The WhyPAR Podcast
Episode 11: “What happens when you run onto the edges of progressivism?”: On Conducting YPAR in Elite Schools, A Conversation Between Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández and Leila Angod
Citation:
Gaztambide-Fernández, Rubén. ““What happens when you run onto the edges of progressivism?”: On Conducting YPAR in Elite Schools, A Conversation Between Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández and Leila Angod.” Produced by Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández and Naima Raza at The Youth Research Lab. The WhyPAR Podcast. March 1, 2022. Podcast, MP3 audio, https://youthresearchlab.org/whypar
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Leila: "So for me, it was about subverting how schools work from the beginning, um, which has been sort of the ongoing tension in that YPAR does, it doesn't work well, well at schools. It fundamentally contradicts schooling in a lot of ways. So, that's where some of my commitments come from, I mean, ethically for me, it's been about , you know, how do we create spaces that, um, bring, you know, help bring young people's voices to the forefront? How do we do anti-racism in ways that are youth centered?"
Host: Welcome everyone! To the eleventh episode of the WhyPAR podcast. My name is Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández, and I am a Professor here at OISE, the Director of the Youth Research Lab, and one of the Co-Producers of The Why PAR podcast.
Music
Host: The Youth Research Lab is located in Tkaronto on the traditional territories of the Huron-Wendat, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, and most recently, the Mississaugas of the Credit River.
I am very delighted to welcome you to today’s episode, which marks the first anniversary of The WhyPAR podcast. Back in the first two episodes a year ago, we hosted a conversation with my Co-Producer, long-time collaborator and co-conspirator, Dr. Sarah Switzer, and for this eleventh episode, I’m joined by Dr. Leila Angod, Assistant Professor in the Childhood and Youth Studies Program at Carleton University, and she’s a former postdoctoral fellow at the Youth Research Lab.
Leila is a YPAR practitioner and I had the pleasure of collaborating with her in several projects through the Youth Research Lab. Leila is also one of the founders of the YRL’s in:cite journal, which is an online journal space and community for gathering and spreading knowledge by, for, and created with young people.
In this episode, Leila and I discuss the challenges of doing youth participatory action research within the context of elite institutions and we reflect on some of the ethical challenges that we as adults must contend with when working with young people in different educational contexts.
And with that, let’s jump in!
Rubén: Welcome to the WhyPAR podcast, Dr. Leila Angod, thank you for joining us. Today we have the privilege of speaking with Dr. Leila Angod from Carleton University, who is a former collaborator or current-and-former collaborator of the Youth Research Lab and I'm really excited to be having this conversation with you and as you said, we have so many pending, unended conversations that we have had, have been having for so long that I'm excited to be in conversation with you. But let's start from the beginning. And, I want to ask you, what brought you to YPAR, and particularly, what kinds of ethical commitments and political commitments brought you to begin with, to this kind of work?
Leila: Thanks Rubén. I just, yeah, I just want to reiterate, I'm really happy to be here and happy that you invited me. It's such a pleasure to be able to spend this time together and explore things that we've been working on. What brought me to YPAR, well, you brought me to, YPAR actually, in a few different ways, right? And it really came about, for me, my interest came from right out of my doctoral dissertation and seeing how schools are inviting young people to participate in social change projects and how problematic that is. So, I've done work on voluntourism for example, and how that's imagined the social justice education and anti-racism, and just uncovering how problematic that is and how it's being carried out and how, you know, the teaching and learning of colonial and racial orders are being institutionalized at schools. I wanted to do something that really flipped that, and really started with young people and where their interests are, what their questions are and what abilities they bring. And that, I mean, dovetails perfectly with YPAR. So for me, it was about subverting how schools work from the beginning, which has been sort of the ongoing tension in that YPAR does, it doesn't work well, well at schools. It fundamentally contradicts schooling in a lot of ways. So, that's where some of my commitments come from, I mean, ethically for me, it's been about, you know, how do we create spaces that, bring, you know, help bring young people's voices to the forefront? How do we do anti-racism in ways that are youth centered? So for me, the political commitments to really come through the theoretical commitments that I have to critical race feminism, to anticolonial work, and really, you know, being in conversation with young people about those, about those theories to unpack them together and see, you know, what kind of pathways these open up.
Rubén: One thing that we, that our work shares in common obviously is that we have been doing this work within schooling institutions, primarily secondary schools, and I wonder for you, what are the specific challenges that come up in that? And what makes the work of doing YPAR in schools particular for you, and also work doing it within elite schools in the case of some of your work initially with the Youth Research Lab, but then later, I think in a lot of ways, universities, even if they're not universities, even if they're not elite universities, they're still elite institutions. So can you talk a little bit about what that looks like, specific challenges that come up in doing that work?
Leila: There's so many challenges, so many challenges that come up in that work, where do you even start? I mean, I think just thinking about the process and the starting points, one of them is simply finding a language to be in conversation with schools about what you're doing, and that gets very quickly to the ethical problems of doing the work. So, how am I describing to a principal, vice-principal, school leaders, you know, that I want to do a project that unmasks the operation of power at their school? How do I frame that? What are the ethics around framing the risks to young people of doing that kind of work at their institution? And, I mean, in the elite schooling context, we've kind of, one of the, we've talked about in the past, restorative approaches and subversive approaches to YPAR and just in the elite school, you know, so ways that we work to move resources to support marginalized students, as a restorative kind of approach and how that works subversively in elite schools. But one of the things that I've been thinking about recently is, um, sort of how YPAR worked as racialized and racializing in the elite school context.
So the facilitators were me and a very dear friend and collaborator who's a black Canadian woman, Karima Kinlock who's an incredible facilitator. Right? And, so what we found was that in us leading YPAR in the kinds of texts that we were inviting students to engage with, in centering that we're doing anti-oppressive work, anti-racist work, right? Work that centers Queer students. And doing that, it became a racializing space that actually further racialized the students of color that came, that came to, that were, you know, the YPAR participants. And so what this actually did was intensify some of the racism and gender-based discrimination that they were already experiencing at the school. So it's this kind of dilemma of, that you always have in ethnographic research where, you know, you're shaping the context as you're being shaped by it, but in the context of YPAR then, ethically, you know, what am I, I don't know what I'm actually inviting students to get involved with. And, and they can't know in advance either. And so those were things that we had to unpack together as they were in the process of going through the research and how, you know, their experiences of being branded, you know, social justice warriors, and different kinds of things. And how it was actually racialized boys who were engaging in this behavior and what that meant.
Rubén: One thing that you're reminding me that I, that I'm curious how you're thinking about it now, in retrospect, but also, based on other experiences that you had, was that obviously part of the reason why some of these elite institutions, and even I would say schools in general welcome the idea of a participatory research project is because they often only fancy themselves as liberal and progressive and self-critical and reflexive and willing and able and desirous of wanting to engage in this process. But one of the things that we always run into in school-based YPAR in general, but I think in the context within which you were working in particular is, when do we run into the limits of that? Right? So at what point do we start asking questions that are, that are not the right questions to ask? And then how do actually, to your point about methods, how does, how does the institution then sort of revert? So in, because at the beginning, it's not like they don't know that the research that we're doing is not traditional research, but at the beginning they say, “Yes, that's what we want”. But then when, it seems like when we run into the edges or run into the boundary of what they're willing to consider, then they sort of come back and say, “Oh, actually that's not really research”. Right? Like the thing that they knew from the beginning then becomes the argument against why, why this is not worth considering. And then, and then what happens, right? Cause I think part of that is also the different ways in which then they try to either expun, expulse you, expunge you, or absorb you, you know?
Leila: I'd say where this came out most clearly for me was in the youth presentation to teachers and school leadership. Um, that was one of the culminating knowledge mobilization initiatives that the youth researchers wanted to enact. And, uh, that's where I really remember grappling with the dismissiveness of the school in terms of what the students were recommending for how to make their education just less harmful, how to make the school culture focused on competition and a very kind of white, hetero, patriarchal, masculine, you know, kind of culture. How to make it just less harmful for Queer and women of color in general. And that's where the pushback really came around. Well, you know, right, exactly as you're saying, how did, you know going to the legitimacy of this kind of research and are these young people really researchers? Is this really, you know, can you really back up the claims that you're making and the demands that you're making? And so from there, I mean we kind of did the move, sort of thinking about it with the young people to kind of refusals and resistances that they were coming up against, was kind of what we do as academics, which was to write about it. So that's where with in:cite, one of the first articles that came out in the first issue was called “Unaffirmative Actions: Lessons on Refusal, Racism, and Youth Research”. And it looked at how the youth researchers were dismissed and even just the interview process, and kind of being scolded and what they described as condescending behavior. Right? That was one way that I think we created something from the walls that were put up to contain what was coming out of the research.
Rubén: I want to ask you more about the dissemination and how that, how that experience might inform the way that you take up dissemination in the future. Cause I, I also remember the first time that, that the youth in our project back maybe seven years ago, the first time that we took up an opportunity to have them share their findings. And it was similar except it was actually in a much more racist, explicit way. I mean, we're working with Latinx students and I explicitly remember this, the teachers, you know, when the students who were presenting their work, were standing up in front of the audience and sharing, like it was literally, "You didn't do that. You didn't do that". What'd you say, what'd you say you did?” you know, "I don't believe that you did it." So it was this completely patronizing, dismissive, you know, “You can't have possibly done what you say you're doing and if you did, then, then it's not a reflection”, you know, it’s sort of the old, the old trope of when, when people of color do something good, it must have been an individual accomplishment, but when people of color did something bad, it's reflecting a lot of them. They've all, because they're all bad. So I remember that and taking a different kind of manifestation. But I'm curious about how as you think about your new projects, how are you thinking about dissemination differently given those experiences?
Leila: It's funny because it's just such a different moment now in COVID to think about dissemination. And I think it, it's changing so quickly. And I think it's to me, it's more urgent than ever that it, that question be put to young people in terms of, that is meaningful to you in terms of, you know, in terms of getting your knowledge, creation out there. Who do you, who is your audience? Who do you want to be in conversation with? How, how would you, what are the communities that you would like to create in and through knowledge dissemination? That's maybe one of the biggest things that has come up for me in thinking about in:cite, because it's one of the places that I would, would like to see it get to is creating community through knowledge dissemination. So not just, you know, a place to invite people that we know to publish, but really creating opportunities and providing the support for young people to be able to publish, to have something publishable, it takes an incredible amount of different kinds of capitals to be positioned to do that. And so I think for me, the community piece is really, that's really what comes through right now, as opposed to the kind of maybe more neoliberal ways in which, the conflicting ways in which we're required to think about knowledge dissemination as outputs, as numbers, as things we have to provide a funding body.
Rubén: So let’s talk about in:cite for a bit. Because in a lot of ways, you know, it was your baby, clearly you played a very significant role in shaping the emergence of that. How did it come about? How did it evolve? What did you see as the initial promises of in:cite as a project that excited you on that and that you know, kept you inspired and moved you to do that?
Leila: So, as I remember it, it came out of conversations with the youth researchers about, we've done all this great work. You've created some, some really great things here. You've presented it, what do we do at these artifacts now? What do we, what do you want to do with it? Do you wanna do anything with it? Um, how do you kind of see this as living in the world? And because it's a very academic group as well. I think this is part of the context that, um, these are students who are accustomed to excelling in a kind of traditional academic environment. So, they were really excited about the idea of publishing a journal and for it to be open access friends, you know, the, the, some of the commitments around accessibility, around, we had talked very early on about providing mentorship to younger writers and how to invite younger writers to the table to provide opportunities to mentor, um, younger people in terms of, so part of the structure, right, was that we'd have a youth editorial board. And that just came out of the, that was kind of an extension of the, of YPAR. If that makes sense? And so that was kind of a mentorship model as well, in terms of bringing other people onto the youth editorial board. I mean, I don't know what the initial promises were beyond, it was more just, you know, it was more just trying to see what we could, what we could create and where, where it might go. And it was really a lot about the process because it was a group of young people who had now finished YPAR, maybe going on to university or taking gap year or whatever, who wanted to spend more time together. And we had built this really nice community through YPAR and we had these, you know, these relationships and these great conversations, and we didn't really want to give that up. And so we wanted to find a new way to grow that, and this was, this was the direction that, that folks were excited about. And also terrified about it. Like, what are we getting ourselves into? And, you know, can this even, can we make it to the first issue?
Rubén: I think it's interesting, uh, how, and, and we certainly have experienced this working with the young people in schools and, and even when, even when they're not young people necessarily that see themselves as academic superstars in the way that, or as academically sort of elite in the way that, in the way that the youth that you worked with at the time, uh, perhaps saw themselves to some extent. But I think that there's a tension, uh, that we sit on the experience when, when young people, you know, we, we have, we have experienced a trajectory ourselves of having experienced what it is like to attempt to enact a certain kind of success as an academic and the, and the cost of that. Right. And the trappings of that. And obviously, you know, young people in high school or at that age haven't yet experienced that. And so therefore to some extent, they still buy into that. They still believe that, um, that the, that, that is that, that is how you demonstrate excellence. That, uh, publishing in a journal, or because I remember even like with our youth, you know, we, we talked about lots of different ways of disseminating. And for some reason, you know, when we talked about writing academic articles, they all wanted to do it. They thought it was brilliant. They thought it was great. "I want to be an author. I want to have my name attached to that thing". Yeah. They were, they were also interested in the other things that we were, that we were doing, but to them that still had a lot of purchase. And so part of the, part of the challenge, I think, as an adult facilitator is, how do you, how do you not, how do we actually, I should say, cause I still find myself in that situation, like how do we facilitate that process in a way that still honors their own journey, that doesn't project onto them in a way that can be patronizing? "Oh, you just don't know any better" you know? Or, "If you only knew how treacherous and racist and problematic the peer review process is, you wouldn't want to do this". Um, I don't know if I'm, I dunno what I'm asking, but I, I think it's actually, I'm asking a bigger question about, about the, the challenges of being an adult facilitating participatory research with young people and, and the ways in which adultism, uh, express it express or manifest itself sometimes in how we direct that process and what we allow to happen and what we don't. So I guess I'm asking you to, to or I'm, um, um, I mean, I'm not asking you anything, I'm just sort of pointing to the different levels at which I wish this process is operating, right? The level of honoring a certain process to unfold and the level of the larger question of how do we, as adults facilitate a process with young people that truly honours their journey and their process?
Leila: Right. Well, and one place where I've doubted that, I kind of really question over-directing and over-structuring is just in how academic the journal was becoming. And so there was a real desire there for it to be a very critical journal, that was the youth editors' desire. Um, but there comes with that, I mean, that comes with, the language that comes with an elite language that comes with, with, you know, the capital of having access to that. And so getting new submissions that maybe didn't look critical or that were from really young authors, right? How did then, how do you assess that? How do you understand that? How do you create even, um, a review process drawing from what, what we're trying to work with, which is an adult-based peer review process that, you know, replicates all these problems that we're trying to, trying to work against. Um, you know, how do we really, how do we really do that? And what does it look like to have a critical journal with, with really young, really young authors, right? Now we're replicating eliteness and being exclusive right? And, and drawing boundaries to keep people out because they're not speaking the right language of what looks and sounds critical rather than again, going back to creating the community, um, for young people, for, to mobilize knowledge, right?
Rubén: Earlier we were talking about how these elite institutions that fancy themselves progressive, how you, what happens when you run into the edges of that progressivism? But what I'm also hearing you say, or what the, what your words are triggering for me is that, that sort of response also comes from the other side, right? That, that people who are committed to critical work, to political work have their own understandings of, of what counts as proper critical work, what counts as the proper language to the critical work, what counts as the proper questions to ask, what counts as the proper communities to engage, and that in a sense, they can become equally exclusionary.
Leila: That's exactly what I'm saying. And then, so then, but then if that's coming from the youth editors, if that's kind of the culture that's being created and that's the trajectory that's coming out and I'm at odds with that, so then what, then what's my, my role as a facilitator? Then, you know, how do I intervene in that way without a kind of adult adultism sort of patronizing thing, right?
Rubén: Well, I think, I think that the part of it that to me is fascinating and I think it's important to share if we could find a way to describe it is that, these questions about dissemination and about how we choose to share the knowledge that young people produce don't are not, don't have simple answers. And that, and that they do require negotiation and pushback and sometimes putting, putting the values that inform the work that we do at stake and putting them on the line, you know? And saying, because they have become competing values, right? You know, I, I might be committed to, uh, an engagement around ideas of ri- I'll give you an example from our work, the word resilience. So, we were trying to really push the, the young people to think critically about the word resilience, but they keep, they kept going back to it. And in the end, you know, at some point we have to say, you know what, this is the word that resonates with them. This is the word that they want to use. Let's just, let's just listen to them. You know, let's listen to what they want to say about resilience. Let's not fall on this bandwagon, this very sort of political, critical bandwagon of "Don't call me resilient", or, you know, "resiliency is, is all these problems". Okay. Yeah, that's fine. But there's something taking place here that we have to pay attention to, you know? Um, and cause, you know, if, if we're going to expect that the institutions that we work for, uh, open up a space for the young people to be heard and taken seriously, then we kind of have to do the same thing. Like really, we need to figure out a way to do that, even when it means suspending our own convictions about what is the right language or what is the right framework.
Leila: And I think there's something for for us to learn from that positioning as well, and the kind of ability to hold together the contradictions in a kind of vulnerability around maybe not using, not using the same language or the right language or the most, you know? There's, I think there's something there that feeds back into into, you know, academic culture that we can learn. Right?
Rubén: So if, if you had a doctoral student now that you're in a full-time faculty position, and you had a doctoral student and they said to you, "Hey, you know, I, I'm a teacher at such and such school and I want to do a YPAR project". What would be all of the advice that you would give to those wanting to do YPAR or YPAR-like projects within elite schools?
Leila: Do it. We have to do it, has to be done. It has to be done, organize your people, get, you know, get support. There's so much funding in elite schools for professional development. There is so much money, right? There are ways that you can bring people in as speakers, right? That you can, um, just mobilize that, that funding to, to try different things that, you know, um, create just a, a different kind of space for students to allow for, you know, allow for them to experience what it means to be in community in a different kind of way. To really tell stories in a different kind of way. And not, really just to see what happens, not really to transform anything in the institution, to really change, make some even structural change. And at least, I mean, it's, it's really, I think, much more, you know, micro than that in terms of working with, um, students of color in particular. Right.
Rubén: I think you, you make a really, a really excellent point that I think is always important to remember when we're working within, uh, elite institutions and even, you know, universities. Again, understanding universities as, as elite institutions whether they're high-ranking or not. Um, that, that in the end it's important to remember that you're not doing it to change the institution because the institution will get rid of you as soon as, as soon as you start to create too much havoc, the institution just expunge you. And that it's really not necessarily, which is not to say that, I don't, I think the thing that I have to remember, it's not to say that that is, it is impossible, that that change could potentially happen. But to remind oneself that you're not doing it for that reason, because if you're doing it for that reason, you're likely to be really frustrated and, and, and to feel like you, to miss the point that the work that you're doing does matter, because it matters to those young people. That it matters to their, to their outlook. It matters to their trajectory, right? I mean, I think the young people that you work with are a case in point, right? I mean, some of them are still involved with in:cite, or who will remain in in:cite. Clearly that work that you did with them was, was life-affirming and life-shaping. Um, so it doesn't really matter that the institution is still the institution in the end. What matters is the difference that you made in the, in their life, through that work, um, and, and where, where that will lead them.
Leila: No, thanks for saying that, Rubén. I mean I, we always talk about the subjective shift in YPAR right? And that's really at the heart of it. And I mean, I think doing an elite school YPAR project has the potential just to, potential to shift teachers' understanding of, of who they are and that in the teaching and learning relationship, that's one thing that, that can come out of it. But also just in terms of students' subjectivities, and just, just the humanizing effect of valuing young people's knowledge, even, you know, in an elite school setting where there is so much performance around, like what knowledge is, really counts and who really gets to be human at the end of the day that is so, so harmful um, to, to have to be, to have to navigate, um, as a young person. Um, So I'd say, yeah, the trap is right, not to be doing it for institutional validation either because then you're getting into outcomes. Then it's a whole different kind of level of, of, it's just the reverse, to me the reverse direction of what we're about in terms of trying for instance, structural change or validation. I'd be curious to hear more about your own shift away from working with elite schools.
Rubén: I always find it helpful to see, to witness the mechanisms by which, you know, we've made references before, the mechanisms through which institutions uh, expel projects and, and work like ours. I find it useful to see it, because then I can anticipate it, but also because I think it's an important part of understanding how they work. So, you know, a couple of years ago I wrote that piece, you know, Elite Entanglements, where I sort of talk about how, how the school where I did my dissertation, tried to get, tried to censor my work. And, and, and I ultimately decided to actually write about the very thing that the school that, I wrote a paper about the thing that the school didn't want me to say, you know, um, because I understood that what was at stake in that situation was the very mechanism through which institutions like these, uh, work to preserve their integrity. And I think that in our case, there was so many moments in our experience that clearly illustrated that, right? The way that the institution tried to, uh, appropriate your work. You know, for example, we haven't really talked about that here, but that was one of those dimensions in which the institution sought to silence you by simply taking your work and not crediting you. But there are these subtle institutional mechanisms that are in place to ensure the integrity of the institution when things like this happen without, without necessarily sacrificing - and that's not the right word - but without necessarily exposing. Because you know they're shrouded, they're shrouded in, in claims around confidentiality and privacy and, and they're shrouded in subtlety, right? This is, this is so much of how elite status works, is through subtlety. Is through what is unspoken, what is unsaid, is through irony. And, and so for me, one of the things that came out of that experience was just being able to see that so that then we can actually name it and write about it.
Leila: I'm just thinking about, you know, the, kind of the white-settler drive of erasing to, uh, to replace and how much of that was, was in operation here. Or for example, the anti-racism work that I tried to do as a teacher. So before coming to this work, right, I was an elite school teacher, um, high school teacher and Director of Equity and Diversity, and constantly at odds with, you know, what can I actually do in this space? And, you know, just the, the cognitive dissonance, the experience of leaving that space, driving to OISE, downtown, driving from you know, Oakville to OISE sitting in George Dei's class and driving back to the school, crying basically to negotiate being in, in these two spaces. But in any case, one thing that I found, so a couple of years later, when I was researching elite schools for my, for my dissertation, I did work in the archives because these schools keep impeccable archives, um, as part of their, their claim to elite status. And, and there's all kinds of fascinating things in there. And that's another thing that I would encourage any elite school teacher who's, who's doing, well, any research on elite schools, YPAR included, is to go in there because they don't even know what's in there. And you will find things that are, that really tell a story through presence and absence about how race operates in those spaces. And one of the things that I found was that, well, there was no record of any of the work that I did on race, on race, you know, anti-racism at the school. And that was also my own fault, I wasn't thinking about an archive, I wasn't thinking about, right, how, like how this work might live institutionally in the future. Um, but that was just one way in which I came to understand a little bit of the erasure. And what, where does this go? What happens to these things that, that you build, right? And a couple of years later it was already gone. And my position, the person who replaced me in my position was a white woman. So just thinking about that, that erase-to-replace kind of drive of these institutions.
Rubén: Well, that's, I think that's in a, in a sense, there's the irony, right? On the one hand, these places keep impeccable archives, on the other, these are machines of forgetting, right? To use, to borrow from Cesaire you know, Cesaire says colonialism is a machine of forgetting. Um, and, and this is how, this is how this works. These are machines of forgetting and, um, that, uh, is a willful ignorance, right? To go back to something we sort of talked about before that, that willful ignorance relies on the mechanisms of forgetting. Um, and I think that interestingly though, uh, so, because these institutions so easily forget that kind of work, it also means that despite the expulsion, they come back. There's like, "Oh, we want to do this work". And it's like, "Seriously, you want to do this again? Because we did this already and you didn't like it". But they forgot because they didn't keep record. Right? And because again, because it is so fundamental to how they think of themselves as institutions, right? Because, because these elite schools are so fundamentally, uh, uh, attached to their identities as liberal institutions, part of that forgetting is that it allows them to keep claiming that they do that work. Right? So they, they expunged, this one project that got too close, but then two years later they're doing the same thing. "Hey, can you come and do and do this?" You know, I mean, I, I think I even, we saw, I'm pretty sure it was Appleby, actually. I, I got an email from someone at Appleby who wanted me to talk to their Visual Art Faculty. And I was thinking, "Wow, there it is again", you know, like, because again, they're, it's a, it's a funny, I'm saying it might, it might be worth a kind of writing about that, because these elite institutions on the one hand... I mean, this happens at UofT too, right? Um, these moments come up and these moments of crisis come up, uh, and the institution survives them. And it, in effect, actually in a way surviving it, it, it almost like it reassures them, you know. "See we survived it, we must be so liberal". Um, I don’t know, I mean and maybe actually to your to your question about my, how I found myself moving away from that, I just realized that it was going to keep repeating itself and I didn't want to participate. I just didn't want to participate in that repetition. And I think, you know, for me, like there were, there were two things that I needed to accomplish, uh, in the, in the work that I was doing with elites. One, one was sociological and political, right? Exposing the mechanisms through which these institutions ensure their status. And I think I did that. And then the other one was about myself. It was about making sense of my own, my own subjectivity as an, as a, as an elite, as a, as a member of these institutions, as a participant in these institutions, uh, you know, as someone who, as a child had to navigate the, the elite, the context of my elite, paternal white, urbane family, and my, my, my working class black, um, uh, rural, uh, maternal family and moving between those spaces. So for me, uh, although I didn't realize it at the time, uh, doing that work was personal and political as, as everything is. And I think I, once I, once I made sense of that, I was ready to move on. I was like, okay, let's, let's go for the next thing. You know, what's the next lesson, you know? Um, and I think that's important when we're doing this, where we have to remember, always have that moment of reflection of realizing this isn't just political. There's always something personal that we're working through. Um, because if we don't do that, then we don't, then we just keep banging ourselves against the same wall in the same way. Then we keep forgetting and then it's, then it's on us. Right? I mean, if we're the ones that keep forgetting, and keep repeating, you know, go through that repetition, then it's on us. Uh, and that's on us.
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Host: Thank you so much for joining us on this eleventh episode of the WhyPAR Podcast, marking our first year anniversary. This conversation, Leila and I explored approaches to YPAR within schools that can be both restorative and sometimes subversive, as well as the tensions that arise when we’re trying to do both. I hope that the episode inspired you to think about the values that you bring to this work, and how different institutions both support and undermine those values when doing YPAR research in schools. Here at the YRL, we’re working on an amazing lineup of guests for upcoming episodes. We hope that you enjoyed the first eleven and we’re looking forward to sharing more ideas with powerful YPAR practitioners and participants from around the world in this upcoming year. See you next time!