholarship is vital in highlighting the competencies unique to racialized youth, its focus on the psychological characteristics, personal strategies, or support systems that help individuals navigate their world has left the systems that create oppressive conditions relatively unexamined. Participatory and arts-based methodologies can redress the exclusion of youth from the research design phase, strengthen the validity of research, and enable the collective social analysis of the colonial, racist, capitalist structures that shape developmental context and processes to produce liberatory knowledge (Adams-Wiggins & Taylor-García, 2020; Aldana et al., 2019; Fox, 2015).

YPAR scholarship counters the conceptualization of racialized youth as “at-risk,” surfaces developmental assumptions that center Whiteness, and critically examines the structural factors shaping young people’s racialized lives. In reframing youth as both subjects and co-researchers, YPAR acknowledges that young people can promote a critical understanding of the social issues affecting their lives to advance social change (Cammarota & Fine, 2008). YPAR is compatible with critical race perspectives that critique the role of power in knowledge production and suggest that counter-stories that center the experiential knowledge of those most vulnerable to systems of oppression can challenge dominant narratives about racialized youth and maintain White supremacy (Goessling, 2018). YPAR participants can generate narratives that counter prevailing stereotypes about urban racialized youth. For example, Hope and colleagues (2015) used semi-structured interviews with Black adolescents to explore youths’ personal experiences and create counter-narratives about the racial discrimination and stereotyping they experienced in their schools. White adolescents can also engage in youth-led antiracism by interrogating their privilege to counter the myth of White supremacy (Corces-Zimmerman et al., 2017; Stoudt, 2009; Tanner, 2016). In our work, framing inter-racial research collectives as a contact zone (Bettencourt, 2020; Torre, 2009) has allowed us to facilitate youth-driven critical inquiry with the racialized youth and White peers to develop a collective critical awareness of racial privilege and oppression.

Essential to ensuring that YPAR becomes a tool to disrupt dominant narratives is an approach that integrates multiple ways of knowing. Existing literature shows that YPAR efforts range from dominant quantitative and qualitative methods to more creative techniques such as videos, art, theater, and games as both methods for gathering information and sharing findings (Anyon et al., 2018; Goessling, 2018). In our work, youth have incorporated various approaches, including drawings, videos, photographs, online surveys, theater/socio-drama, cartoons, voting boxes, mapping, and word clouds. We find that primarily relying on the written word (e.g., surveys, research vignettes, transcription of interviews, ethnographic fieldnotes), without collective and reflexive social analysis, also hinders researchers’ capacity to conceptualize, operationalize, and measure the complexity of human behavior. The use of arts in social science research allows for multiple ways of knowing (Fox, 2015; Goessling et al., 2020). Thus, youth-led creative approaches offer new possibilities for developmental research methods.

In YPAR projects, research teams often select methods to capture the information needed to systematically document structural inequality in ways that resonate with the youth participants. Methods also reflect the ability to present information in ways that link to action. Since its conception, YPAR has demonstrated a commitment to activist scholarship that advances racial justice. As part of YPAR projects, young people advocate for improved educational opportunities and oppose White hegemony in the school curriculum (Anderson, 2020; Cammarota & Aguilera, 2012). Youth-led research has also drawn attention to community health inequity and perilous neighborhood conditions (Nolan et al., 2021). Adult allies participating in youth-led antiracism research provide opportunity structures to foster critical awareness of structural racism and develop solutions to community concerns while innovating developmental science.

Challenges to Youth-Led Antiracism Research

As with all research studies, any YPAR study will include challenges and limitations specific to the project. As discussed throughout the article, various personal challenges may emerge while working with young people on YPAR projects. Challenges may include limited ability to be critically self-reflexive, consistently sharing and navigating power with youth, and the push to take risks and be open to new ideas in the research process. These challenges may be particularly difficult for adults without proper training or consistent support in addressing adultism within YPAR contexts (Bettencourt, 2020; Toraif et al., 2021).

The unexamined characteristics of White supremacy within research standards de-incentivize and trivialize participatory action research methods in developmental science. Therefore, we must acknowledge that youth-led antiracism research brings additional institutional challenges that developmental scientists should consider. The institutional challenges that we have encountered, some of which we described in this article, include a range of barriers such as navigating institutional review board (IRB) processes when review board members do not understand the collaborative role “research participants” play in YPAR. In other cases, YPAR is viewed as “service” but not as “research.” YPAR requires a different level of time and skill development than most research, even community-based research. Thus, scholars interested in youth-led antiracism research must also consider institutional publication expectations with the time required to develop partnerships, train youth, and engage in the dialectical process of collective inquiry.

There is also an additional level of skepticism that we have faced with youth-led research. In particular, we have both encountered multiple individuals who, despite their understanding and value of community-based research, could not understand the potential of young people to do research that was to their standard, as evidenced by our experience responding to journal reviewers who doubted young people’s ability to create a valid measure. For these reasons, we decided to base this article on the commitments necessary to engage in youth-led antiracism research. We conceive of these commitments as an embodiment of personal values, antiracism praxis, and social justice ethics required to intentionally enact antiracist YPAR projects. Engaging in youth-led antiracism research, which integrates YPAR and critical race methodology, requires (re)committing to sharing power with youth and co-collaborating in the research process, and all of this takes time, energy, and a deep belief in the power of young people. From this perspective, youth-led antiracism research is not simply a youth engagement strategy but rather a powerful research approach that recognizes and embraces the challenges inherent in the work.

Implications for Developmental Science

Designing and implementing youth-led antiracism research projects require more than just research skills. At a minimum, adult scholars interested in youth-led antiracism will need to:

Be open to situated and multiple ways of knowing that center the lives of the racialized youth or counter dominant narratives;

Practice critical self-reflection on one’s positionality as an adult ally in relation to the local racialized context, the phenomenon under study; the antiracist YPAR praxis; and youth participants;

Establish and maintain trust and open dialogue with youth throughout the research process, being mindful of intergroup (e.g., race, class, age) differences;

Identify and understand systemic racial inequality at the individual, group, and institutional levels that demonstrate critical awareness of White supremacy and racism;

Engage in and provide opportunities for research-informed advocacy with youth.

These skills, knowledge, and capabilities are necessary to ensure equity and inclusion within youth-led antiracism research collectives. As youth scholars also trained in social work, our YPAR scholarship has benefited from our professional training in community organizing, intergroup dialogue facilitation, and program development. Our experience suggests that developmental scientists who want to engage in youth-led antiracism research will need to acquire a wide variety of pedagogical and group facilitation skills or collaborate with others to contribute the necessary skill sets to the research collective. We offer the insights from our own experience working with youth researchers, not as a recipe for replication. After all, there is no right way to accomplish this work. However, we caution against the adoption of YPAR without an expressed commitment to antiracism. Instead, we hope that the commitments and strategies we offered stir the reader’s imagination about new possibilities in developmental science.

To conclude, we would like to echo the question raised by Ginwright (2008) at the beginning and to offer a few new guiding questions of our own. How do we intentionally create research collaborations with youth to disrupt White supremacy? In what ways does our positionality, as adult allies and members of a racialized society, shape research with youth? How do we shift power in academic research to empower youth to document and challenge racism? What is needed to engage in this type of research? We invite developmental scholars to consider these questions as they co-create research projects that may advance racial justice in their work.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Dr. Josefina Bañales for her thoughtful feedback on an early draft of the manuscript.

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

Adriana Aldana

Notes

Author Biographies

Adriana Aldana is an associate professor at California State University, Dominguez Hills. Her scholarship examines how participatory action research and empowerment-oriented group practice build youths’ capacity for antiracism engagement.

Katie Richards-Schuster is an associate professor at the University of Michigan School of Social Work. Her research focuses on understanding the contexts that facilitate youth engagement and the impact of youth participation in creating community change.

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Youth-Led Antiracism Research: Making a Case for Participatory Methods and Creative Strategies in Developmental Science

Abstract

Keywords

Conceptualizing Youth-Led Antiracism Research

Critical Race Theory (CRT): Centering Antiracist Methodology in YPAR

Background

Research Positionality

Summer Youth Dialogues (SYDs)

Metropolitan Youth Policy Fellows (MYPF) Team

Tri-City Youth Project

Participatory Methods and Creative Strategies: Reflections From Our Work

Commitment I: Multiple Ways of Knowing

Commitment II: Countering Paternalism

Commitment III: Structural Racism Focus

Commitment IV: Activist Scholarship

Discussion

Challenges to Youth-Led Antiracism Research

Implications for Developmental Science

Recommended Readings

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

Funding

ORCID iD

Notes

Author Biographies

References