Helping Homeless Youth:  Epistemological Implications of Power in a YPAR Project

Text from Nasma: 'I’ve started moving my things out of the house. I’m putting it in your office for now.' Thus began the story of how one of the youth I had worked with for four years on various YPAR projects became homeless and turned to me for help. Entering this crisis with Nasma took time and an emotional toll, and it affected the power dynamics of our relationship when finishing our YPAR project. Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) works to rebalance power in inequitable relationships based on roles, age, race, gender, etc. Providing care to Nasma as she confronted the traumatic situation of homelessness affected our collaborative relationship as she became dependent on me for basic economic resources. Through this process, the inequities in age and material resources between Nasma and me were centred, displacing the more equitable interactions that we had constructed through YPAR projects. This article employs critical autoethnography to examine the epistemological ‘risks of care’ and argues that the calls for ‘care-full’ scholarship still need to contend with the pitfalls of differential power dynamics in YPAR.

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The Quandary of Youth Participatory Action Research in School Settings: A Framework for Reflecting on the Factors That Influence Purpose and Process

Harvard Educational Review ◽

10.17763/1943-5045-88.4.429 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 88 (4) ◽

pp. 429-454 ◽

Cited By ~ 10

Author(s):

GRETCHEN BRION-MEISELS ◽

ZANNY ALTER

Keyword(s):

Action Research ◽

Participatory Action Research ◽

Power Dynamics ◽

Youth Participatory Action Research ◽

Participatory Action ◽

School Settings ◽

School Based ◽

Cultural Power ◽

Critical Participatory Action Research ◽

Level Of Analysis

Youth participatory action research (YPAR) is a form of critical participatory action research that provides young people with opportunities to identify injustices in their current social realities, to gather and analyze data about these phenomena, and to determine actions that will begin to rectify their negative outcomes. A growing body of evidence suggests that YPAR projects improve outcomes for individual youth as well as the organizations/settings they act on. Despite this, the extent to which YPAR can and should be used in institutions that reproduce dominant cultural power dynamics remains a subject of debate. Building on recent studies that explore the tensions inherent in school-based YPAR projects, in this theoretical essay Gretchen Brion-Meisels and Zanny Alter put three fundamental tenets of YPAR—participation, purpose, and level of analysis—into conversation with each other. Illustrating their points using examples from an ongoing YPAR project that explores barriers to on-time graduation at an urban high school, they describe the ways in which these tenets are central to YPAR projects and identify several elements of schooling that complicate decision making around these fundamental ideas.

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