Brett G. Stoudt

Intersectional Inquiries with LGBTQ and Gender Nonconforming Youth of Color: Participatory Research on Discipline Disparities at the Race/Sexuality/Gender Nexus

In this chapter, Chmielewski and colleagues present findings from a multi-method, collaborative research project examining the disproportionate rates and consequences of school discipline for LGBTQ youth of color at the intersection of race, gender and sexuality. Using both survey and focus group data with LGBTQ youth of color in New York City public schools, they document the ways in which these students are marginalized through overt discrimination in school discipline practices as well as a more subtle, yet insidious policing of their gender and sexuality. Based on those findings, the authors discuss the psychological impacts for LGBTQ youth as they negotiate these hostile environments and offer interventions based on their wisdom and insights.

Awakening Injustice in a New Century

For Mort Deutsch, justice is a political vision, a theoretical field, a way of teaching and being in the world. We write as the intellectual children and grandchildren of Mort, who have taken up his commitment to justice studies as a line of inquiry. For us, Mort’s thinking about distributive injustice expands to consider how the right to research injustice is distributed unevenly. So we work with participatory action research (PAR) collectives in prisons, schools, and communities, where we cultivate the distinct knowledges born in conditions of oppression and those spun in privilege. By bringing together research collectives of varied expertise, what Maria Elena Torre (2005) calls “contact zones,” we craft new questions about injustice, spawn new theoretical formulations, and design new research that can document the impact of social policy on lives and also support the efforts of social movements. By so doing, we challenge traditional conceptions of objectivity in psychology. We agree with Donna Haraway’s (1988) critical views of what she has referred to as the God’s eye view of objectivity; the belief that the view from afar or above is more true than the view from below.

Promise and Provocation: Humble Reflections on Critical Participatory Action Research for Social Policy.

This essay reflects on the promise and challenges of community-engaged, critical participatory action research (CPAR) hinged to social policy in times of racialized state violence and massive community resistance. With cautious optimism, we argue for the potential of CPAR to facilitate more just social policy, by enhancing research validity, policy integrity, and organizing capacity. Drawing on a series of CPAR projects, we also raise a series of ethical, political, and power-laden dilemmas we have encountered in this work and offer, with humility, provisional solutions for advancing activist-scholarship linked in struggle with communities under siege.