Comadrisma as Method: A Reproductive Justice Approach to Community Based Participatory Action Research

Abstract

Student parents are often marginalized and/or rendered invisible by academic systems that view their dual role as incompatible with the idealized student (Moreau & Kerner, 2015; Sallee & Cox, 2019; Springer et al., 2009). As a result, these students are often offered limited resources and passed over for opportunities, leading to a lesser academic experience than that of their childless peers. In this article, we argue that eliminating barriers for student parents is largely a reproductive justice issue, and we offer comadrisma as a remedy. Comadrisma is an approach to friendship rooted in Latinidad involving a high degree of support and camaraderie, and this framework has been utilized to embody academic survival by creating inclusive practices of communal care, peer mentorship, and scholarship in academic spaces and beyond (De Los Santos Upton & Hernández, 2023). In what follows, we develop comadrisma as an approach to community based participatory action research framed within the tenets of reproductive justice and demonstrate how we have used this method in our own research with student parents at an R1 university on the Mexico/U.S. border.

Keywords

comadrisma student parents reproductive justice education equity community engagement feminist participatory action research

Comadrisma

The term comadre is rooted in Latinx culture, and signifies a complexity that both encompasses and moves beyond the concept of friendship to include a collective ethic of care and a practice of deep support in both personal and professional settings (Bennett, 2019; De Hoyos Comstock, 2012; Scholz, 2016). In fact, the experience of having a comadre is so profound that Comas-Diaz (2013) argues this bond is ultimately therapeutic, and comadres can offer healing to one another that is not only affirming, but also liberatory and activist in nature. Drawing from the concept of comadre, in previous work we have offered comadrisma as “an intersectional Chicana feminist approach to mothering and comunidad through the lens of reproductive justice” (De Los Santos Upton & Hernández, 2023). Comadrisma is intimately connected to Black feminist thought and Hill Collins' (2000) concept of “othermothering,” a practice in which mothering responsibilities are shared communally among mothers and family such as grandmothers and aunts, as well as kin that extend beyond the biological family unit. Building from this legacy of motherwork, the Chicana M(other)work Collective engages in community building inside and outside of academia to support the labor of mothers and othermothers, and their approach is also inherent to our understanding of comadrisma (Caballero et al., 2019).

Comadrisma has allowed us to create our own networks of support inside and outside of academic spaces, and this ethic of care has influenced the ways in which we carry out the academic work necessary for the creation of scholarship. For example, the underrepresentation of Latina/o/x scholars in academia (Martinez et al., 2022) means that comadrisma not only offers us a necessary support system for our academic labor (Castañeda et al., 2017), but also serves as “a mode of academic survival within a reproductive justice framework” (De Los Santos Upton & Hernández, 2023, p. 77). Comadrisma has created space for us to exist in academia as mothers and to find radical acceptance as othermothers (De Los Santos Upton & Hernández, 2023). The practice of comadrisma can be as simple as welcoming children into spaces and meetings so that parents are not restricted by a lack of access to childcare. Normalizing children at academic conferences, in classrooms on campus, in activist organizing planning sessions and events are “small examples of embodied reproductive justice that can have a big impact on both parents and children” (De Los Santos Upton & Hernández, 2024, p. 36). Comadrisma also creates space to disrupt the traditional norms of academia. For example, Gloria Anzaldúa’s writing process involved sharing drafts of her work in various stages of completion with her writing comadres, which called for a high level of vulnerability and trust that is not often valued or even tolerated within academic spaces that privilege (the illusion of) perfection (Keating, 2015). Ultimately, engaging in comadrisma is a practice that we hope can “make academia a kinder and more humane place” as it encourages us to challenge the “status quo of hypercompetitive, individualistic academia and instead [forge] community and care in the nurturance of development in research and intellectual pursuits” (De Los Santos Upton et al., 2025).

Reproductive Justice as a Framework

The tenets of reproductive justice enabled our practice of comadrisma. The concept of reproductive justice, developed by Sistersong, is defined as the human right to own our bodies and control our futures, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities (SisterSong, 2023b). While reproductive justice conversations frequently center birth justice, reproductive health care access and bodily autonomy, it is also a framework that centers our right to parent with dignity in the moments that work best for us individually and with our partners (Norwood, 2017; Ross & Solinger, 2017). As such, reproductive justice helps us to understand that we have the right to become parents at any point during our academic careers and that we do not need to choose between being parents or being faculty or students, there is an inherent ability to be both simultaneously. The flexibility and ambiguity of reproductive justice lets us center education equity as a valid and full human right within its scope (Ross, 2017).

Reproductive justice’s power is its ability to “provoke and interrupt the status quo and imagine better futures through radical forms of resistance and critique” (Ross, 2017, p. 292). Researchers engaging with comadrisma as a methodology embody reproductive justice as they challenge structural oppression around parenting through deepening their own understanding of their parent communities needs (Eaton & Stephens, 2020) and are empowered by their ability to make change within their own communities (McGlothen-Bell et al., 2023, p. 138). We leaned into this framework to understand the complex inequality that Ross (2017) argues “has always shaped people’s decision making around childbearing and parenting, particularly vulnerable women” (p. 291).

Feminist Approaches to Community Based Participatory Action Research

Action research presents a path for challenging and dismantling power structures within relationships, organizations, institutions, and ultimately communities (Reason & Bradbury, 2008). Within the field of action research, we find Community Based Participatory Action Research (CBPR) and Feminist Participatory Action Research (FPAR) to be particularly meaningful for comadrisma as a research method. CBPR is “a collaborative approach to research that equitably involves all partners in the research process and recognizes the unique strengths that each brings. CBPR begins with a research topic of importance to the community with the aim of combining knowledge and action for social change” (Minkler & Wallerstein, 2008, p. 6). Feminist Participatory Action (FPAR) research is both a methodology and framework that is inherently inclusive and disruptive (Reid, 2004) while focusing on gendered inequalities that are both pervasive and invisibilized (Frisby et al., 2009) from inception of a research idea through the dissemination of results (Cedeño, 2023). FPAR is disruptive in its ability to force the researcher and the community to reassess previous understandings of what they believed in, including the paradigm shifting concept that previous beliefs may not be valid across all populations (Nielson, 1990). These approaches to action research create spaces of trust and knowledge creation that pave the way for creative action, challenging the false dichotomy between “knowing” and “doing” that is inherent to patriarchal institutions” (Bradbury, 2023, p. 259).

With a focus on highlighting the lived experiences and perspectives of those most frequently kept from research spaces FPAR actively confronts what Reid et al. (2006) note as “the underlying assumptions researchers bring into the research process” (p. 316). Within FPAR even this initial work of bringing together a team and participants for conversation has the potential for positive outcomes by developing a support network between researchers and participants that values the potential for growth and learning equally from both parties (Swantz, 2015). This process of social inclusion and solidarity can build bonds between researchers and participants while “exposing researchers’ own biases and assumptions” (Coghlan & Brydon-Miller, 2014, p. 344). FPAR upholds inclusivity by centering the community research team and carving space for an empowered and equal voice for women which inherently breaks down typical social hierarchies (Frisby et al., 2009; Norwood, 2022). The methodology allows for women’s knowledge to be seen as equally valuable to that of their male counterparts (Swantz, 2015), and in fact, Bradbury (2023) explains that even the very origins of participation in Action Research are grounded in women’s insistence that they be given space at the table to share their own perspectives alongside all-male teams of “experts.” FPAR pushes us to go through an unlearning process (from researchers) and strengths development (from participants), and this focus on gendered power imbalances moves the needle towards social change while creating opportunities for empathy and a more just world (Brabeck, 2004; Frisby et al., 2009; Reid, 2004).

Comadrisma as an Approach to Community Based Participatory Action Research

Comadrisma as a feminist method of community-based participatory action research is rooted in the three pillars of reproductive justice as defined by SisterSong: the right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities. Rather than simply analyzing data on the topic of reproductive justice, comadrisma asks that we seek out and build methods of doing research that center the framework of reproductive justice as a methodology. For example, Yam (2020) offers a reproductive justice model of rhetorical analysis to better interrogate the influence of social forces and power structures on the reproductive lives of individuals across positionalities. While most rhetorical research has focused on reproductive rights such as access to safe and legal abortion, this singular focus does not address the limits on reproductive agency facing many marginalized individuals (Ross & Solinger, 2017; Yam, 2020). A reproductive justice model of rhetorical analysis creates space for the study of not only the right to safe and legal abortion, but also the right to have children and parent them in safe environments, as well as “everyday practices of reproductive survivance and coalition-building” (Yam, 2020, p. 21).

Inspired by Yam’s (2020) reproductive justice model of rhetorical analysis, this article offers comadrisma as a method of community-based participatory action research that centers reproductive justice in the design of the research, throughout the research process, and in the analysis and actionable findings of the study. As Eaton and Stephens (2022) argue, the aim should no longer be to simply produce knowledge about reproductive justice, but instead to operationalize reproductive justice throughout the research process. Instead of focusing on which questions to ask, we must investigate who is asking the questions and which systems are being called into question (Eaton & Stephens, 2022). Using RJ as a framework for CBPR invites community members to not only participate as experts in their own lived experiences around reproduction (Mcglothen-Bell et al., 2023) but also co-construct research design and implementation that not only critiques the power structures that shape these experiences, but also push researchers to “challenge the power structures in which they negotiate their own programs of research and research foci” (Eaton & Stephens, 2022, p. 211). In the remainder of this article, we describe our process of engaging in comadrisma as method in our community-based participatory action research with student-parents.

Comadrisma in Practice

We are both products of comadrisma and it informs our entrance into this work. It grounds the ways we mother, how we educate and mentor our students, and how we hold space for our friendships and communities. It is also intertwined in our experiences of higher education.

Sarah: When I was a little girl I watched my mom walk across the stage at the graduation ceremony for the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) and earn her bachelor’s degree in human resources. She entered school as a non-traditional student after my parents divorce, and while attending college she also worked full time and raised me as a single mother. I remember attending study groups with her in coffee shops as the only kid in the room, and my happiest memories of her time as a student took place at tailgate parties where I played with the children of the mom friends she made in the college of business. We maintain deep friendships with these mothers and their children to this day. Almost 20 years after my mom graduated from UTEP, I had the honor of beginning my career there as a postdoctoral fellow in the communication department. Having attended UTEP as an undergraduate, it was my dream to return and work and learn alongside students and faculty from the border community that shaped me. In August of 2016 I earned a tenure track position at UTEP, and that November I learned I was pregnant with my first child. Like my mother before me, I navigated motherhood on the UTEP campus. I was in the privileged position of working full time as a faculty member, while she navigated motherhood as an undergraduate student with a full time job off campus. Even with the privilege of my position, I caught glimpses of the ways campus is not supportive of student parents, or faculty parents for that matter. I gave birth to a second baby while on the tenure track, and I knew better than to take the pause on my clock that was offered to me. I watched male colleagues use their paternity leave to write and be “productive” while mine was spent learning to nurse and care for my babies.

Naomi: Somewhat surprisingly I found myself pregnant the summer before my final year of graduate school. Against the advice of academic advisors I decided to stay in school to finish the program rather than take a leave of absence. In February of my final semester bogged down with comprehensive exams and clinicals I gave birth to my first child. I had the incredible privilege of being welcomed into new motherhood by a tight cohort of graduate students who carpooled back and forth from El Paso, TX to Las Cruces, NM 3 times a week to attend our evening classes. These women (most of whom were mamas themselves, navigating graduate education with school age children, jobs and partners) made space in their cars and in their hearts for me and my daughter during this transition. They did everything they could to support me, passing my daughter between them during class, stepping out in turn when she cried or needed a little more comforting, carrying the load together of helping me to make my way through the last push of my education. I graduated in May of 2013, and with their support went forward into my own career in academia at UTEP.

My experience in that last semester of graduate school has forever been imprinted on my heart and in my mind. Those women taught me in my most tender moments that we are valuable, smart and capable as parents, and that there is capacity to care for each other. In an academic world that frequently encourages us to think and work in silos, to believe that we can only be successful by doing better than those around us and to separate ourselves from the families that we leave at home each morning, these women have been a continual reminder that a better way through higher education is possible.

We have born witness to comadrisma as a powerful tool in our own lives, as we have grown from being children who were cared for within these communities to mothers who choose these bonds to love and grow our own children. Comadrisma has forged new paths for us to navigate higher education and it has also created a space for us to imagine new futures in academia for ourselves and our families and for our students and their lived experiences.

Research Design Rooted in Comadrisma

Comadrisma is an approach to Community Based Participatory Action Research that is rooted in reproductive justice. This is not a prescriptive method, rather, we utilized a set of guiding practices to frame our research and our work time. We use the word practice intentionally, as we continually consent to working in this way, and practicing means that we are always learning and unlearning and discovering how to use this method to its fullest potential. This method is a disruption of the traditional norms of academic work, in that it centers care work in multiple forms and values our roles as parents and caretakers, as deeply as our roles as scholars and knowledge producers. By centering children and their families, comadrisma as a method invites our work to be led by our children, and also creates space for us to care for each other’s children as a practice and as the norm.

As a team of two mothers working in academia, carrying our lived experiences into our workplaces we received a grant from the Liberal Arts Community Engagement (LACE) Initiative to support summer research with a community partner. The grant offered a $1000 stipend, as well as funding to hire three undergraduate research assistants. As a community partner, we reached out to Moms N’ Majors, a student organization on campus created to encourage solidarity among students who are parents and offer support as they navigate their student and parent roles. In an effort to fully ground our project in community based participatory action research we reached out to three undergraduate members of Moms N’ Majors to invite them to join our project as paid research assistants and ultimately co-researchers. It was important to invite these students for two main reasons. First, they brought innate knowledge and lived experience to the project as self identified student parents. Second, we were able to amplify the community impact of the LACE Initiative funding by employing parents, and doing so in a way that would not require childcare. Each student co-researcher is a self-identified parent with 1–3 children ranging in age from seven-months-old to seven-years-old.

Student Parents and the Invisibility of Care Work on Campus

While there has been some research aimed at understanding the needs of faculty parents, there is a significant gap in addressing the experiences of student parents (Springer et al., 2009). There are many areas of overlap in the experiences of student and faculty parents, such as work/life balance and parental leave policies, however, the (few) institutional efforts that exist for recruiting and retaining parents on campus tend to be faculty-focused (Springer et al., 2009). In addition, student parents are often left navigating the tensions that exist between society’s view of the ideal mother and academia’s view of the ideal student (Springer et al., 2009), and even the physical space of the university signals that they are expected to “shed their parenting identities while at school” in an effort to “conform to the normative student identity” (Sallee & Cox, 2019, p. 640). Springer et al. (2009) explain that student parents are often left feeling like there is no place for their families on campus: “Mothering and fathering is not normative on campus. Student mothers experience awkward pauses rendered by pregnant bodies on campus, struggle to navigate strollers in classrooms, and search to find clean and discreet places to feed their babies. Although sometimes subtle, there are constant reminders in the social and physical environment of the university that graduate student parents and their children do not truly belong” (Springer et al., 2009). In her study of student parents at community colleges, Moreau (2016) categorizes these institutions as “care-blind,” meaning that they often “operate under the assumption that students are free of parenting or other caregiving responsibilities” (p. 623). While the literature described above problematizes the various barriers and challenges facing student parents, Moreau and Kerner (2015) remind us that there are benefits and lessons to be learned from their dual status, as “they resist the discourse of deficit typically applied to ‘non traditional’ students and produce a counter-discourse that disturbs the long-lived binary opposition between care and academia” (Moreau & Kerner, 2015, p. 215).

Defining Community in CBPR: Student Parents as Researchers and Participants

Bringing in a student parent perspective was the first step of our research design. As Rauh et al. (2023) explain, student parents bring with them unique perspectives regarding the barriers and facilitators of academic success they experience in higher education, and it was therefore necessary “to steer the research with the input of those closest to the subject matter and who stood to be most affected by changes” (p. 142). We met as a research team, which always included the student co-researchers’ children and babies, to develop our design. The student’s believed that focus groups would feel safest and most helpful for collecting responses and creating space for parents (who may have otherwise been dismissed at the university) to feel relevant and important. The student researchers developed focus group questions based on their own lived experiences. What had their journeys through school looked like, what challenges had they faced, in which ways had they been supported by faculty and staff and where had they been hindered? The students considered the resources that they knew about (which were limited) and were hopeful that this research would allow them to build their own community resource knowledge. Cogland and Brydon-Miller (2014) explain that FPAR works both with and for it’s participants, and we found that even the development of the interview guide served as a resource to our students, and the questions generated by the student co-researchers led to focus groups that frequently served as peer-to-peer support groups.

Our application of comadrisma also highlights the ways that creating support networks positively impacts all of those involved in the research process (Cedeño, 2023; Swantz, 2015). The research team exemplified feminist methodologies in action research by bringing their individual positionality into the research process. It is also important to acknowledge that these students were invested in change making and action before we (the faculty members) involved them in research. As Reid et al. (2004) highlight “It should not be falsely presumed that action begins once women meet and share their experiences” (p. 325). While the research component of their work may have been new, their efforts of making change at the institution had begun long before they started sharing it with others.

The student co-researchers designed research flyers and circulated them to other interested student parents via social media and university list serves. Because of their work as a student organization, Moms N’ Majors had already created an extensive network on Instagram where they share posts and stories with over 300 followers, as well as a mailing list of UTEP student parents. They had also developed close relationships with faculty in the women and gender studies department, which they leveraged to assist with the circulation of materials. These tools allowed them to quickly reach, share information with, and recruit a diverse pool of participants for this research project.

As a research team, we put a lot of thought and cariño into developing our focus group structure. The students with their innate knowledge and understanding of the study participants were the bridge connecting what we hoped to learn and how we knew we would be able to arrive at a space where accessing that knowledge was possible. In this stage of the research, they (as student parents) rather than us as faculty held the power to make the design decisions (Muhammad et al., 2015). Recognizing the moments where we were excluded from academic spaces because of a lack of childcare, or met with hostility when we showed up in spaces with our children in tow, we dedicated a lot of time and effort to talking through what a family friendly focus group would look like. Being family friendly also meant designing within a reproductive justice frame and centering the needs of our families by “accommodating participant schedules within the comfort of their designated safe space” (Mcglothen-Bell et al., 2023, p. 137). To do this we chose meeting spaces off campus with access to free, easy, close parking. These spaces ended up being homes with places where parents could talk while children played in backyards and living rooms, with supervision. We also considered the times of day and locations where families can actually show up. This meant considering would our focus group meeting times interfere with nap time? What would parents need so that they knew their children were safe in a new location? We also considered that not all parents would have the flexibility or the interest to physically go somewhere to participate in a focus group and taking these factors into consideration we opted to schedule two zoom focus groups to allow for accessibility. We strongly believe in paying research participants for their time, especially student-parents for whom time is a finite resource. We opted for $25 dollar gift cards, either VISA, Target, or Walmart based on personal preferences. Ultimately we sought to compensate participants in a way that would actually help them in getting what they needed for themselves and their families. We also provided food, being sure to include toddler-approved snacks, in an effort to care for these caregivers as they shared their lived experiences and wisdom.

Our student co-researchers led focus groups as the starting piece of the data collection process. The students being parents themselves were deeply involved and invested in the conversations. While a traditional focus group would set the facilitator as an outsider orchestrating a conversation about a topic to be better understood, our focus groups did not follow this model. Rather the students got involved in the groups themselves, answering questions and developing relationships with the other parents in the group (Oakley, 1981). Their involvement is essential in understanding the benefits of comadrisma as a methodology. While the learning from the focus groups will hopefully over time impact the experiences of future parents while they journey through higher education, utilizing this strategy has immediate benefits for the parents involved in the focus groups. Reid et al. (2004) describe a similar feeling of inclusion when they highlighted the outcomes from their own FPAR ”Unanimously they {participants} reported that meeting as a group, discussing their shared problems, learning they were not alone, and developing a sense of inclusion and belonging were major benefits of their involvement” (p. 321). In her feminist action research with mothers, Cedeño (2023) found that while they often discussed challenges such as social exclusion, the process of information sharing in workshops and focus groups helped them find solutions for themselves and one another. In our own focus groups, many of our participants expressed that they learned about resources they had previously been unaware of, all of them shared joy and thankfulness in having the opportunity to have these conversations, and one of the parents asked to come back for a second focus group, not because she had more to add or because she wanted a second gift card, but because the experience of community building had been so powerful for her and she wanted an opportunity to continue that. The immediate product of this time together was a collective telling and listening that was deeply impactful to both our participants and the research team.

Benefits and Challenges of Comadrisma as a Method

Engaging with comadrisma as a research method served as a time of deep learning for everyone involved. We experienced several benefits to intentionally designing research in a way that supported all involved as parents with multiple roles in the university setting, and we also experienced profound challenges exacerbated by the academic systems in which we operate. Our desire to do this work was partly influenced by our own experiences as parents in academia, and throughout the research process we at times found it difficult to balance our research goals with our childcare needs.

Our student co-researchers brought themselves and their families to the table from the beginning. Our first research meeting happened at the end of the school year while our team was in a flow with their on campus time. It was easy to schedule our first meeting in the Women’s and Gender Studies office, and to make space for one of the researcher’s children who joined at that meeting. As we discussed our summer research plans our youngest member worked hard to gain the attention of his researcher mother. She skillfully balanced the needs of her child with the needs of the team, but that skill did not translate into what one might otherwise imagine as a conventional research meeting. She was not flustered by needing to interrupt the meeting to care for her little one, but as academics and research advisors we found ourselves wanting the meeting to go smoothly with less interruptions, we wanted the research to move forward in our time frame, a time frame which centered us as faculty, with ample resources for childcare. Our children were still at school with set schedules, and subsequently we were not struggling to balance multiple pieces of our lives at the same moment. The meeting moved forward at the pace needed to allow for the students to assume their dual roles, and we bit our tongues and held back the urge to force the time frame and rhythm to uphold our own needs and because of this were eventually surprised by what all the students were able to accomplish. In the moments between parenting they were creative and determined in focusing on their work, and the students whose children were not present were capable and willing to support their fellow parents by volunteering to take notes, share snacks, and be an additional layer of support. The meeting looked different then any other academic meeting than we had previously been a part of, but in its own right was just as productive.

The research was funded through a grant that began May 1st and ended August 31st, which meant that for a majority of the project we (the entire research team) were on summer break without childcare. While we (faculty researchers) intentionally constructed our research meetings and focus groups as spaces where children were welcome and childcare was provided, we found it difficult to do the work of hosting, facilitating, and engaging in research alongside participants when our own children were present. At one particular focus group held in my (Sarah’s) home, my children were present and my partner was assisting the childcare provider in entertaining all children present for the group. Because we were in our own home and I was present, my children felt comfortable moving through the space as if it were any other day. This included coming into the room we set aside for focus groups and almost knocking over a heavy partition directly on top of our focus group circle. I quickly became frustrated, overwhelmed, and embarrassed and it impacted my ability to be fully present during the focus group session. I also scolded my child harshly, which added another layer of guilt and shame. We ultimately found that because of our own lived experiences navigating academia as parents, we struggled to show up fully and take up space as our parent selves, even when we worked to intentionally create that space for others.

Our research plans progressed into the summer, when students lost the daily routine of the 15 week class schedule and jumped into 7 week summer semesters. All of our student researchers were enrolled in summer courses (a mix of online and in person classes). Balancing these classes and completing research proved to be another barrier. Summer classes include longer hours in the classroom and additional hours of homework. While many students use summer classes as a pathway to complete their education in a shorter time period, it was clear from watching our parent researchers that these classes were doubly challenging for students who are caregivers.

Many things worked against our ability to meet in person including class schedules, transportation, and gaps in childcare. We pivoted to Zoom check ins for flexibility. Virtual meetings came with pros and cons. Students could access our meetings from wherever they were, one student traveled to another city during the summer for support with childcare from her own parents, and Zoom gave her the flexibility to join from there. Student’s joined from doctors and dentist office waiting rooms and while driving between other activities. Each of these non-traditional spaces forced us as research advisors to be patient and flexible and to re-examine our own concepts of what we had been trained to consider as the right way to do the work. There were downsides to virtual meetings. When students joined meetings from waiting rooms holding sick children, they were interrupted and had mixed focus. Another downside was that parents lost opportunities for their kids to socialize with each other. These impromptu play dates had allowed for a better balance of parenting and working, as the research team could focus more on work and being together with other adults.

Our flexibility needed to extend beyond our research meetings including the option to move focus groups to Zoom as well, and also to pivot to the use of individual interviews (both in person or over Zoom as was the most accessible to the researcher and the participant). While the loss of camaraderie and support was evident in some ways in the individual interviews, loss of childcare impacted everyone’s time so significantly that this was the clear path forward for everyone during the summer months. The individual interviews were set by the student co-researcher and the study participant for times that were convenient for them. We found that even the scheduling between just two people was challenging during this time period.

We also encountered several institutional challenges that took time and effort to navigate. First, it took six weeks for our students to be entered into the university employment system. When we raised concerns we were told that the students should not have begun the research process until they were fully onboarded, and they would not be paid for the 6 weeks they had already been working. We again raised concerns that this time frame would have drastically cut into the already short grant window, not to mention denying students a month and a half of employment they were eligible for through no fault of their own. We were eventually able to work out a solution to get the student co-researchers their back pay, but the process cost time and energy that could have been better spent on the research itself and put the students in the position of having to wait longer for their paychecks. Second, while we are grateful to have received grant funding for our project, the institutional structure of the grant created its own barriers. The summer time frame meant only three months of employment for our student co-researchers, rather than a long-term opportunity. Faculty are also not paid during summer months, and we had to take on the upfront expenses of purchasing food and gift cards and providing childcare while we waited to receive our stipend. Our children are also out of school during the summer, and it is difficult to cover the cost of childcare during a period when we are not receiving a paycheck. We recognize the privileges that come with working as university faculty, and at the same time we are intimately familiar with the challenges that come with the (un)spoken expectation that we will use our summer “time off” to produce research that we receive little to no funding for. Any funding we do receive results from our time and effort writing grants and proposals, and often does not include childcare expenses.

Anzaldúa (2015) argued that through writing she was able to create a world that “compensates for what the real world does not give me. By writing I put order in the world, give it a handle so I can grasp it” (p. 167). For us, this project continues to be an opportunity for us to create the world we want to live in. We want academia to be a space of comadrisma, we want our students to show up as their full parent selves, and as difficult as we may find it to take this leap, we want to be able to show up as our full parent selves as well. While we outlined several struggles in the section above, it is still deeply meaningful and worthwhile to create these spaces of comadrisma. It offered us as faculty members the opportunity to do research that actually feels good, and meaningful, and at a pace that creates space for our children. It offered our student co-researchers the opportunity to gain research experience and participate in community engagement opportunities that they are often excluded from, while at the same time earning a paycheck for a job where they were welcome to have their children with them. Finally, it gave participants an opportunity to share spaces with other student parents with their children present and cared for. They used these spaces to process their struggles and successes in community while also being compensated for their time. The first phase of this project also created opportunities for our student co-researchers to show up in new ways as role models for their children (Moreau & Kerner, 2015), while also serving as leaders in their student parent community.

Our student researcher’s children were ever present through our summer project. They were physically next to us during meetings, we heard them over zoom calls, or our students responded to them between agenda items. These children set the pace for the ways that we worked as a team, and they also had the opportunity to see their parents take on a new role as a researcher. It is one thing to be recognized by the academy and an institution for your contributions to a field, this is important and noteworthy. The value of being seen by your children in your full capacity as a capable adult with multiple skills beyond parenting should not be undersold. Our student co-researcher’s children had the opportunity through their parents to discover the possibilities that might be present in their own futures. These parents were also empowered in their abilities to demonstrate these skills and opportunities to their children at a young age, something that their own parents and families did not all have the opportunity to do for them.

The student researchers were also empowered by their ability to do both parts of their lives, adding depth to conversations we had (in spurts between other things) and building their self esteem as skilled multitaskers. They had incredible patience for the struggles of their fellow researchers, and with their own limited time they made space for others who needed more flexibility, stepping in for each other endlessly as comadres in a working space. Their actions (grace for time management and interruptions and solution oriented responses to obstacles) demonstrated that they saw the success of the project as the success of their combined work, and they all had equal ability to get them towards the finish line.

Although it has been noted already multiple times, the depth of empathy (which can also be understood as comadrisma) that was learned, demonstrated, and received by all members of our research team (both student researchers and faculty researchers) was a benefit that far surpassed initial expectations or understanding. While the students shared early in the project that they had not always been treated with empathy as they navigated higher education as parents, they demonstrated a level of empathy throughout the summer that was beyond expectations of a typical college student. Examples of this were their willingness to give more time to meetings or work then they had originally accounted for when one of their student researchers needed them to fill in, being able to pivot between times and locations for meetings and focus groups as was most convenient for other parents, and their grace with faculty researchers when we did not have the patience for these changes (which fit outside of our “typical” expectations of how and when students should complete work).

As one example, our student co-researchers led one later evening focus group to accommodate our study participant’s schedules. It was their second focus group of the day, held at 7:30 p.m. The study participants joined the call from their homes and workplaces, highlighting the additional complexity that our student parents are also employees who must find time to work on top of all of their other commitments. More than one person was holding an infant on their lap while older children moved in and out of the Zoom space. Every person in that group showed signs of exhaustion. Yet each person in the group was also committed to being a part of the research. They shared stories, swapped the good and the bad and held space for each other’s experiences. They had a shared language of what had worked and they listened to the ways that each of them had struggled and persevered. Their sharing of space, allowance of time even when it felt impossibly precious, and depth of listening and hearing each other was the most committed example of empathy that we witnessed in this project.

The student researchers’ own demonstration of empathy was a most valuable lesson. In an academic system that values one’s ability to complete as much work as possible in as little time as possible without considering who is left behind in the process, these student’s reframing of success had a lasting impact. While time to a parent is a precious resource, these students showed that by giving time when it is needed, and allowing people to be their authentic selves, there was both enough time and resources to complete the work. Rather than focusing on what Covey (1989) describes as a scarcity mindset and hiding behind the idea that time is scarce and should be hoarded individually, the students focused on and demonstrated an abundance mindset, by continuously and generously creating time for one another to be successful.

The process of engaging in this research has had some direct and tangible public benefit to the university community. For example, this research has visibilized the need for an intentional family work space for our student-parent community. Last year the Women's and Gender Studies program began collecting and storing toys in one corner of the main office, so that student parents could have an intentional space where they could work on campus and their children would be welcome. Harnessing the institutional support for this research, the WGS director decided to expand the family area from one small corner of the main office to its own individual larger play room and work space. This new family work space opened for the UTEP public in Spring 2024, and represents the visibilization of a movement of students who have been pushed to exist outside of campus space to one of their full inclusion (Cedeño, 2023).

Comadrisma as a Challenge to Academia

This summer of research and model of work pushed back on a system that has long been in place within academia. As faculty and as students we have been socialized to separate and compartmentalize pieces of our identities, and the system rewards us for fullying embodying these parts of ourselves, while leaving the rest tucked away at home. Our research highlights the impact that this compartmentalization has on our lives. For example, we all felt incredible pressure to get the work done, to center the needs of the university for research productivity and the creation of new knowledge. The nature of the work we were doing was to rethink engagement and the positionality of parents, but we found ourselves so tangled in the pull of the system, a system that demanded us to prioritize work over family in ourselves and in our students that it was hard to envision a system we embraced our full selves and embodied reproductive justice.

Even as we actively pushed back we felt the pressure of the machine in our team as we worked to develop a methodology and research approach that embraced families and work life balance. In the past year I (Naomi) had received a promotion into a faculty position that included a research component, and my evaluation and promotion in the institution depended for the first time not on the quality and effectiveness of my teaching, but on my ability to produce knowledge. This new stress felt almost antithetical to the work that we were now attempting to develop. As we fought to carve a path towards scholarship that prioritized learning over productivity, we struggled with the real life implications of how that would impact our own team’s promotion in the workplace. We had to make a conscious effort to do additional work (the writing and submission of this methodology piece) to create space for our student researchers to move forward at the pace that worked for them. It is clear to us that we created something impactful in the moment, but the university structure makes it difficult or even impossible to sustain this type of individual impact within a system that prioritizes output. The structure and workload of the university system does not allow faculty researchers to move forward at a child’s pace.

This research uncovered for us that within the university system students who are parents are understood to have made the decision to parent first and to student second. It appears that the university views the success of student parents based solely on their graduation (which is a tremendous achievement that should not be undervalued) rather than them engaging in all of the opportunities that education may afford to nonparent students. Within the university system, parents become what Stringer (2015) describes as cultural outsiders within a system created for a standardized and non-parent student. To truly work towards a model of reproductive justice would be to create space in academia that allows student parents to engage in their education as the parents that they are, creating higher education systems that are flexible and innovative, rather than offering student parents a lesser academic experience.

Our process of engagement as faculty and as students forced us to slow down, to move with intention, to be forgiving, and to be led by our least flexible and most vulnerable members. It centered the content and quality of the data over the quantity of the collection. This nontraditional focus is a paradigm shift that can be understood and valued within the contexts of traditional feminist research methodologies (Nielsen, 1990), and it felt like a significant win for the students who had the opportunity to be involved. These students learned new skills, developed confidence, built their resumes and saw themselves as leaders amongst students and their families. Even with all of these wins, the value of the project is still in flux. After three months of research funding, data collection is still just beginning, as the time structure of the parent researcher work load did not allow for them to complete all of the interviews they had originally set out to do, and it did not even begin to allow space for analysis of the data that was collected. While the students would undoubtedly claim the summer experience as a success, it is hard at this moment to understand whether or not the university would agree with this assessment.

Our struggle helped us to understand that we are limited in our ability to fully engage in this work by a time frame that does not coexist with the reality of being a parent (either a faculty parent or a student parent). It illuminated the ways that this time frame is both socially and structurally exclusionary to parents and thus impacts the ways they are valued (Levac, 2013). When we as parents can not move forward at the pace that is needed to be seen as successful we are relegated to being seen as less then and are prevented from promotions into positions that have the power to push back.

Fully embodying comadrisma will involve an ongoing process of unlearning our academic socialization. We must find ways to move past the publish or perish paradigm and push back against the privileging of productivity at all costs. As I (Sarah) have written elsewhere, the unrelenting emphasis on productivity, even during the COVID-19 pandemic, means that our workplaces have often made us feel like our children are a disruption to our work (De Los Santos Upton, 2021). Universities, like most organizations and workplaces, operate within a system of adult supremacy. As Tootoosis (2020) explains, “Adult supremacy is the worldview that children are inferior, adults are superior, and that children must comply to adult expectations and environments” (para. 3). While this may sound like an exaggeration, adult supremacy in academic environments leads to much of the treatment that we, our student co-researchers, and our participants have experienced as we’ve tried to balance parenthood with our academic roles. We have been told that there is no space for our children on campus, and we have internalized this message.

The Chicana M(other)work collective encourages us to both examine and resist the confines of motherhood in academia, arguing that rather than attempting to diversify academic spaces or assimilate into them, our aim should be to transform them. We do this by “choosing not to hide our children, instead including them in our work for social justice” (Caballero et al., 2019, p. 5). Unlearning our academic socialization won’t be easy, but we have experienced glimmers of hope throughout this project. One is that the project allowed us to take a step back and observe what can happen when we are led by comadrisma, a practice that values and upholds our children. The children who participated in the first phase of this research taught us to slow down and move forward by emphasizing learning and opportunity for the sake of the learner, rather than for the sake of the system that we work within. As Bradbury (2023) argues “Our institutions, and notably academia, remain deeply patriarchal in structure. But seen from the vantage of transformative efforts, it is a positive. Those ‘at the edge’ – of institutions, of academia - have something to tell the mainstream” (p. 259). Our student parents, and especially their children, have largely been pushed to the edges of academic systems, but their teachings can be truly transformational if we are willing to listen.

Beyond the university setting, we argue that fully embodying comadrisma supports reproductive justice aims more broadly. SisterSong reminds us that in order to achieve reproductive justice we must “analyze power systems, address intersecting oppressions, center the most marginalized and join together across issues and identities” (SisterSong, 2023a). Centering children as the most marginalized is crucial to the practice of comadrisma, because as Tootoosis (2020) argues that “Children are among the most oppressed human beings in the world” and what’s worse is this oppression is not only accepted but largely normalized. Comadrisma is an embodied practice and ethic of collective care that offers support to children and their families, and in this article we extend the practice as a method of community based participatory action research. Bradbury (2023) encourages us to see action research as “anti-patriarchy work” that supports stakeholders “in becoming conscious agents of change and helping the unfreezing of our stuck institutions” (p. 260). In this article we have described the ways we intentionally built a research team composed of parents, centered parents and children throughout the planning process, and created family friendly research spaces for interviews. We argue that engaging in comadrisma as a method is necessary for achieving reproductive justice in society, because if we aim to create space for families to thrive in safe environments, we have to include them in the research process. Families need to be in the room, in ways that make space for them and their children, and beyond that they should ultimately be guiding the aims of the research according to their own lived experiences and the needs, desires, and goals of their families.

Footnotes

ORCID iD

Sarah De Los Santos Upton

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by University of Texas at El Paso Liberal Arts Community Engagement (LACE) Initiative.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

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

Author Biographies

Sarah De Los Santos Upton is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Texas at El Paso. Her research interests include Chicana feminism, border studies, community engagement, and reproductive justice. She received her PhD in communication from the University of New Mexico.

Naomi Fertman is an assistant professor of instruction in the Women’s and Gender Studies program and the community outreach specialist for the Center for Community Engagement at the University of Texas at El Paso. Her research interests include reproductive justice, community engagement, and education equity, with a focus on the ways that student parents access higher education. She received her master’s in social work and her master’s in public health from New Mexico State University.

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