From Democratic Participation to Cariño: Exploring the Core Commitments of Foundational Scholars in the Field of Youth Participatory Action Research

Abstract

In this essay Thomas Albright and Gretchen Brion-Meisels build on the work of foundational scholars in intergenerational participatory action research (PAR) to explore the conceptualization and mobilization of various research processes. Motivated to understand the opportunities and dangers of using critical participatory approaches within neoliberal institutions like public schools, they interviewed fourteen scholars working in the field to understand their core commitments when engaging in PAR, specifically their framing of purpose, participation, and power both within their research initiatives and for the broader field. Albright and Brion-Meisels’s findings illustrate these scholars’ shared intellectual, ethical, and political commitments. Also, many of them described PAR as an ontoepistemological endeavor, recognizing that the entanglements are not simply a method, epistemology, or add-on intervention to be mobilized but a coconstitution of knowing and being—a knowing-in-being and being-in-knowing.