Childrens Studies

Page 1. Chapter 8 Awakening Injustice in a New Century Brett G. Stoudt, Madeline Fox, and Michelle Fine For Mort Deutsch, justice is a political vision, a theoretical field, a way of teaching and being in the world. ... (Deutsch & Steil, 1988, 20) ...

ABSTRACT The construct of privilege has been undertheorized in the field of psychology. The discipline more commonly examines those who have been disenfranchised, marginalized, and discriminated against. However, psychologists concerned with social issues must also attend to questions of power and privilege. This article uses a collaborative research project with New York City youth and adults called Polling for Justice to engage in a discussion about privilege as it runs through three areas of that work: by design, in results, and through action. First, the paper argues that privilege is an epistemological standpoint of empirical psychology that has been disguised as objectivity. Next, that privilege is a set of material and social psychological conditions that protect adolescents as they develop, take risks, and mature. Finally, that those who hold privilege can embrace and model a sense of collective responsibility and solidarity, not retreat or passively empathize.

Citation: Fox, M., Mediratta, K., Ruglis, J., Stoudt, B., Shah, S. & Fine, M. (forthcoming) Critical youth engagement: Participatory action research and organizing. In Sherrod, L.; Torney-Puta, J.; & Flanagan, C. (Eds) Handbook of Research and Policy on Civic Engagement ...

Coming from a critical youth studies perspective, this article sketches a participatory action research project designed by youth and adults in New York City to evaluate the impact of neo-liberal public policies on young people. Through telling the counter-story of the Polling for Justice (PFJ) project, we propose that re-considering accountability at the point of knowledge production is generative for re-imagining — and realising — a more just world. PFJ examined young people's experiences of urban public policy and through embodied participatory research, privileging young people's knowledge of the everyday, attempted deep accountability, provoked precarious solidarity, and activated change.

For Mort Deutsch, justice is a political vision, a theoretical field, a way of teaching and being in the world. We write as the intellectual children and grandchildren of Mort, who have taken up his commitment to justice studies as a line of inquiry. For us, Mort’s thinking about distributive injustice expands to consider how the right to research injustice is distributed unevenly. So we work with participatory action research (PAR) collectives in prisons, schools, and communities, where we cultivate the distinct knowledges born in conditions of oppression and those spun in privilege. By bringing together research collectives of varied expertise, what Maria Elena Torre (2005) calls “contact zones,” we craft new questions about injustice, spawn new theoretical formulations, and design new research that can document the impact of social policy on lives and also support the efforts of social movements. By so doing, we challenge traditional conceptions of objectivity in psychology. We a...

The authors trace the connections between multigenerational participatory action research and relational approaches to shared leadership, illustrating how the collective production of knowledge through research builds youth leadership capacity.

Fox and Osato focus on one performance piece from an arts-based research project to explore the potential contributions of participatory artistic embodied research for science and social justice. The Polling for Justice (PFJ) study was a multi-generational participatory action research project on youth daily experiences at the intersections of education, criminal justice, policing, and public health. PFJ turned to participatory artistic embodiments of the data in order to analyze and disseminate research. Fox and Osato focus on the ways the majority youth research team creatively used a scientist’s “lab coat” as a theatrical prop/provocation in various settings to re-imagine adolescence and to make claims on knowledge production as power.