What is the Role of Adult Facilitators in Critical Participatory Action Research? Employing Affective Labor While Navigating the Politics and the Perils Alongside Minoritized Youth Researchers

Critical Participatory Action Research (CPAR) represents a tool for minoritized youth in shaping educational policies. Despite its promise, the politics of engaging in CPAR within structures ensnared in hegemonic ideologies can negate, devalue, and deny the contributions of youth voice. This study highlights how adult facilitators supporting youth researchers negotiate methodological tensions when the politics nested within oppressive structures converge with the ideals of CPAR. Using LatCrit methodology and employing affective labor theory, this qualitative study offers four counterstories interrogating the role of adult allies in CPAR, navigating the politics and perils of engaging in this work alongside minoritized students.

“People Are Demanding Justice”: Pandemics, Protests, and Remote Learning Through the Eyes of Immigrant Youth of Color

This paper examines a youth oral history project conducted by/with/for immigrant youth of color and educators. Designed as a longitudinal five year project of critical participatory action research and youth oral histories, we sought initially to document generational experiences of schooling inequity, aggressive policing, housing precarity and immigration struggles. As a research collective we then confronted and chose to interrogate how COVID19, uprisings and activism, and remote learning affect youth of color. In our analysis we “discovered” the power of culturally responsive and sustaining education as a framework to cultivate critical consciousness and civic engagement. With an epistemic commitment to “no research on us without us,” decolonizing methodologies and research for social action, we review in this article our theoretical frameworks, epistemic commitments, methodologies, our ethical praxis and our evidence-based activism, as we explore the intimate details of critical participation as core to anti-racist developmental science.

Transition Discoveries: Participatory Action Research to Design Pathways to Success

A multiyear critical participatory action research study was conducted with a total of 503 youth and young adults with disabilities (ages 14–25), family members, and transition stakeholders across the State of Pennsylvania. Youth and young adults with disabilities, families, and stakeholders served as participant researchers who collaborated in operationalizing post-school outcomes and the high-quality transition practices, resources, services, and supports that contribute to achieving them. As a result of this study, the Transition Discoveries Quality Indicator Framework was developed. We provide examples of how the content of this framework can be used to design experiences for youth and families to learn about transition planning, programs, and services. Guidelines for ecologically relevant research and implications for practice in secondary transition are provided.

Setting research priorities in age-related vision loss: The first step in a critical participatory action research approach

There are no known examples of studies utilizing a critical participatory action research (CPAR) approach with older adults aging with vision loss, to better understand how environmental factors impact activity engagement. As such, the aim of this article was to share the process of initiating a CPAR approach with older adults with age-related vision loss to identify a set of research and/or rehabilitation priorities related to the influence of physical, social, cultural, political, and institutional environmental factors on activity engagement. This study utilized a CPAR approach. Eight older adults (aged 65 years of age and older) with a diagnosis of age-related vision loss (including macular degeneration, glaucoma, and/or diabetic retinopathy) took part in three half-day meetings as well as a one-on-one interview over a period of 2 months. Through a series of facilitated group discussions, the older adults identified research and/or rehabilitation priorities related to how environmental influences support or limit the participation of older adults with age-related vision loss (ARVL) in everyday activities. Three research and/or rehabilitation priorities were identified including (1) community mobility; (2) assistive technology; and (3) community support and services. For each priority, the older adults, along with the researchers, answered four key questions including (1) What do we need to know more about? (i.e., research question); (2) How could we learn more about this? (i.e., proposed methods of data collection); (3) Who would we need to involve as key stakeholders? (i.e., participants); and (4) What would change look like? (i.e., action potential). This study shared the process of initiating a CPAR process with eight older adults with ARVL to identify research and/or rehabilitation priorities. By doing so, this study will help to provide direction for future ARVL research and rehabilitation that is grounded, methodologically, in a CPAR approach.

Critical Participatory Action Research in a Rural Community Committed to Peacebuilding in Times of Crisis

Conducting critical community research during the COVID-19 pandemic has brought unexpected challenges to academic communities. In this chapter, the authors analyze the obstacles faced in a Critical Participatory Action Research (CPAR) education project with a rural community of former guerrilla members in the Amazon piedmont in Colombia. After this analysis, the authors present four CPAR principles to support critical community work during difficult times. The authors argue that communicative action, horizontal community participation in all the stages of the research process, time commitment, and the leverage of other competing needs should be guaranteed and maintained during times of crisis. CPAR offers opportunities to advocate better conditions for the most affected communities in moments of increasing inequality.

Between Two Crises

The purpose of this chapter was to critically examine the reconstruction of professional identity between two crises: The Great Recession of 2008 and the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. Using a critical participatory action research self-study design, the author deconstructs the transition from for-profit behavioral health care business leadership to adjunct professor. Data sources include U.S. government job classification profiles, syllabi from courses taught, and the university's corresponding student surveys to answer the primary research question: How can teaching action research contribute to the reshaping of professional identity? Data analysis revealed that iterative cycles of reflection and action in teaching action research supported the development of identity as an academic across time. The knowledge, skills, and abilities required for a career in business supported, and also interfered with, career transition. Lastly, the author understood that the problem of practice stemmed from lack of recognition of her own privilege.

Healing Lives in Community: The Integrated Transformative Potential Intervention Development (InTrePID) Method

This conceptual paper introduces the Integrated Transformative Potential Intervention Development (InTrePID) Method. InTrePID is a method that social problem solvers can use to develop interventions (practices, programs, policies, culture) that translate the critical transformative potential development framework into concrete practice steps: (1) dialogue, (2) critical participatory action research initiatives, (3) skill building, and (4) critical action project implementation. The purpose of the InTrePID method is to develop each prong of the Critical Transformative Potential Development Framework: consciousness (awareness), accountability/responsibility, efficacy (ability), and action. The framework is theorized to bridge the gap between critical consciousness and critical action needed to transform and address dehumanizing realities that harm the self, relationships, and the community. In essence, InTrePID should generate a cyclical process for participants to increase awareness of individual and systemic factors that perpetuate interpersonal and community violence; take responsibility for (in)actions that perpetuate dehumanization and accountability for implementing solutions; develop efficacy in individual and collective community/cultural organizing skills; and, practice solution-oriented multi-level action. The paper highlights the work of a community-based project as an example of one way to implement the method to support community members in healing from the harm of dehumanization by addressing the violence of living in a dehumanizing society.