Madeline Fox

Leadership in Solidarity: Notions of Leadership Through Critical Participatory Action Research With Young People and Adults

The authors trace the connections between multigenerational participatory action research and relational approaches to shared leadership, illustrating how the collective production of knowledge through research builds youth leadership capacity.

Participatory Action Research in Social Research

Participatory approaches to doing research have gained critical attention from across the behavioral and social sciences, as scholars, activists, and practitioners committed to social change work closely with communities to investigate their concerns, develop proposals for transformative change, and identify new questions to investigate. Rooted in principles of justice and democracy, participatory action research (PAR) is an inclusive, collaborative approach to research defined both by participation and a determination to produce knowledge in the interest of social change. Within the social sciences, PAR is a stance committed to engaging knowledge and expertise beyond the ‘ivory tower’ by involving those who are most intimately affected by the research in shaping the research questions, framing interpretations, and designing meaningful research products and actions.

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.

This is not a Lab Coat: Claiming Knowledge Production as Power

Fox and Osato focus on one performance piece from an arts-based research project to explore the potential contributions of participatory artistic embodied research for science and social justice. The Polling for Justice (PFJ) study was a multi-generational participatory action research project on youth daily experiences at the intersections of education, criminal justice, policing, and public health. PFJ turned to participatory artistic embodiments of the data in order to analyze and disseminate research. Fox and Osato focus on the ways the majority youth research team creatively used a scientist’s “lab coat” as a theatrical prop/provocation in various settings to re-imagine adolescence and to make claims on knowledge production as power.