The WhyPAR Podcast
Episode 2: “We don’t talk about the work without the youth researchers”: On Ethical Commitments and the Politics of Dissemination
Citation:
Raza, Naima. “”We don’t talk about the work without the youth researchers”: On Ethical Commitments and the Politics of Dissemination (Part Two).” Produced by Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández and Sarah Switzer at The Youth Research Lab. The WhyPAR Podcast. January 11, 2021. 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.
Rubén: We have a kind of politic that we don’t talk about the work without the youth researchers. Every time that I think of an example of something that the young people have done and I want to offer it as an example, I have this moment where I have to check myself. Am I talking about them without them?
Host: Welcome everyone! My name is Naima, and I’m the host of the WhyPAR podcast. I am currently a graduate assistant at the Youth Research Lab. I’m also a YPAR practitioner with a background working in schools.
As you may know, today’s episode is the second in a two-part conversation between Dr. Sarah Switzer and Dr. Rubén Gaztambide-Fernandez. Sarah is a YPAR practitioner and post-doctoral fellow at the University of Toronto and Rubén is a YPAR practitioner, a professor at the University of Toronto and the Director of the Youth Research Lab . They’re going to be continuing their conversation on ethical commitments and the politics of knowledge dissemination in YPAR. They’re going to be discussing, How do power dynamics play out in YPAR and while disseminating knowledge? How do we honour our ethical commitments while disseminating youth knowledge? What are the opportunities, challenges, and tensions in disseminating knowledge within academic spaces?
I hope you got a chance to listen to our first episode, so if you haven’t, I would very much encourage you to check it out before you jump into this one.
And like Part One of this conversation, Part Two of this conversation was also recorded at the Youth Research Lab on U of T’s campus… as I mentioned in our previous episode, the Youth Research Lab is a super fun and creative space, which made recording this so great.
And with that, let’s jump in!
Rubén: I was thinking, though, that know, one of the aspects that we want to make sure that we talk about is this issue of dissemination. And I think maybe we can enter that through this question of structures and timing and expectations. I'm not sure, you know, if that's valid. It's not as if that's a helpful entry point for you. I mean, for me, I'm thinking that part of. Part of the challenges are on disseminating the work and when I think about disseminating, I think specifically around this question of how to share the work that young people do, you know, projects with the public. We have sort of an expectation that that the dissemination aspect of our work is part of the grade. And this is one of the challenges of doing participatory research within school, is that there is there is an evaluative aspect to it, that there is a kind of expectation that that there is some kind of product at the end that can be evaluated and that and that is a product that, you know, according to the parameters of schools, each individual student is supposed to be evaluated individually.
But participatory research doesn't work that way. We work in teams and we work in collaboration. And that's been challenging even from the point of figuring out what exactly these products look like or are. Never mind how to disseminate them. What did they look like? Who was involved in creating them? What? Why is that a satisfactory outcome or product that that we can say yet that student got an eighty nine, that student got a ninety four, that student got an eighty six. You know, so for us that question of dissemination in a sense… the actual question of how the work gets disseminated, it's answered a priori because we've already decided coming in that at the end of the project we're going to have a presentation… often that's up to debate. We usually tell the students you get to decide what it looks like, you even get to decide if this happens, you know, you could you could decide that these, quote unquote, final presentation is literally just us in a circle talking about our project. Or you could decide that you want to have a big public event, then invite a bunch of people to see it. It's completely up to you. But there has to be something because we have to enter a mark that we have to tell the board, the district, yep, they've fulfilled their requirements and here's the evidence that we're using to give this student an eighty three. So how do you think about that? What are the sort of what are some of the ways that they're sharing the results of the work or sharing the work that the people you work with produce? How does that sort of figure in the way you think about ethics? That was a terrible transition, but I'm sorry.
Sarah: I'm still thinking about this, that the tension around. Great. Wow, what a contradiction. And I'm just thinking about the power dynamics that I play as like the teacher that grades. Right. You know, already there are definitely in research power dynamics in terms of folks expectations that they need to be or perform in a particular way. For you as a researcher, even if those relationships are ongoing, you know, like I've had many experiences where some will say something to me on tape that I'm like. I know that that is very different from everything else you ever said to me. You know, I've known folks for a very long time. And I'm like, OK. Yeah. Yeah. And then off tape, you know, they'll say something entirely different, you know, or I'll even have like confessional moments where folks will call me up the next day. And be like, I really need you to know this, you know? And I'm like, oh, OK. Well, you know, it's almost like they're trying to, because they're quite savvy. Right. And being like, I'll tell you this on tape. And that's all about power. But anyway. In that's the complete side tangent. In terms of dissemination… I mean, I'm certainly not limited by expectations around marking.
I think dissemination is something that's negotiated in an ongoing way. And I will say that I can't generalize. The sharing of the work is often the pull for folks to be involved in the first place in the sense that they, they want to see research that makes a difference. They want… if we're working through the arts or other forms of cultural production, they want to celebrate in the work that they produced. They want to know that it wasn't for nothing. And so there's often a very keen interest in dissemination from the very beginning. Now, I'm not saying the academic articles folks don't really care so much about those and why should they? But the conversations are definitely negotiated, ongoing. And I find especially with my work with young people and in part because it's because I've been working with the same group of folks for a very long time.
And in this I'm thinking more specifically about the recent project I did, which is around kind of how stakeholders in different organizations considered or thought about engagement. So in this case, we're thinking about youth engagement. So I'm working with young leaders who are already very actively involved. And I, one of my challenges was that I didn't have an unlimited budget. I also didn't have an unlimited amount of time. I was doing it as connected to my doctoral work. So it did need to kind of wrap up. And even if I wasn't doing it, it was part of my doctoral work. I had the constraints of the funder I had. There's only so much you can do. And so balancing everyone's desires to be involved and with just the human resources capacity to kind of follow that involvement through. And so one of the ways that I have attended to that, which I think connects back to ethical commitments, has been really explicit with folks that this is their work and they can do with it what they want. And so that has opened up opportunities for folks to do stuff with the work that has nothing to do with me. And in fact, that is the best case scenario so that we can organize a series of events within our project, whether it's an exhibit, whether it's multiple. I do a lot of co… for lack of a better word co-lead or coauthored presentations where young folks and myself will go and we'll present at professional conferences, less academic conferences, because folks aren't really interested in that. So we'll present to physicians or service providers or policymakers and that work is always so important. It takes a lot of time, but it is so important. So we'll do a lot of those... we will produce, you know, public documents that get circulated. And one of the benefits of those documents is that because they're tangible, folks can literally go and do stuff with them. That, again, is completely outside of the parameters of the project. And so it hasn't been uncommon for me to be chatting with folks and they're like, oh, I went and talked on a panel the other day about the project, and I’m like, did you? And I mean that at first. I was like, you know, I've got to let up control, you know, if we're really going to say this is a participatory collective project, then things are gonna come out that have nothing to do with me. And that is what we ought to strive for. You know, I've had other young people they created, we worked on this coauthored book chapter with a bunch of young folks around thinking about how to structure peer-led programs. And it was, the chapters called “What's Glitter Got To Do With It”. Yeah, I can't remember the full title, but I bring up Glitter because I found it a few years later… a group of them are one of, one of them had been asked by this organizing body that organized this conference for community members. And they said there has been critique over time that there wasn't a youth focus. So they said, OK, we're going to pay a young person to do a thing, kind of perhaps tokenistic… Yeah, well, I won't say anything in a public interview.
But so this young person ended up navigating with the organizers that they needed a larger budget and they went and recruited a bunch of folks that had worked on this chapter and other projects together. And they created this installation of a chair covered in glitter from which they put in the conference as a kind of representation of a seat at the table and then asked folks to kind of lacquer. And then they had all these statements on the chair that were quotes from the book chapter we had created. Their quotes, not mine. And then asked folks to kind of contribute to the chair in terms of their own commitments, in terms of what they were going to be doing within their own spaces to make sure that young people actually had a voice at the table. And it was actually quite an intervention for them to put this chair in a space that has traditionally not been very youth-centered. And I had no idea that this had happened, like I found this out after the fact. You know, I was, I was delighted.
So I guess it kind of speaks to something that is that it's a, it's a balance in terms of how these things get negotiated. And a lot of the time, you know, it also comes down to resources too which I think is something that we don't often talk about publicly in participatory research. You know, it's like what happens when a budget runs out? The budget runs out. And then how do you continue this work when the work is often really pressing? We can say, yes, OK, we'll apply for another grant. But the reality is that that takes a very long time. And are folks willing to wait around, you know, these grant cycles can take sometimes one, two years to get the grants. And so it's definitely a challenge.
Rubén: You know, it's interesting to hear about the continuation of the relationships beyond the parameters of the project. Probably the closest that I can think of that and this is directly related to dissemination is the creation of INCITE, the journal INCITE, which evolved out of the work that Lila Angod, who was a postdoctoral fellow at the time and who took the lead with the YPAR project that we did at the private school nearby. And it was really Lila and the young people that she was working with in that project that sort of first imagined INCITE and kind of made INCITE run. And so probably INCITE is the is the biggest sort of public dissemination project that has grown out of this… the most ongoing. Of course, the difference there is that this is not about their own work. So they've basically created a platform for other young people to share the work that they were doing in projects through this online “academic” in quotes. And I see academic in quotes not because I don't think it's academic, but because they very deliberately, you know, one of their goals is to very deliberately challenge the parameters of what it means to be academic. And particularly when engaging young people, the ways in which young people want to share their knowledge don't, rarely look the way that we adults, academics want to share our work. And it doesn't make it less academic. So probably that's the closest to that. I've sort of lost my train of thought, I thought a little bit thinking about this piece of dissemination.
Sarah: It's interesting when you talk about INCITE, though, I think I think one of the pieces it's really integral to the work that we both do is coming out of this conversation. Is that kind of recognizing and allowing for like multiple different products for lack of a better term, you know, and not going in with any pre-decided expectation of it's going to look this particular way. And I think that that's really important for the process to be emergent so that if young people decide that they're like, I want to start a journal. OK, that is that is a possibility. I'm not pre figuring things from the start. Right. I think that that's been really, really key. I mean, it can be challenging from a funding perspective because for grants, you have to write in a plan, you know, funders are not so open to… We're just going to see what happens and what happens.
Rubén: Yeah, that's right. And so not something funders want to hear.
Sarah: Yeah. And so it's like, how do you then, as a researcher in terms of those ethical commitments, build a grant that is, you know, robust enough a grant so you'll get the funding, but also be open enough to know that you can throw the entire thing out the window? If you want to. And that's actually I think a skill that you need to kind of hone as a participatory researcher if you want to get funding. But it's also incredibly important for the work because you need folks to be able to then, you know, build these installations or run off and do these projects or, you know, build an academic journal… I didn’t know we are co authoring the glitter chapter. I went into that project not expecting that we are going to write a book chapter at all. I thought we were gonna do a video because we'd done videos before. We're gonna do a series of presentations. And I don't even know how it came up, to be totally honest. But I remember we were sitting around the room and we were talking about knowledge production, not so much in those words, but how knowledge gets produced specifically around young people. And I'd mentioned something around kind of, oh, you know, will folks get cited? Some of these people were also starting to learn how to write grants at this time, programing grants. And for background in public health, there's just huge move towards evidence based programming. Right. Which put a lot of demand on folks in community to justify what they already know using outside sources. So they were kind of like navigating that and being a what is this, this thing that we're you know, that, you know, we have to do it even for youth led programing, you have to do it. And so next thing you know, I'd pulled up Google Scholar and we had a screen. So we did it with the PowerPoint, but like we had it projected. And so let's just search for stuff. So they told me the terms and I put it in, and, and they're like, well, what you don't like, what, you know this guy? This jerk? He has how many citations, and this is what he’s writing, you know, stuff that was very focused on risk, very essentializing around categories, not accounting for issues of systemic racism or transphobia or homophobia or poverty or any of this. And they were pissed off and they said, well, how do we get on this list? They said, well, unfortunately, you know, all of the work that we do is so important in terms that participatory videos, the workshops, all of that, you know, that is very, very, very important. It probably will make more change than stuff on this less. But unfortunately, because of the powers that be and academic structures, they won't ever end up on Google Scholar.
And they said we want end up Google Scholar. So how do we do that? Well, we can… write a chapter. And so that's how we did it. But it wasn't it was never through it was never didactic prose. That's right. It was. It was ensuring that anything could kind of come up at any given moment. And then negotiating all of that. And then again, back to the flexibility being like, oh, OK, so how are we gonna do this?
Rubén: That’s such a great story Sarah. You know it actually reminds me of how important INCITE is. Yes. Because INCITE is such an important venue for just that. And for making sure, because the other thing that happens in academia, that another way in which academia sort of ends up having an undue influence on things is citation practices. And it's very difficult to cite a video that you saw at a community gathering. It's very difficult to cite a tweet or to cite an installation, you know, like the wonderful installations that you created. You could create it together, but, and so and so this becomes a political project of interfering, intervening, interfering, intervening in an academic project by perusing a space that then allows that work to be cited. Yeah, know. I mean, in a similar way that we're hoping these blogs also become or these interviews, these conversations have also become a way to do that is it interferes in the practice in their academic practices that give certain kinds of work salience by making it available for that so that we can so that this can be cited. So that they can show up on Google Scholar when somebody is looking it up and it really sort of underscores that for me. But it also speaks to a tension, a big tension in this question of dissemination for us, which is that we have a kind of politic that we don't talk about the work without those without the young youth researchers or we don't talk about that particular research projects. But it's really difficult to talk about the work that we do with them without talking about the work they're doing. And so even right now, when we're having this conversation, you know, every time that I think of an example of something that the young people have done and I want to offer it as an example, I have this moment where I have to check myself. Am I talking about them without them? You know, I'm about to go on this weekend, this week to go up to Ottawa to this event. And I'm supposed to present the work of the Youth Research Lab. And as I'm presenting, I am constantly second guessing myself. You know, am I going too far if I show this image? Am I going too far? If I say, how much can I say about this without violating my own ethical principle that I don't talk about it without them, you know? Absolutely. And they usually are sort of we usually say this, these have been approved. And it is true. These images are images that we, that we as a collective have agreed to can be shared. And with the young people who are here have said, yes, you may show that image, but even still, you know? Because we haven't come we haven't sat down to decide what should be said about that image in that context. What if somebody has a question?
You know, this is probably in terms of dissemination, is the tension that I struggle with the most on a more regular basis? It seems small, you know, like, you know, figuring out what to say about something. And yet I mean, it is so big.
Sarah: It’s huge. You know, even while we’re talking, I have the example of the glitter chapter. You know, even while we're talking, I gave the example the glitter chapter. Well, that's not mine to share. And I'm fully cognizant of that. So if we decide to do anything with this, there is no way that is going to stay on the tape unless I get permission from because otherwise then it feels gross, like I'm taking credit for something that had nothing to do with me. Right. You know. And so then how do you.. and then and then for me, it's particularly tricky for me as a young scholar that's expected to go out and share my work in these venues. But I can't always do it with folks by my side. I try. You know, I try to prioritize that. But it's not always possible because of the expectations of academia. And in truth, a lot of young folks I work with, they don't want to go to a critical geography conference, you know, or like, you know, they, they wanna go to the professional conferences. They want to speak to policymakers, to clinicians, to funders and say this is what needs to change. But the academic spaces aren't really for that. And so then how that gets to that for me is where I kind of navigate that.
If it's a purely academic conference and even still, there are certain pieces of our work, you know, like so we have we spent a lot of time as a group thinking about the idea of journey and what journey means for thinking about community engagement work. And so we coauthored a paper on it. It just got accepted. Yay. It'll be out this week. And that's a coauthored piece. And because it's coauthored, I would never present that by myself. Even if and I could, you know, the academic powers it be, you know, would it you know, folks would have their names on it. And I could stand up and do it, but I only do it in community spaces. And the one time where it was presented by myself, I made sure that my other co authors were in the room. It was a 10 minute presentation. So it wasn't possibly be shared. But they are in the room. And they when it came to me to answer questions on the panel, we previously agreed that I would defer to them and they would answer. So that's how we kind of intervene. Yeah, but you know it. Yeah. It when I am standing at that critical geography conference, usually I'll also talk about methods. I feel like that's a bit safer. But it’s like, it's tricky. It's I always think like you know or. Yeah. When you have to answer questions it's like, well you don't you can't. You don't. You can't expect what questions are going to come out.
Rubén: Just to kind of know this difference that you made reference several times to the fact that oftentimes the people that you work with have already established leadership roles and have gained leadership experience. And it's interesting to hear what kinds of opportunities that opens in terms of the initiative that they take and the demands that they make of the work. And, you know, I find that, for example, when it comes to facilitation or even… we end up doing a lot of mentoring, we end up doing a lot of, in a sense, training. And I don't know how to talk about this. It's so hard to talk about, you know, when this aspect of the work of of capacity building of skill, an element of learning how to make it… it’s so hard to talk about it from. Perhaps because we have this ethical commitment to beginning from their strengths. You know, we have this ethical commitment to begin the work that we do from an asset-based perspective that think first of this strength that they bring to the work. And I can do that, but it's hard. It's funny to then talk about the areas of growth that we all have. We all have areas of growth. I have still have areas of growth, even though I have been doing this for 10 years. So obviously they've only been doing this for a year. So, of course, they have areas of growth. But how do you talk about this? Like you can hear me stumbling, I don't even know how to talk about it.
Sarah: I mean, it’s interesting. For me, I think about its collective capacity building, because in a lot of my projects, we also have these kind of formalized, informalized training pieces. But for me, a lot of my work is informed by kind of Freire and ideas of education and popular education that even in those trainings, it's always starting with their lived experience and what they already know. And so I don't know if I don't know if I do it well, but it's a lot more integrated into the work we're doing rather than standalone. I also know I've worked on projects before, not with young people, but I think it's an illustrative example where we have started every meeting with a 10 to 15 minute presentation or workshopy thing that every single person around the table has to do. That's to train all of us on something. And those have been spaces where there have been community members, again, physicians, researchers, staff… all sorts of folks in different roles. And every single person has to do this fifteen minute piece. And that was, it really worked for that one particular project. So I think it’s really kind of shifting how capacity building is framed and thought about.
I think one of things that is an aid to the work that I do is the young people that I work with have already come out of a capacity building program. Right? That was a youth led program. And this is really, really key because a lot of young folks I've worked with have also been pushed out of school. You know, some of them have been precariously housed and have spent time on the streets. Many of them have not finished high school. And so these are not the young people that you, who might be running… Imagine running the high school debate team or taking over a meeting. You know, I want to be careful. I want to make it very strengths-based right now. But there's also struggle because life is hard.
And because power exists and because we're living, you know, on stolen land, you know, we are living, you know, in an epoch that for a very long time has been white supremacist, you know, and so that can't be ignored in terms of when we think about who comes to the table and who has powers. And so for me, capacity building is also, it's an ethical commitment in terms of making sure that folks have the training that they need, but also to be open enough so that they're training me and to be transparent in that conversation. And I think that that has really helped things. It's also allowed for a lot of co-training to happen. So you mentioned earlier that you've got this mentorship component to your YPAR project and that's been something that's been really integral to my work as well.
Host: Thank you so much for joining us on this episode of The WhyPAR podcast. I’m still reflecting on Sarah and Rubéns' conversation. I’m thinking about their reflections on dissemination as being negotiated in an ongoing way, the importance of being emergent and flexible in decision-making about dissemination products, and the ways they described youth co-lead in academic spaces and intervene in academic literature.
Stay tuned for our next episode and see you next time!
Special acknowledgements: This podcast acknowledges "A Seat At The Table" - an artistic installation led by Lydia Hernandez, Tumaini Lyraruu, Mimi Duong and Chris. It also acknowledges the work of many others, including - but not limited to - those involved in the picturing participation project.