Humanizing Research

What does it mean to conduct research for justice with youth and communities who are marginalized by systems of inequality based on race, ethnicity, sexuality, citizenship status, gender, and other categories of difference? In this collection, editors Django Paris and Maisha Winn have selected essays written by top scholars in education on humanizing approaches to qualitative and ethnographic inquiry with youth and their communities. Vignettes, portraits, narratives, personal and collaborative explorations, photographs, and additional data excerpts bring the findings to life for a better understanding of how to use research for positive social change.

This guide is for educational researchers interested in conducting ethically sound qualitative studies with diverse populations, including refugees, documented and undocumented immigrants, and people with disabilities. Through a description of a case study with refugee families, their children, school personnel, and liaisons, the authors highlight humanizing methods--a multidirectional and dynamic ethical compass with relationships at the center. Topics in the book include working within the limitations of Institutional Review Board (IRB) standards, using cultural and linguistic liaisons to communicate with research participants, and creating reciprocity with research participants and their families and communities. Through accessible real-world examples, the text covers the full arc of a project, from conceptualization, to navigating human subjects committees, to the complex task of representing ideas to academic and community-based audiences. Book Features: Engages readers in the complex and sometimes uncertain terrain of working across diverse constituencies in school-community partnership research. Centers practical and ethical tensions in fieldwork as sites from which to learn more about research participants and researcher values. Includes reflections by contributing authors on how to work with non-dominant students, ensuring full equity and inclusion for all learners. Models an approach of metacritical reflexivity and researcher positionality.

This book explores the challenges and opportunities involved in conducting research with members of immigrant, refugee and other minoritized communities. Through first-hand reflective accounts, contributors explore community-based collaborative work, and suggest important implications for applied linguistics, educational research and anthropological investigations of language, literacy and culture. By critically reflecting on the power and limits of university-based research conducted on behalf of, or in collaboration with, members of local communities and by exploring the complicated relationships, dynamics and understandings that emerge, the chapters collectively demonstrate the value of reflecting on the possibilities and challenges of the research process, including the ethical and emotional dimensions of participating in collaborative research.

In company with its sister volume, Arts-Based Research Across Textual Media in Education explores arts-based approaches to research across media, including film and comics-related material, from a variety of geographic locations and across a range of subdisciplines within the field of education. This first volume takes a textual focus, capturing process, poetic, and dramaturgical approaches. The authors aim to highlight some of the approaches that are not always centered in arts-based research. The contributors represent a variety of arts-based practices and methods, and they weave this marrying of artistic and scientific expertise and experience into the fabric of the chapters themselves. Authors from international contexts speak to the importance of utilizing artistic approaches for research processes. From multimodal field notes to poetic forms to the dramaturgical, chapters in this book represent steps forward in educational inquiry to bringing together both the creative and credible. The book includes multiple images and rich descriptions shared from the field. This first volume covers amongst other topics: co-created narratives, creative fiction in research, analytic portraits, dramatic representation, and critical poetic inquiry. It would be suitable for graduate students and scholars interested in qualitative inquiry and arts-based methods, in education and the social sciences.

Humanizing LIS Education and Practice: Diversity by Design demonstrates that diversity concerns are relevant to all and need to be approached in a systematic way. Developing the Diversity by Design concept articulated by Dali and Caidi in 2017, the book promotes the notion of the diversity mindset. Grouped into three parts, the chapters within this volume have been written by an international team of seasoned academics and practitioners who make diversity integral to their professional and scholarly activities. Building on the Diversity by Design approach, the book presents case studies with practice models for two primary audiences: LIS educators and LIS practitioners. Chapters cover a range of issues, including, but not limited to, academic promotion and tenure; the decolonization of LIS education; engaging Indigenous and multicultural communities; librarians’ professional development in diversity and social justice; and the decolonization of library access practices and policies. As a collection, the book illustrates a systems-thinking approach to fostering diversity and inclusion in LIS, integrating it by design into the LIS curriculum and professional practice. Calling on individuals, organizations, policymakers, and LIS educators to make diversity integral to their daily activities and curriculum, Humanizing LIS Education and Practice: Diversity by Design will be of interest to anyone engaged in research and professional practice in Library and Information Science.

Doing Youth Participatory Action Research offers an unprecedented, in-depth exploration of the pragmatics and possibilities of youth-driven research. Drawing upon multiple years of experience engaging youth in rigorous, critical inquiry about the conditions impacting their lives, the authors examine how YPAR encourages the educational community to re-imagine the capabilities of young people and the purposes of teaching, learning, and research itself. Much more than a "how-to" guide for those interested in creating their own YPAR projects, this book draws upon the voices of students and educators, as well as the multiple historical traditions of critical research, to describe how youth inquiry transforms each step of the traditional research process. From identifying research questions to collecting data and disseminating findings, each chapter details how YPAR revolutionizes traditional conceptions of who produces knowledge, how it is produced, and for what purposes. The book weaves together research, policy, and practice to offer YPAR as a practice with the power to challenge entrenched social and educational inequalities, empower critically aware youth, and revolutionize pedagogy in classrooms and communities. For researchers, educators, community members, and youth who want to connect, question, and transform the world collectively, Doing Youth Participatory Action Research is a rich source of both pragmatic methodological guidance and inspiration.

A Responsive Rhetorical Art explores the risk-ridden realm of wise if always also fallible rhetorical action—the productive knowledge building required to compose and to leverage texts, broadly construed, for the purposes of public life marked by shrinking public resources, cultural conflict, and deferred hope. Here, composition and literacy learning hold an important and distinctive cultural promise: the capacity to invent with other people new ways forward in light of their own interests and values and in the face of obstacles that could not have otherwise been predicted. Distributed across publicly situated strangers, including citizen-educators, this work engages a persistent challenge of early rhetorical uptake in public life: that what might become public and shared is often tacit and contested. The book’s approach combines attention to local cases (with a transnational student organization, the Nipmuck Chaubunagungamaug, and the South Sudanese diaspora in Phoenix) with a revisable guide for taking up wise action and methods for uncovering elusive institutional logics.

By showcasing asset-based approaches inspired by individual reflection, research, and experience, this volume offers a fresh and timely perspective on grief and trauma within higher education and illustrates how these approaches can serve as opportunities for hope and allyship. Featuring a broad range of contributions from scholars and professionals involved in educational research and academia, Humanizing Grief in Higher Education explores the varied ways in which students, scholars, and educators experience and navigate grief and trauma. Set into four distinct parts, chapters deploy personal narratives situated within interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research frameworks to illustrate how issues such as race, gender, socio-economic class, and politics intersect with experiences of personal and professional grief in the academy. A variety of intersectional fields of study – from positive psychology, counselling, feminist and queer theories, to trauma theory and disability studies – inform an interdisciplinary framework for processing traumatic experiences and finding ways to hope. These narrative explorations are positioned as key to developing a sense of hope amongst the grieving and those supporting them. This text will benefit researchers, doctoral students, and academics in the fields of Higher Education, teacher education, trauma studies, and mental health education. Those interested in positive and educational psychology, as well as grief counselling in adults, will also enjoy this volume. Finally, this collection serves as a companion for those who find themselves grappling with losses, broadly defined.