Anti-racist research practice partnerships as critical education: dismantling the master’s house with their own tools?

ABSTRACT

This paper reflects upon “Justice Now Coalition” (JNC), an anti-racist research practice partnership (RPP). The Coalition drew from the Black Emancipatory Action Research (BEAR) Framework as well as Black feminist, Afro-futurist, and critical race epistemologies to answer two research questions: 1) How can an urban education RPP that includes academic, community, and youth partners engage in a collaborative inquiry process that helps to dismantle the STPP/Nexus; and 2) How does engagement in the collaborative inquiry process influence research projects, group dynamics, and community members? We present a self-reflective, ethnographic case study of an anti-racist RPP that we led. We find that the collaborative inquiry teams’ primary way to dismantle the STPP/Nexus is to center Black children. They approached their work not from a policy change perspective, but in the co-creation of a space where Black youth speak, are heard, and take the agency to reimagine and reconstruct their school environment. Data also show the leadership of Black women who collaborated with partners with the intentionality of demonstrating love and critical care for Black communities. This work extends the vision of RPPs to be explicitly anti-racist and decolonizing by engaging in an Afro-futurist space in the present.

KEYWORDS:

• Research practice partnerships
• anti-racist
• Black feminism
• Afro-futurism
• school to prison pipeline/nexus

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Pseudonym to allow for confidentiality.

2. We depart from academic convention here to honor the voice of community residents as knowledge at the same level as peer-reviewed literature.

3. Core ideas of our conceptual framework were influenced by the Combahee River Collective Statement (Combahee River Collective, 2000) originally written in 1977, by Black feminists and lesbians who helped pioneer U.S.-based Black feminist scholarship. The Collective’s statement emerged from consciousness raising sessions in which members grappled with the intersecting realities of racial, gender, class, and sexual identity oppression. They then introduced key ideas that have informed intersectionality theory, including “interlocking systems of oppression.”

Additional information

Funding

This research is based on work funded by the Spencer Foundation (#202000153).