The WhyPAR Podcast
Episode 1: “It’s all about your relationships”: On Ethical Commitments and the Politics of Dissemination (Part One)
Citation:
Raza, Naima. ““It’s all about your relationships”: On Ethical Commitments and the Politics of Dissemination (Part One).” Produced by Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández and Sarah Switzer at The Youth Research Lab. The WhyPAR Podcast. December 28, 202. Podcast, MP3 audio, https://youthresearchlab.org/whypar
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Host: Welcome to The WhyPAR podcast, a project of the Youth Research Lab at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.
Music
Host: In the WhyPAR podcast, youth participatory action research practitioners discuss the ethical dimensions of conducting YPAR. In our podcast, we explore issues of co-leading YPAR projects, building relationships, power dynamics, and sharing our work together. The Youth Research Lab is located in Toronto on the traditional territories of the Huron-Wendat, the Seneca, and most recently, the Mississaugas of the Credit River.
Sarah: And I always say back to them all, what are the relationships you have? Who are you in relation with? What are the conversations you're already engaging in?
Host: Welcome everyone! My name is Naima, and I’m the host of The WhyPAR podcast. I’m currently a graduate assistant here at the Youth Research Lab.
So, I first came into YPAR as a high school student when I was frustrated by traditional schooling. Around me, I saw that teachers were keepers of knowledge, and that students were seen as passive recipients of knowledge. So, after graduating, I started working for my local school board, in my hometown, as the student voice coordinator where we developed a project for administrators, teachers, and students to come together and conduct YPAR projects in order to take action on issues they saw within their schools. So overall, I come from a background of wanting to use YPAR to support youth, and particularly marginalized youth, in becoming critically conscious of their educational environments. And, I think this is important because we know that schools are a microcosms of the world.
Okay, now enough about me. Joining us today will be Dr. Sarah Switzer, a YPAR practitioner and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto, and Dr. Ruben Gaztambide-Fernandez, a YPAR practitioner, a professor at the University of Toronto, and the director of the Youth Research Lab.
Today’s episode will be the first in a two-part conversation between Sarah and Ruben, where they will be discussing ethical commitments and the politics of knowledge dissemination in YPAR. Together, they’ll explore, how do ethical commitments play out in different institutional settings? What are the opportunities, challenges, and tensions that arise? And how can we YPAR as a means to not just increase youth participation, but as a means to enable social transformation?
So before we jump in, a little bit of context. Sarah and Ruben have known each other for a while. While they bring similar ethical commitments to their YPAR projects, their work takes place in very different contexts. Ruben has been working in YPAR for about 10 years, largely with Indigenous and Latinx young people, in the context of schooling, and particularly urban schooling. Sarah’s work, on the other hand, takes place in the HIV or harm reduction sector. Sarah has been working in participatory research and YPAR for 10 years, with a longer history of running youth-led HIV/sexual health and harm reduction programs within settings such as community health centres, youth led organizations and youth led initiatives. Her work involves working with young people living with or impacted by HIV and young people who use drugs. And of course within this category, there are lots of different intersecting identities.
Their conversation was recorded in two parts: the first part was recorded on zoom, and the second was recorded at the Youth Research Lab. The Lab is a super fun, creative, and imaginative space with chart papers and posters and markers scattered everywhere. So, it’s a pretty big contrast from the brutalist architecture we find in OISE.
Ok, so that's enough of an intro for me, now let’s turn it to Sarah and Ruben.
Rubén: Why don’t you just start by giving listeners a sense of the projects you’re working on.
Sarah: Sure, thank’s Rubén.
Laughs
This doesn’t feel awkward at all.
Ruben: Not at all. Let’s see how long it takes before it’s not awkward.
Sarah: My larger program of research is really about, really seeks to explore how to meaningfully engage folks who experience marginalization in program and policy change. And what that kind of looks like in practice is historically, I’ve worked in the HIV and harm reduction sector, so I work with people living with HIV, folks who use drugs, and people living with or impacted by HIV. So it’s been a lot about having conversations with folks and within organizations about how do we leverage their experience within organizational change. And so, together we identify issue of concern and we develop projects together that we then implement and one of the cutting themes across all my work is they all involve participation or collaboration in some way, participation is very much a spectrum, and they also engage in forms of cultural projection or what we might call the arts or other creative ways of dialoguing about issues. And that’s kind of my work historically. More recently, I’ve shifted my work to look at how community engaged practitioners are adapting their participatory work to, in the context of COVID. How they’re moving online and in remote contexts to have really critical conversations in ways that make sense for folks.
So Rubén I’m so curious. Yeah, tell me. I mean, we’ve worked together for a number of years, and I know your work very well. But since this is a podcast, can you tell be a little bit about your work and what you’re doing?
Rubén: Yeah, of course. So, the main focus of the work, the participatory research that I’ve been doing for the last decade has been in the context of schools, what some people would call school-based YPAR. And that’s a really interesting context to work within because as a lot of participatory research practitioners would say that schools are antithetical to the commitments and to the ethical commitments of participatory research right? When we think of schools, we think of places that are highly hierarchical, where roles are very defined and prescribed, right? The teacher is a teacher, the one who knows. The students are the ones who are learning. And where everything kind of works within parameters that are strict and of course that runs against the principles of participatory research as a horizontal space where everybody is acknowledged as a knowledge producer, everybody is acknowledged as a learner and where we’ve kind of negotiating power relations. So, in a lot of ways I come into that work, and to do the relational ethical work reluctantly because of those contradictions. But in our case, our work with young people in schools began at the behest of the students themselves. So, we started this work doing some exploratory research on the experiences of Latinx Latino youth in schools and at the end of that year the students themselves were saying, okay, so what are we doing next? What’s going to be the next step of the project?
And we. It was at that point and it was in the context of their own provocation that we said to them, well you know, if you want us to keep doing this work, how about we teach you how to do research and you decide what should be researched? And they were really excited about that idea, right? And so our work was possible because the young people themselves said to us, we want to keep doing this. We want to learn how to do this and we see, we think of this as a kind of political action that we’d like to be able to pursue. So, it was in a very particular context and a very particular opportunity, right? And then also, the other piece of about our work that in a sense makes us navigating these contradictions possible is that, especially in the last five years, we’ve developed a very deep collaboration with the educators at the urban Indigneous Education Centre which is a part of the Toronto District School Board and which is itself a school. And it’s a school that’s very committed to notions of Indigenous knowledge and Indigenous sovereignty of education. And so it’s a school that in itself has a commitment to a kind of education that is in a way antithetical to most types of schooling. And we’ve been working within that schooling space over the last few years and with teachers in that context. And because of that commitment that has also facilitated a space where we can really challenge some of those hierarchies and we can really sort of work against the sort of parameters of schooling. And try to really honour the principles and the political commitments of participatory research.
And I think along those lines, you know, one of the things that I’m really interested to hear about and that I love to hear you think through and talk about is this question about ethical commitments, right? Because for us that has been such a tension and I would love know and to hear from you, you know, what are some of the ethical commitments that you bring to this work and how do you see those ethical commitments play out in practice and sort of, what are the kinds of challenges that come up in your work?
Sarah: Thank you for that, Rubén. And for starting with your own work and the origins of your work. I think, you know, something that kind of strikes me and it connects to ethical commitments, but it’s also the starting place is like, it is the relationships, you know? And how projects come about. And yeah, I appreciate your starting with the fact that you know, with this project there are so many starting foundational conversations before the research you know, happens or takes place, and you know, one thing I’m often struck by, you know, in having conversations with folks that are interested in getting into participatory research is, you know, they often ask, who do I start? And I always say back to them, it’s all about your relationships. What are the relationships you have? Who are you in relation with? What are the conversations you’re already engaging in? And so, with respect to commitments, that’s one of the foundational pieces of YPAR. You know, and what that looks like in practice? It’s messy. It’s complicated. There are a lot of contradictions. And so, you know, figuring out ways to move through those relationships and move through the work with the spirit of transpar- you know, fairness, equity, collaboration, transparency, I think is one of the really big ones. Flexibility and adaptability, and knowing that folks in any participatory project are in it for different reasons, and that’s okay. And how do we honour the spirit or the role that different folks bring to a project and the different expectations that they all bring to a project which are deeply shaped and governed by the contexts, you know? One of the things I appreciated you raised how the context of schooling shapes what is or is not possible within YPAR and then how you are pushing against that even within the project itself. Yeah.
Rubén: Yeah, pushing against and reaching towards, which is, we’re in a sense, part of the reason why working within schools for me is such an important commitment is because I believe in schooling. I believe in the principle of public schooling. And I think that our intention is to reach towards the type of schooling that we want, right? It is to bring this ethical commitment to in a sense push against the parameters of school in order to reach towards the kind of schooling that we want, the kind of schooling that we want to imagine for the young people that we work with, the young people that we are about, for the young people whose lives we want to be part of transforming. And I say be part because obviously we’re not in charge of transforming it, you know? It’s their life to transform, but we want to be part of that transformation. And I think, you know, the piece about the ethics, you know, the ethical commitment to relationality and transparency, you know, it’s so important.
And I think, you know, when oftentimes when people come with a question, now how do we get started? I get this question from doctoral students who come in with a strong commitment. A lot of times people are from the prime that what matters most is the commitment, that what matters most is that, well I’m committed to this princi-, I’m committed to this ethic. I’m committed to this political project. And so therefore that’s my point of departure and for me actually, the point of departure is their relationship. Not the commitment. In fact, I think that their relationships are far more difficult to build, far more challenging and time consuming, and more important as a point of departure than the commitments. Because the commitments can come later, but you can’t start from the commitments. You can’t start from the commitments and then hope the relationships will come. You have to start from the relationships and then build towards the commitment. And I think that that’s sometimes for many folks who I think discover YPAR and want to do that kind of work, but they start from the commitment instead of the relationship.
Sarah: And so often I think within academic spaces, the commitments manifest through an academic language. And, a lot of the folks that I work with, they’ve like, I don’t want your fancy words, they’ve like I don’t care. I don’t care what your commitments are, I want to see it in action. And that just takes time. You know, like, I think, you know, this is disgusting and kind of the literature, but I don't think it can be over estimated that like relationship building takes time. And it’s all about, it’s not even about the research. It’s about the other moments, about the conversation at the bus stop, or you’re waiting to get on the TTC in Toronto, or you know, the chat on the phone or the conversation over sharing a meal. You know, that is the work. The showing up for events in people’s lives, you know that you’re in collaboration with. I think that’s so much of it. And then the research just kind of comes out of that because you’re committed to being in relationship to each other.
And you know I think about, you know, a lot of the young people that I've worked with, you know, we’ve worked together for some of them like almost a decade now. And they’ve gone on and they’re leading their own YPAR projects. RIght? And so, the relationships are really first and foremost and it’s interesting to circle back to what you’re saying about transforming the culture of schools. You and I work in very different contexts, but there’s a similarity in the sense that in working within the nonprofit sector and you know, lots of folks will talk about the nonprofit industrial complex, and there are many, many, many tensions there and challenges with funding and larger histories of you know, the nonprofit system being a very colonial institution for example, a very racist and anti-Black racist sector. And so one of the commitments that we’re kind of pushing- the pieces that I think the projects that I’m invested in working, well we’re trying to push towards is that, you know, we’re also trying to carve out space within that sector, within that program so that, you know, folks can lead and create their own projects and spaces which may have very liberatory goals and aims and also contradictions of course. But, trying to figure out how we can use YPAR - not in an instrumentalist way - but as a launching pad to something else.
Host: Sarah and Rubén go on to continue their conversation at the Youth Research Lab.
Sarah: Even as researchers we can, myself included, can become very overly invested in our own projects and around this idea of like, participation and there being some star or, you know, you achieve, right? If a project is the most participatory… and there can be harm that can be caused.
Rubén: And there's so much that becomes invisible. There's so many modes of participation that become invisible. I mean, in your own work and the way that you think about non-participation. I think of that when I think about all the models of participation that are invisible to these parameters that inform these kind of normative practices of participation. But I was thinking about the difference. Right. That, you know, it would be, there are a lot of people who work in schools who would like to think that they… let me and many paraphrase that… there are a lot of people in education who bring commitments from participation to the work in schools in principle that that, in principle, would have sort of, you know, a commitment to the idea that learning should be student centered, that students should be makers of curriculum, that that students should take center stage, that bring those principles in. And I don't I don't doubt those principles. But I don't think that I would describe schooling as a context in which participation is taken for granted in the way that you're describing it and perhaps in a sense, because, you know, schooling as a structure is a that is intended to parse, that is intended to separate students by default. You know, even grades are a kind of separation. So, this is defined on separation? And so in a sense, what is the consequence?
The worst consequence in the context of schools of not including students is that students leave, that students decide that schooling is not for me and certainly a lot of the students... you know, the reason why we started doing this work was to sort of address the fact that Latin American students and Indigenous students were not finishing school at a 40 percent rate. So 40 percent of students who started in not only Indigenous and Latinx groups, but also in other communities, were not finishing high school. And that's a pretty high rate for something.
You know, we could sort of we could have a whole conversation about whether finishing school is worth it. You know, and what school does to young people. But the fact is that not finishing high school is a very strong predictor of poverty. Yeah. Yeah. And that not finishing high school is a very strong predictor of poor health, of poor socioeconomic. Right. So however you slice it, finishing high school matters. You know, and so putting that question aside and assuming that we want to come up with ways to engage students in school so that they do finish high school. Right. Participation or these participatory methods become, from our perspective, one way to do that. And I think I think in a lot of ways probably our work speaks for itself. Like, you know, most of the students that have been in our courses have been able to finish high school. We contribute to that because it helps them with credit accumulation and we contribute to that because we help them financially. Right. And we can talk about these details, but I'm thinking about the difference, right, between a place where, as you're describing, the people who have the most to lose are the ones demanding. You know, as opposed to a context in which the ones who have the most to lose a lot of times don't even imagine the possibility of what participatory schooling might look like and in fact, come to us very suspicious of our intentions.
And I was gonna say, like one of the one of the primary ethical principles that drive our work and so many commitments I bring in is the principle of transparency and fairness. We can talk about fairness in a bit, but that principle of transparency in this context is I think for that reason, very important. This is where I'm kind of drawing the connection because the students, when we invite them to join us, when we sort of, you know, interpellate them into this position, they come in very suspicious. And that transparency of sorts, being really open with them about both our intentions as well as the challenges and parameters that shape that. And maintaining that transparency is really crucial for that process that the students even begin to imagine what a participatory schooling could even look like, you know, and to begin to open themselves up for that experience. I mean, in a sense, it's part of that process of I can't remember right now where the authors are, but if we transcribe this, we'll figure it out. But others who think about participatory methods would make a distinction between projects that involve buy-in. So the participants have to be sort of convinced that this is going to be participatory or brought into a project and then they have to sort of buy into the project versus projects that are… and I don’t remember the phrase that they use. But where is initiated by the participants, where the participants say, I want to do this, come help me, right where our community comes to. And we've had experiences like that, too. But there have been fewer and definitely in schools. You know, it's a buying model. It's a buy-in model. Here's what we're offering. Here's what we want to do with you. Come check us out. Come try us out. Right. It’s not the student saying we want participatory schooling. It's us saying here's an opportunity. Give us give us a shot. Like, try this out. Yeah, so I was just thinking about those differences.
Sarah: And, I mean, there are similarities, too, because I can... You know, I see that there's this large demand or expectation for participatory approaches in my work, but that's also very top down in the sense that it has become kind of taken for granted assumption within the field itself. And that doesn't always trickle down to the folks who are actually experiencing things. So I definitely have also experienced folks who have been quite suspicious. You know, when I start working with them, folks who won't even tell me, you know, I'll come into a space and we'll be, I'll be introducing myself and chatting with folks and just hanging out, which I often do at the beginning of any project. And I've had folks be like, I'm not telling you my name, you know. And it hasn't been until someone else will come over and we'll say, oh, no, I you know, I know Sarah. She's cool. This is how I know her. And then folks will be like, OK, I'm still not telling you my name, but I'll talk to you for a little bit, you know? And then some of those folks have now been people that I've worked with for years.
But folks are very suspicious and rightly so, in part because I think because they’ve been tokenized, they've been harmed by this work. They've gotten their expectations or promises have been broken, you know, and I think that that's where transparency really comes in. And that, for me, is also a really fundamental value of negotiating what is possible and the limits of what is possible. And folks are similarly quite surprised when they're like, oh, no, we're actually you know, when I say to them, so we get to decide together and they're like, no, no, no, we don't, and I’m like, no, no, we do!, and they’re like, no… no we don’t, like no no, we are…
Or when I, even something as simple as you know, one of the last projects that I worked on was working with three organizations. And we were looking at how folks within each of these sites kind of understood kind of engagement. And it was a co-theorizing project. And we used photovoice. And at the end of the project, we decided collectively to create these installations. I had no idea what I was doing because I had not planned for any of these installations to emerge. And I remember at all those meetings saying, what are you going to do?
And they're like, well, I thought you had an idea. And I said, I don't know. I didn't know what I'm doing. And then kind of just looking at me blankly, I mean, like so we're really just gonna figure it out right now. And I'm like, I have no plan. And I remember at one point someone said, but you're the researcher. And I said, yeah.. so what? You know? I feel like there was a a pivotal shifting that we've been working together for many months at this point. But they're like, oh, we really can do whatever we want. And I was like, yeah, you know?
And so I think that there's a lot of opportunity there when things shift. But then it also is important to be transparent around when there are limits, because some of the dangers are when you say, well, we can do whatever we want and then someone, you know, people make contributions or go along with a certain plan and then like, oh, but not that. Oh, but not that. Oh, but not that. And that's when folks get their back up. Right? So how do you… it's just it's this careful dance between opening things up for possibility, but also being very transparent along the way when there are limits.
And depending on the size of the group, like we've done collaborative budgeting before where I've taken out the grants and we've actually plotted things in alongside dollar signs, you know, on the wall to kind of attempt to, I don't know, do this work together. And in a way that we're all acknowledging the constraints simultaneously, you know, so it's not kind of an after the fact, but we realized together, oh, we want to do this, but we can't. And I think that that's important for the work. But it takes a very long time. This is the thing. It takes an extraordinary long time.
Rubén: And time is one of those things that when working within schools, the timescales of school have such a huge impact on the way that we do this work. And we tried to push back against it and restructure the work that we do with young people in schools. We try to use a different time structure. So rather than meeting every day for 50 minutes, we meet once a week for four hours, which gives us a lot of flexibility and a lot of sort of, you know, opportunities for allowing relationships to evolve, for people to get mad at each other and work through that anger for ideas to really evolve in ways that the usual parameters of schools, even in an hour and a half or a two hour format, just is not possible. It does not work. But we are still limited by the semester or even the year structure of schooling, the way that marks are done. The flow of, you know, when students are doing the final exam, when students have high demands on other aspects of their schooling. And when you know the breaks and all of that presents a set of constraints to what is possible that are very different from being in a situation where there are no time constraints or where the community itself decides, you know.
So I guess, you know, when I think about that, there's a kind of ethic of responsiveness, right? There's a kind of ethic of responsibility of responding to the flows of how things happen in a space that is also really important for the work. And that, I think, different kinds of institutions impose different kinds of time frame parameters that end up mediating our ability to be responsive to the needs of our community. Right. I mean, if we have participants who, for whatever reason, are unable to attend at various times, right now, we're actually dealing with this with because we all started our project two weeks ago, we had two sessions. And because we usually don't start with the beginning of the semester, we always have issues with enrollment and attendance at the beginning.
And so on the one hand, we have this time constraint. When the institution is telling us the students must be present for these many hours in order to receive credit, and on the other end, when we have this commitment, around responsiveness of responding to the needs of young people, responding to their time commitments to the work commitments.
And so we tried to be really flexible for figuring out how do we, on the one hand, be responsive to all the complexity of the lives that students are bringing while at the same time satisfying these requirements. That is that the school district is putting on us… and we find creative ways to do it. These might be one of those things that I better not describe. But it is a challenge to live out that ethical commitment within those constraints. And time is one of those things that I probably didn't think 10 years ago I could probably imagine it, but I didn't think 10 years ago how much time would become one of those dimensions of the work that would be challenging.
Sarah: And then how do you know? And I think there in terms of ethical commitments like earlier, we're talking about transparency. Well, flexibility and creativity, I actually think are also absolutely commitment types, not creativity in the way that we often kind of think of it. But how do you then, when you have these challenges are often imposed from the institution. How do you then navigate accordingly?
Host: Thank you so much for joining us on this episode of The WhyPAR podcast. I hope you learned as much as I did from Rubén and Sarah… some of the key learnings I’m taking away from their conversation was the importance of relationships in YPAR, about understanding participation as a cyclical, about the constraints we face while working in different sectors and spaces and institutions, and being responsive to communities while working in these constraints which can be a challenge. Tune in for Part 2, where Sarah and Ruben will continue their conversation. See you then!