Alice McIntyre

Constructing Meaning About Violence, School, and Community: Participatory Action Research with Urban Youth

In this paper, I describe how a group of young adolescents negotiate their daily lives within the seeming permanence of a toxic environment, limited social services, poverty, crime, drugs, and inadequate educational resources. The world that the young people described in this paper inhabit is a world of despair and hope, chaos and silence, violence and peace, struggle and possibility—a world in which they spend a good deal of time surviving violence while negotiating the psychosocial, economic, raced, gendered, classed, and sociocultural borders that inform and influence their lives.Through the use of participatory action research and community photography, we are problematizing those borders and creating spaces for young urban youth to engage in processes that position them as agents of inquiry and as “experts” about their own lives. As the data reveal, by listening to young peoples stories, by giving them the opportunity to speak about their lives, and by collaborating with them in designing plans of action to address their concerns, we can more effectively frame research questions and teaching pedagogies around their understandings of violence and urban life. As important, by examining their lives via participatory action research, young people are provided with opportunities to take deliberate action to enhance community well-being.

Exploring Whiteness and Multicultural Education with Prospective Teachers

Abstract In this article, I describe how I initiate an examination of whiteness with predominantly white students in teacher preparation programs by the use of group collages—a pedagogical tool that combines visual, textual, and oral representations of subject matter. In doing so, I illustrate one of the ways teacher educators can provide students with opportunities to (1) “see” whiteness as an integral aspect of educational discourse, (2) fix their gaze on themselves as a collective racial group, and (3) engage in processes aimed at changing beliefs, stereotypes, and practices that reproduce social and educational injustice.

Who's the boss? Confronting Whiteness and power differences within a feminist mentoring relationship in participatory action research.

In this article, we discuss the sometimes problematic and always challenging nature of feminist mentoring, particularly in a participatory action research project aimed at interrogating whiteness. We analyze our relationship by examining the multiple contexts in which it was embedded-power relations within the institution in which the research was conducted, our expectations of one another both during and after the research experience, our complementary and conflicting agendas, whiteness, social class and gender. We illuminate the nuanced complexities of our relationship providing feminist researchers and scholars with a lens that elucidates the kaleidoscope that is woman-to-woman academic relationships. Our experiences suggest possible strategies for white educators and researchers who seek to both rethink the meaning of whiteness and reimagine feminist mentoring relationships through creating liberatory research methodologies. In addition, we suggest that as feminist researchers we need to continually demonstrate our reflexivity through (re)articulating how we problematize power, privilege and the multiple unequal hierarchies that exist in feminist research.

A Worm's Eye View of the Everyday: Insights from the Field

I was engaged in fieldwork in a working-class community in Belfast, the North of Ireland1, for over five years. Although I was primarily working with children and young people during the first two years, I was also learning a great deal about the day-to-day lives of the women who live in the community in which I worked. Together, we spent many hours talking, laughing, crying, eating, drinking tea, and engaging in multiple forms of community work. Out of those experiences, nine local women decided to participate in a feminist participatory action research (PAR)2 project aimed at exploring issues that affect them as mothers, daughters, wives, partners, caregivers, and the primary stakeholders in community life. Together, we set up a series of workshops where the women engaged in numerous creative techniques and processes (e.g. collages, symbolic art, painting, and poetry) to reflect upon, and make meaning of, the way in which violence, gender, and politics mediate the women’s lives. As part of the PAR project, we also designed a photovoice project aimed at documenting the women’s daily lives through photography (see McIntyre, in press). My decision to work in Belfast is directly related to my own history of being brought up in a large, Catholic, working-class family in Boston, Massachusetts. Although a long-distance observer of the conflict in the North of Ireland, I have always identified in a deeply personal way with the ongoing struggles in the North of Ireland. Although I find myself at an experiential distance from the women I collaborated with, and have not fully experienced some of the horrific events that have shaped their identities, world views, and beliefs, like them I share a commitment to eliminate and redress the social injustices that affect and disrupt their everyday lives. My previous experiences of engaging in PAR (see McIntyre, 2000; McIntyre, 1997) demonstrated that participatory processes of

Feminist Fieldwork and Political Change

There is an increasing need to move away from focusing on marginalized communities’ needs, deficiencies, and problems and extend research methodologies to include an examination of communities’ assets, skills, and talents (Kretzman and McKnight, 1993). This special feature will address that need by exploring the ways in which feminist researchers utilize fieldwork methodologies that promote participant/researcher collaboration and position researchers and participants as agents of change within the research process. By fieldwork, I am referring to a multimethod research approach where the researcher is involved in an ongoing relationship with a group, community, or organization for the purposes of exploring the complex social and cultural realities that mediate people’s daily lives. Although fieldwork has a long and rich history in anthropology and sociology (see e.g. Anderson, 1923; Becker et al., 1961; Thrasher, 1926; Wolf, 1996), there is a paucity of fieldwork research in psychology – ‘a severe shortcoming in a field in which human encounter is basic to the research method’ (Christman, 1988: 71–2). Yet fieldwork is precisely the place where feminist psychologists, as well as feminists in other fields within the social sciences, can engage the very issues that distinguish feminist methodologies from positivist, scientific methodologies: a rejection of dualism between the researcher and ‘subject’; a commitment to awaken issues of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, class, power, privilege, and other social locations within the research process; a focus on affectivity and consciousness-raising; increased politicization and activism in the research experience; and an intentionality about linking theory and practice. For many feminist researchers the process of engaging in research experiences that reflect and incorporate the multiple and varied contexts in which people live