Participatory Action Research and Critical Race Theory: Fueling Spaces for Nos-otras to Research

TLDR: The authors explored the possibilities for research embedded in the theoretical, ethical and methodological overlaps between participatory action research and critical race theory, using the Echoes project as a case study, a participatory collective of intentionally diverse youth from New York and New Jersey brought together in the long shadow of Brown, to document and perform educational injustice in their schools.

Abstract: Drawing on the intersections of a justice oriented participatory action research and critical race theory, this essay explores the possibilities for research embedded in the theoretical, ethical and methodological overlaps between the two. Using the Echoes project as a case study, a participatory collective of intentionally diverse youth from New York and New Jersey brought together in the long shadow of Brown, to document and perform educational injustice in their schools, the essay asks social scientists what it means to engage research that takes seriously the idea of mutual implication, or what Anzaldua (Borderlands/La Frontera, The New Mestiza, 1999) calls nos-otras—whereby research is designed to seek knowledge at the nexus of everyday lived experience and intricate social systems; to ask questions that allow individuals to hold multiple, even opposing, identities; to provoke analyses that requires historical re-memory; to destabilize naturalized power hierarchies. Research that calls for socially engaged questions that demand to be answered collectively through research and action.