In Youth Participatory Action Research, Michelle Fine speaks on social injustice, leading with the question “To whose souls are we accountable?” in the process of innovation. I was gripped from the moment she said, 

“I work with the children whose things you have broken”

This ties in with the previous reading, “Nothing for us without us”, where we were given a picture of how the stage is set currently – with a certain demographic dictating the flow of design and innovation. “Move fast and break things” is an ugly tool of power shaped by the narrative of cis white males who have historically been privy to every possible access. Either ignorance, the support of patriarchal establishments, or just consciously turning a blind eye to the consequences of “breaking things” would drive designers to follow that statement. I really liked how Michelle succinctly framed the current problem with the trend of innovations and its effect, or lack thereof, in communities within the first few minutes before introducing us to Participatory Action Research. It is not only focusing on finding innovations but also showing social injustices are an outcome and not a cause. The other refreshing point about her talk was the specific examples of what their work looks like, such as the March Justice Project, and how they are empowering the community and the youth to be the researchers who contributed impactful data towards social justice cases. I also found Echoes of Brown very insightful as someone who is new to research in the design journey. The dimensions through which this project explored the ‘unfulfilled promise of integration’ and the diverse voices from within various facets of education that participated in providing this data gave me a guideline on how to conduct participatory research in an effective way. Lastly, through her experience in this field, I was able to collect key pieces, or strategies, for effective solution methods. 

Going into the reading, Participatory Action Research, and City Youth: Methodological Insights From the Council of Youth Research, I was able to gain more insight into the injustices that exist within the educational system in the US. To me, this was an elaboration of the problem that Echoes of Brown addressed. It  Challenges the notion of whose research has more legitimacy, which mirrors a previous reading that also questioned who a designer should be. With participatory action research, we can extend the contributor group of knowledge production to the people in the community that have experiential insight into systemic injustices and issues that impact them directly. In this particular case, I realized the initial researchers took a step back from the project completely and afforded all their tools and resources to the students who were taught data collection and analysis strategies. I really liked how the students employed creative strategies to document and present their findings. It gives them a chance to codify their experience with injustice through factual inquiry and develop their own vocabulary to act against it.

This is very relevant to a criticism I have of the way traditional research is conducted and documented. It is viewed as a sector of academia that is only relevant to researchers in academia and inaccessible to students still in school. YPAR shows that if the youth are allowed to be the authors of their data-backed narrative, their methods of representing impactful content using modern/popular references can reach a broader audience.

I want to end with the observation that the challenges mentioned here, to give this work legitimacy is one of the biggest hurdles to participatory action research. I would have liked to read more insight into how the researchers navigated the frictions that arose because of this probe and inquiry. I am also curious to read more cases of what the challenges are in the next step of using this research to establish policies or change the status quo.