Research Justice Methodologies for Social Change
Edited by Andrew J. Jolivétte
RESEARCH JUSTICE
Methodologies for Social Change
10 year anniversary edition
Edited by Andrew J. Jolivétte
in collaboration with DataCenter: Research for Justice
Foreword by
Mary Romero
First edition published in Great Britain in 2015
Second edition published in Great Britain in 2025 by
Policy Press, an imprint of Bristol University Press University of Bristol 1–9 Old Park Hill
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In loving memory of my mother
Annetta Donan Foster-Jolivétte (January 16, 1944–September 5, 2012)
In loving memory of my father
Kenneth Louis Jolivétte (December 11, 1949–March 16, 2022) and my uncle/godfather
Charlie Jolivétte (August 31, 1952–March 9, 2024)
Dedicated to my loving husband
Anthony Ferrer Marte
To all our ancestor spirits who have fought, and who continue to fight, for justice
8
Akeem T. Ray and Phyllis A.Gray
Marta López-Garza
Haruki Eda
Alma Leyva, Imelda S. Plascencia, and Mayra Yoana Jaimes Pena
Julia Chinyere Oparah, Fatimah Salahuddin, Ronnesha Cato, Linda Jones, Talita Oseguera, and Shanelle Matthews
12 Actos del corazón: Las sabias—bridging the digital divide, and 137 redefining historic preservation
Cathryn Josefina Merla-Watson with the Corazones del Westside
Part III: Research Justice: Strategies for social transformation and 149 policy reform
13 Everyday justice: Tactics for navigating micro, macro, and structural 155 discriminations from the intersection of Jim Crow and Hurricane Katrina
Sandra E. Weissinger
14 The revolutionary, non-violent action of Danilo Dolci and his 169 maieutic approach
Domenica Maviglia
15 Telling to reclaim, not to sell: Resistance narratives and the 183 marketing of justice
Amrah Salomón J.
16 Decolonizing knowledge: Toward a critical Research Justice praxis 197 in the urban sphere
Michelle Fine
17 Decolonizing knowledge: Toward a critical indigenous Research 203 Justice praxis
Linda Tuhiwai Smith
Notes on contributors
Nicole Blalock is a mixed-heritage activist scholar and artist whose work applies Native American Studies to the examination of education, schooling, and the development of culturally sustaining pedagogies. Dr. Blalock is currently serving as a Fulton Postdoctoral Fellow for educational equity in diverse schools with the Mary Lou Fulton Teacher’s College at Arizona State University. Her research is largely interdisciplinary and incorporates her interests in contemporary society and how its policies and practices influence learning and achievement. She is also interested in issues of representation, identity, and sovereignty as related to the tensions of tribal memberships, nation-to-nation politics, and decolonization. Although distinct activities, Dr. Blalock’s research and art run a parallel course, developing and enriching her understanding of critical issues in society. Both are the result of archiving experience and thought and draw from her own rich academic, professional, and personal history. www.nicole-renee.com
Ronnesha Cato is an African American woman, community doula, mother, and activist who lives in East Oakland, California. She is currently a student majoring in history, with aspirations of becoming a history teacher in addition to a midwife. Ronnesha’s interest in birthing justice stems from her own experiences with childbirth. In 2010, while pregnant, she studied the different techniques and procedures associated with birth, but grew increasingly dissatisfied with western scientific medicine. This led her to look deeper into women’s holistic health and educating women on their rights to control their birth experiences. Ronnesha believes that, if more women of color approached the mainstream medical system with the perspective that women should have support, encouragement, and birth education, the infant mortality and high C-section rate in African American women would drop.
Julia Chinyere Oparah is an activist scholar, social justice educator, and experienced community organizer, who is dedicated to producing critical scholarship in the service of progressive social movements. Oparah is an African diaspora specialist, whose interests span a number of different social concerns, including activism by women of color, violence against women, women and the prison-industrial complex, restorative justice, queer and transgender liberation, race and adoption, Research Justice and birth activism. Oparah is Professor and Department Chair of Ethnic Studies at Mills College. She is author of Other kinds of dreams: Black women’s organizations and the politics of organization, the only comprehensive history of the black women’s movement in Britain. She is editor of Global lockdown: Race, gender and the prison-industrial complex, a seminal work that mapped the connections between globalization, gender, and mass incarceration. She is also co-editor of three books: Activist scholarship: Antiracism,
feminism and social change; Color of Violence: The incite! anthology; and Outsiders within: Writing on transracial adoption. She is currently working with the grassroots community organization Black Women Birthing Justice on a participatory action research project about black women’s experiences of pregnancy and childbirth, and editing an anthology on black women in the birth justice movement.
Antonia Darder holds the Leavey Endowed Chair in Ethics and Moral Leadership at Loyola Marymount University and Professor Emerita of Education Policy Studies at University of Illinois. She has authored numerous books and publications, including Culture and power in the classroom; A dissident voice; and Freire and education.
Haruki Eda (he/they) is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs where he teaches on globalization and development, Asian American studies, race/ethnicity, and war and social change. As a Zainichi Korean organizer, his research centers on anti-imperialist struggles in East Asia and North America. His book project Queer Unification: Community and Healing in the Korean Diaspora examines how Korean community organizers of diverse backgrounds cultivate political solidarity to embody counter-hegemonic modes of kinship, sovereignty, and liberation. He served as a research intern for DataCenter in 2010–11.
Michelle Fine is Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Urban Education at the City University of New York. She is a founding faculty member of the Public Science Project, which produces critical scholarship for use in social policy debates and organizing movements for educational equity and human rights. Fine is a recipient of honorary degrees from Bank Street College and Lewis and Clark University, and is a much sought-after commencement speaker. A sampling of her most cited books and policy monographs includes: The changing landscape of public education (2013), with Michael Fabricant; Charter schools and the corporate makeover of public education (2012), with Michael Fabricant; Revolutionizing education: Youth participatory action research in motion (2008), with Julio Cammarota; Muslim-American youth (2008), with Selcuk Sirin; and her classic Framing dropouts: Notes on the politics of an urban high school (1991). Fine has received the 2013 American Psychological Association Award for Distinguished Contributions to Research in Public Policy, the 2012 Henry Murray Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology of the APA, the 2010 Social Justice and Higher Education Award from the College and Community Fellowship for her work in prison, and the 2011 Elizabeth Hurlock Beckman Award for her mentoring legacy over the past 25 years.
Amanda Freeman is a writer, professor and researcher based in Connecticut. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Central Connecticut State University, working to complete her PhD in sociology at Boston College. Amanda writes about the challenges facing low-income families in America.
She wrote a six-part series of news articles about women and poverty for the Women in the World Foundation and the Ford Foundation, which appeared on the Newsweek Women in the World website. In 2013, she received the Dentler Award from the public sociology section of the American Sociological Association in recognition of “exceptional research and writing on the challenges facing low-income single mother-headed families and communication of research and its policy implications to a broader audience.”
Phyllis A. Gray is Professor of Sociology/Social Psychology and Criminology at Florida A&M University. She has published in national and international journals, and is the recipient of many honors and awards including induction into the prestigious Sigma Xi National Scientific Research Society. Her research has been funded by The National Science Foundation, The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Mississippi Department of Mental Health, the Mississippi Department of Public Safety, and the U.S. Department of Education. She is the author of two books: From imagining to understanding the African American experience and The disparate treatment of black youth in the juvenile justice system. She received her BSc degree in psychology from South Carolina State University, and the MSc degree and PhD in sociology from Iowa State University.
Mél Hogan is an Assistant Professor of Communication at Illinois Institute of Technology. Her research is at the intersection of media, archives, and the environment. Her most recent publications revolve around media and their ecological impacts, data storage centers, and server farms. As a practitioner, aspects of these same issues are addressed through media arts interventions and research design projects. Hogan is also a co-curator of online and p.o.d. journal of arts and politics, nomorepotlucks.org and a design consultant for mat3rial.org. mel@nomorepotlucks.org • www.nomorepotlucks.org • @nomorepotlucks
Andrew J. Jolivétte is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara where he is working to develop an area of study and a first in the nation certificate focused on Queer Afro-Indigenous Studies, Thrivance Circuitry, and Kinship Practice that examines identity, wellness, place, and Indigeneity across the Americas utilizing a justice framework. He is under review as an affiliated faculty member in the Departments of Black Studies, Chicana and Chicano Studies, Feminist Studies, and Latin American and Iberian Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is former Professor and Department Chair of Ethnic Studies as well as the inaugural founding Director of Native American and Indigenous Studies at the University of California San Diego where he worked from 2019 to 2024 with affiliations in Black Diaspora and African American Studies, Critical Gender Studies, Global Health, and Latin American Studies. His acclaimed scholarship, writings, and presentations examine Native American, Indigenous, Creole, Black, Latinx, Queer, Mixed-Race, and Comparative Critical Ethnic Studies. He is former
Professor and Department Chair of American Indian Studies at San Francisco State University (2001–19) and a Senior Ford Foundation Fellow. Throughout the course of his nearly three decades in education, he has served as Dean of Students and Multicultural Programs at Presidio Hill School, as Interim Principal of XCEL Cross Cultural Charter High School in San Francisco, among many roles in K-12 and higher education. He currently serves as Partner Investigator with the Australian Research Council’s Centre for Indigenous Futures at the University of Queensland, as Board President of the American Indian Cultural Center of San Francisco, as Board President of the Institute for Democratic Education and Culture (Speak Out), as a film consultant and producer on the documentary, ‘Rise’, about Louisiana coastal erosion on the Isle de Jean Charles among Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw tribal members, as Co-Chair and Founder of the University of California’s Ethnic Studies Leadership Council and as Advisory Board Member of the American Indian and Indigenous Culture and Research Journal at the University of California, Los Angeles. He also serves on the editorial review boards for the American Sociological Association’s Contexts and the Ethnic Studies Pedagogies journal. He is the author or editor of ten books, including the Lammy Award-nominated Indian Blood: HIV and Colonial Trauma in San Francisco’s Two-Spirit Community; Louisiana Creoles: Cultural Recovery and Mixed-Race Native American Identity; Obama and the Biracial Factor: The Battle for a New American Majority; Cultural Representation in Native America; Research Justice: Methodologies for Social Change 1st edition; American Indian and Indigenous Education: A Survey Text for the 21st Century; Louisiana Creole Peoplehood: AfroIndigeneity and Community; Gumbo Circuitry: Poetic Routes, Gastronomic Legacies; Research Justice: Methodologies for Social Change 10th Anniversary 2nd Edition; and the forthcoming book, Thrivance Circuitry: Queer Afro-Indigenous Futurity and Kinship. An enrolled member of the Atakapa-Ishak Nation of Louisiana, he is his tribe’s former tribal historian and is born of the Hiyekiti Ishak [Sunrise People] of the Tsikip/Heron Clan. He is a former Indigenous Peoples Representative to the United Nations as well as the former Board President of the GLBT Historical Society and Museum, iPride for Multiracial Families, and a Board Member for the African American Art and Culture Complex in San Francisco and the DataCenter in Oakland, California, among many others. He is a Louisiana Creole of Atakapa-Ishak, Opelousa, Kaskaskia (Illiniwek/ Illinois Confederation of Tribes), Chitimacha, Mi’Kmaq, Metis, Algonquin, Coahuiltecan, West African (Nigerian, Senegambian, Ghanaian, Cameroonian, Guinean), French, Spanish, Italian, Cajun, Mexican, Congolese, Angolan, Southern East African, Canadian, Isleño, Irish, Haitian, Portuguese, English, Scottish, and German descent.
Linda Jones is a birth and postpartum doula and mother of two who lives in Oakland, CA. She founded and owned Waddle and Swaddle Baby Boutique and Resource Center in Berkeley, CA, and has been a part of the natural birth advocacy community in the Bay Area for more than two decades. She belongs to Sistahs of the Good Birth, a group of black doulas who work with low-
income mothers. She was one of the founders of a volunteer doula group that provided services for low-income, uninsured, and teen mothers who birthed at Alta Bates Hospital in Berkeley.
Alma Leyva is a Project Coordinator at the Dream Resource Center of the UCLA Labor Center. As a queer and undocumented woman, Alma has dedicated her work to advancing the rights and protections of undocumented communities and the identities that intersect them. Alma’s work is centered on developing leaders at the intersection of immigrant rights and healthcare access as a project coordinator of the Dream Resource Center. Alma is a lead researcher and author of the report Undocumented and Uninsured: Immigrant Youth and the Struggle to Access Health Care in California, the first statewide study by and about immigrant youth in California.
Marta López-Garza holds a joint position in Gender & Women’s Studies and Chicana/o Studies Departments at California State University, Northridge. Her current research is on formerly incarcerated women, the subject of her documentary, When will the punishment end?, which can be viewed at www. whenwillpunishmentend.net/. Recent publications include Betita Martinez: Compañera y Mentora in Social Justice
Mayra Yoana Jaimes Pena is a Research/Project Coordinator at the Dream Resource Center (DRC) of the UCLA Labor Center. She has over seven years in organizing in Queer/Undocumented and student organizing. Her years of working with various communities has developed in her a strong passion for an intersectional approach to social justice. Her passion for justice has led her to work with the CIRCLE Project of the DRC to intentionally address intersectional immigrant issues through a health and restorative justice framework. Mayra Yoana is a lead researcher and co-author of the report Undocumented and Uninsured: Immigrant Youth and the Struggle to Access Health Care in California, the first statewide study in California by and about immigrant youth.
Liam Martin is a PhD candidate in the Sociology Department at Boston College. His work draws on a range of approaches for engaging with the people and communities most affected by the prison system. Liam’s doctoral research, funded by the National Science Foundation, has involved nine months living in a halfway house for men leaving prison and jail—spread over three separate stays—and life history interviews with a network of former prisoners established while living at the house. Using this ethnographic approach, he examines how the prison experience follows people after they leave, the forces and processes that push people back toward prison, and the strategies of former prisoners rebuilding their lives while facing often extreme forms of social exclusion. Liam also teaches college courses inside Framingham and Norfolk state prisons through the Boston University prison education program.
Shanelle Matthews is a journalist, blogger, and all-round digital enthusiast. She is the communications strategist at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Northern California, where she is tasked with creating visibility for the legal and programmatic work happening on the ground. A former journalist, she leads the communications and digital strategy for the ACLU-NC’s reproductive justice and LGBT rights work. She writes on the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality, and has been published in a wide variety of magazines and newspapers, including Women’s eNews, The root, Feministing, RH reality check, and The frisky. Shanelle is a Progressive Women’s Voices alumnae from the Women’s Media Center, a Core Align Generative Fellow, and was recently awarded the Ida B. Wells Award for her commitment to communications by Black Women for Wellness. She studied new and online media at the Manship School of Mass Communications and is on the board of directors of the National Network of Abortion Funds.
Domenica Maviglia is Doctor of Philosophy in intercultural pedagogy at the Department of Cognitive Science, Education, and Cultural Studies, University of Messina (Italy). Her work focuses mainly on critical pedagogy and the theoretical and historical research in the field of pedagogy, with a particular emphasis on the philosophy of education, the history of pedagogy, and the history of education. In her career, she has worked with different educational and training institutions, taking part in educational research projects carried out in several schools.
Cathryn Josefina Merla-Watson is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Mexican American Studies Program at the University of Texas-Pan American, and a former recipient of the Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship. She coedited, with Bill Mullen, Crossing the world color line: W.E.B. Du Bois’s writings on Asia (University Press of Mississippi, 2005), has authored chapters in The un/ making of Latino citizenship: Culture, politics, and aesthetics (Palgrave, 2014), and has published in ACME—An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies. Her current book project, tentatively entitled Coloniality, the mission city, and queer Tejan@ sensibilities, examines the role of affect and embodied epistemologies in queer Tejan@ cultural production. She has also co-curated with B.V. Olguín a dossier focused on the Latin@ speculative arts in the journal Aztlán (forthcoming, fall 2015).
Talita Oseguera is a twentysomething black woman whose passion is to increase access to healthcare. She works as Program Director of a non-profit adult day healthcare program with persons living with Alzheimer’s disease and other related dementias, in Berkeley, California. She is in the process of applying for a master’s degree in nursing programs and pursuing a career as a nurse practitioner. Talita has a three-year-old daughter. Her husband is away for six to nine months at a time pursuing his dream as a professional baseball player, and her life is parallel to that of a single mother. She feels incredibly blessed to have people, mostly
women, around her who support her emotionally and physically, and believes that there is true power in women supporting women. Talita attended a Black Women Birthing Justice sharing circle, and found it a powerful experience to hear the stories of other women around the circle and liberating to share her own story.
Imelda S. Plascencia is the Project Manager of Health Initiatives at the Dream Resource Center of the UCLA Labor Center, addressing the lack of access and healthcare for undocumented Californians. For the past 12 years, Imelda has organized with the immigrant rights movement as a Queer Undocumented activist. Her work centers on health justice and health access for immigrant communities, and intersectional organizing for LGBTQ immigrants.
Akeem T. Ray received his Bachelor’s degree in psychology with a minor in communications from Florida State University. He has conducted research on youth-related issues and wrongful convictions. He is the co-author of Black Youth and the Juvenile Justice System, published in The disparate treatment of black youth in the juvenile justice system. His plans are to attend graduate school and further his interest in psychology. His goal is to become a college professor and a researcher.
Fatimah Salahuddin is a first-generation African American undergraduate student at Mills College, majoring in ethnic studies and education, and she has a long history of social justice activism and equity advocacy within her community. During her first semester at Mills College she was one of three students nominated for the Harry S. Truman Scholarship for students who possess a commitment to a career in public service. In addition, she became the first (and only) Half the Sky Movement Campus Ambassador for the PBS documentary series Half the Sky: Turning oppression into opportunity for women worldwide, where she organized and hosted more than six screenings of the documentary throughout the Bay Area while spreading awareness of women’s rights. She has also been accepted into the accelerated dual-degree, Bachelorsto-Masters Program in Education with an Emphasis in Teaching, at Mills.
Amrah J. Salomón is a PhD candidate in ethnic studies at the University of California, San Diego. Her community work is focused on environmental justice, gender, sexuality, youth organizing, migrant rights, indigenous struggles, workerowned cooperatives, and the creation of economic and environmental autonomy as an alternative to displacement and globalization. Her master’s thesis examines the Partido Liberal Mexicano as a transnational and internationalist movement that organized on both sides of the border to further the Mexican revolution. In her doctoral research she explores decolonial theory and epistemology, as well as engaging with cultural and gender studies to develop a more nuanced theoretical framework for analyzing grassroots counter-hegemonic projects and transformative cross-border organizing.
Research Justice
Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Ngāti Awa, Ngāti Porou) has a professional background in Māori and indigenous education. She currently serves as Pro Vice-Chancellor Māori at the University of Waikato. Her research interests are wide ranging and collaborative, and include Marsden-funded research on the Native Schools system and on New Zealand youth. She is known internationally for her work on research methodology, and Māori and indigenous education. Her book, Decolonizing methodologies: Research and Indigenous peoples, has been translated into various languages and is highly regarded as a research text in indigenous and other research and educational institutes around the world. Many of her publications are credited with having helped to create the academic field of Māori and indigenous education.
Sandra E. Weissinger is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. Her research focuses on resistance and resiliency strategies engaged in by groups facing a range of inequalities. She does this through qualitative, often ethnographic, research studies. Weissinger is the author of A Sociology of black clergy in the state of Illinois: Activism and acquiescence in the post-civil rights generation. Recent selections of her work can also be found in Race, class & gender: An anthology (8th edn.) and Beginning a career in academia: A guide for graduate students of color
Andrea Zeffiro is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Communication, Popular Culture and Film at Brock University (Canada). Her research intersects the cultural politics of emerging technologies, contemporary media histories, art activism and social justice, with a particular focus on the practices and processes of experimental digital media production. Zeffiro is co-curator of No More Potlucks, the Canadian journal of arts and politics. andrea@nomorepotlucks.org • www.nomorepotlucks.org • @nomorepotlucks
Acknowledgments
Research Justice calls upon all community experts and witnesses to violence, legal violations, education and health disparities, and other social inequities to be active participants in processes for change and policy reform at local, regional, national, and global levels. The contributors to this volume are anchored with community organizations and non-profits, as well as with academic institutions. What the authors have in common is an understanding of the power associated with the knowledge production process as an outcome of research. I am deeply grateful to Miho Kim, former Executive Director of DataCenter: Research for Justice, for coining the phrase in 2006 and for envisioning the framework for the type of work that this group of university and community scholars are producing to make this book a reality. Kim’s voice and articulation of the concept of Research Justice call upon all marginalized population groups to place themselves at the center of their own healing in research as an act of ceremonial recovery. DataCenter: Research for Justice continues to be represented by a powerful team of dedicated staff members who contribute enormously to the ongoing work of articulating a Research Justice methodological framework: Celia Davis, Jay Donahue, and Bill Hogan. DataCenter: Research for Justice is also fortunate to be represented by amazing group of board members who lead with great vision and reciprocity in ensuring the success of the organizational mission. Many thanks to Marla, Aspen, Carolyn, Margaret, Aspen, Jill, Sujata, Miloney, Neil, and Max.
I also offer my thanks to Haruki Eda, who has been instrumental in thinking through some of the complexities of crafting a book of this nature. We have done our best to construct a project that includes the voices and methodologies of those living on the margins, as well as those who come from communities facing sociocultural and economic disparities. Andrew Millspaugh was extremely generous with his time in volunteering to provide crucial transcriptions of remarks delivered by prominent practitioners of Research Justice, Dr. Linda Tuhiwai Smith and Dr. Michelle Fine. The inclusion of these leading scholars in the manuscript is possible only because of Andrew’s fine work. I am also indebted to the Provost and Vice-President for Academic Affairs at San Francisco State University, Dr. Sue Rosser. The SFSU Office of Academic Affairs granted a sabbatical leave during the fall of 2013, which allowed me to compete the writing and editing for this first ever anthology on the foundations and possibilities for Research Justice as a new socially engaged form of methodological inquiry and action.
My department colleagues in American Indian Studies—Joanne Barker, Robert Keith Collins, Melissa Nelson, John-Carlos Perea, Gabriela SegoviaMcGahan, Amy Lonetree, Clayton Dumont, Jacob Perea, Esther Lucero, Sara Sutler-Cohen, Phil Klasky, Kathy Wallace, Amy Casselman, Jessica Hope LePak,
and Eddie Madril—have also been a wonderful resource for many years and I am very appreciative of their encouragement of my work for the past 13 years. I am, above all, most thankful to my family. They have seen me through so many difficult life challenges over the years. I am eternally grateful to my colleagues in Ethnic Studies and Native American and Indigenous Studies at UC San Diego and in Sociology and Black Studies at UC Santa Barbara who have inspired new thinking on Research Justice since its first publication 10 years ago. Special thanks as well to Speak Out and the American Indian Cultural Center of San Francisco for their work in shaping my thinking on Research Justice. Melanie Cervantes and Jesus Barraza of Dignidad Rebelde truly personify Research Justice in their daily work, and commitment to arts activism and community experts as research leaders. Much love and appreciation to Melanie and Jesus for allowing us the rights to use the image they created for the 42nd annual National Association for Ethnic Studies Conference, ‘Research as ceremony: Decolonizing ethnic studies,’ for the cover of this book. To my dear friends and warriors in the movement for justice and light in all of our communities, Corrina Gould and Fuifuilupe Niumeitolu thank you for your compassion, your courage, and friendship. I love you both dearly.
My parents have always demonstrated through their actions how deeply they love me, and how much they want me to succeed and contribute something meaningful. Even in death, my mother taught me to keep fighting and working to be the best person I can be. And, since her recent death in 2012, my father has taught me how to hold on to faith and to those you love. My parents were my first teachers when it came to Research Justice, for they knew that education coupled with love and an active commitment to equality would not only make my life better but would also add to the circle of individuals from marginalized communities who are working to transform the social order of power relations for the betterment of our world. Annetta and Kenneth Jolivétte, you are my hope and my inspiration for this work.
Foreword to 2015 edition
Miho Kim Lee, former Executive Director, DataCenter: Research for Justice
Approaching its 30th anniversary, in 2006, we at DataCenter began to ask ourselves how we could strengthen the impact of community-led campaigns and organizing by actively putting strategic information in the hands of communities leading change. As an organization with a long-standing mission of supporting the social justice movement through research, we observed that very few communities had the capacity to craft the ‘right’ research question, let alone harness the power of information to take calculated, purposeful action. In fact, organizing approaches that integrated research were few and far between. Community leaders who were neither social scientists nor policy makers possessed unique insights into genuine solutions to issues they addressed, from experiencing those issues firsthand. But theirs was a ‘talkstory,’ then there was ‘real’ research, done by ‘smart people’ in the Sciences, the currency at the policy-making table.
Many of our efforts to shift policies impacting disenfranchised populations have led to key victories. Yet, there was a palpable trepidation in embracing research among grassroots organizations and their constituents. The statement by Dr. Linda Tuhiwai-Smith that ‘research’ is “one of the dirtiest words” rang true for us and our own communities here in the United States, having been scrutinized and de-legitimized through outsider-led ‘research.’ And so, we began to feel the need for a powerful strategy to reverse the role of the passive ‘research subject’ we’ve been conditioned to assume as oppressed peoples, and to proactively redefine ‘research’ as nothing short of an emancipatory concept on our journey towards making change.
Here we were, at DataCenter and the Environmental Justice movement I served as researcher, claiming that “people who experience injustices firsthand are the experts.” The irony was not lost on us.
Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples by Dr. Linda Tuhiwai-Smith ignited an irreversible momentum towards our Research Justice mission by helping us find our voice in our critique of research as we knew it. We launched a two-year movement assessment on Research Oppression in an attempt to unpack the hidden barriers to grassroots ownership of research. During this process, I articulated what I had observed as ways in which inequity prevailed in research, perpetrating a sense of exclusion and disempowerment in marginalized populations:
Research Justice
1. lack of access to (accurate) data about themselves and their experiences in mainstream sources (for example, census, and so on);
2. mis/under representation of those communities in the mainstream data sources;
3. assault(s) on/violation of individual political and collective cultural rights, justified by data-backed allegation of criminality and immorality;
4. lack of community control over production, documentation, possession, and use of their own data;
5. lack of mainstream political legitimacy as valid, credible producers of data.
The systemic change agenda underlying these challenges is the very fact that western science dominates the world of ‘valid’ knowledge production in policy making. This assumption implies that communities that did not practice western science historically lack a legitimate means of knowledge production worthy of recognition in decision making that impacts their own lives. In other words, Research Justice acknowledges that traditional western science operates from a paternalistic position of assumed superiority that has been unsuccessful in producing meaningful reforms and social justice for indigenous nations and communities of color. We knew that the social sciences nor other investigative research methods DataCenter employed in and of themselves would not deliver the long-term solutions necessary to obtain the political empowerment and cultural sovereignty of peoples and nations most impacted by Research Oppression.
The framework of Research Justice situated community-driven research as a vehicle for the community to reclaim, own and wield all forms of knowledge and information as political ammunition in their own hands, in ways that are consistent with the community’s unique cultural and spiritual identity, and values and traditions. All methods of producing the building blocks of our own worldview and realities must be recognized as equally valuable and relevant, if not critical, on a par with those validated and accepted in dominant institutions. In order for this to become reality, I argued, communities must achieve:
• access to information (not just misinformation and outside expert research but what they truly seek and deserve) that impacts their lives;
• ability to define what is valid ‘knowledge,’ as well as methods to produce this
• capacity to produce their own knowledge;
• capacity to use all forms of knowledge; and
• control over all stages of the ‘knowledge lifecycle’—from producing, analyzing, interpreting, packaging and deploying knowledge—on an equal footing with all other institutions in society.
Although Research Justice did not become DataCenter’s explicit mission until 2010, by 2007, DataCenter had begun to argue publicly that Research Justice is in itself a part of a racial, economic, and social justice agenda that insists on the right of communities for their independent and autonomous capacity to
not only effect policies that impact their lives, but to transform the notion of who has the right to determine research questions, designs, and methodologies on their own terms. We began to shape processes of community-led inquiry based on whether they centered indigenous and community of color knowledge systems as legitimate, truth-telling experts who have the power, agency, and their ability to shape the research process from the beginning and completion of the research process, and the outcomes of deploying their own research. By 2013, DataCenter’s programs were restructured under these three complementary frameworks: (1) Community’s Right to recognized and authoritative community expertise, (2) Community’s ‘Right to Know,’ and (3) Community’s ‘Right to be Heard.’ The staff and board teamed up to build the field of Research Justice, to galvanize the support and solidarity of allies across sectors, issues, discipline, and geography, because Research Oppression impacted everyone.
The first time DataCenter formally introduced ‘Research Justice’ publicly was in October 2007, when we convened a community forum, hosted by our long-time funder, San Francisco Foundation, with much thanks going to Ron Rowell, Program Officer of the then Social Justice Program. Much to our pleasant surprise, more than 50 people packed the room, representing county departments, foundations, community-based organizations, intermediaries, organizers, and journalists. Everyone came to discuss: how is research going to help us build a sustainable movement? What is the right model and approach of ‘research’ to pursue this goal, if different from existing academic or journalistic investigative models, if at all? And how should it be used in the context of grassroots organizing? And, ultimately, for those of us identifying as research allies for communities, what does all this mean for how we do our research?
Among some popular needs expressed were “best practices, so organizations have a guide on how to do this type of participatory research as an active reference to help implement projects step by step;” “multi-disciplinary approach that brings policy advocates, academics, and communities; not just one or the other;” and “case studies”.1
Armed with a brand new Research Justice mission, DataCenter’s 2010-14 strategic priorities plan provided a clear trajectory, based on the mandate from our allies in the social justice movement and convenings such as this, as well as our Board of Directors, for our programs to tackle all of these needs. Board members including Max Weintraub and Neil Tangri strongly advocated for publishing Research Justice, and helped successfully recruit Dr. Andrew Jolivétte to join the board as a key leadership figure to make this happen. It is in this context that this publication project was given life.
In 2012, Dr. Rachel Pfeffer, long-time DataCenter advisor, introduced us to Dr. Michelle Fine, founder of the Public Science Project at CUNY, who in turn introduced us to her “good friend,” Dr. Linda Tuhiwai-Smith, and together, we all envisioned a gathering of kindred spirits from near and far, to which Dr. Fine
1 Miho Kim, ‘Research Justice initiative: How it began,’ DataCenter website, 2012, www.datacenter.org/wp-content/uploads/Research_Justice.pdf
referred as a “bi-coastal sauna” in conjunction with the east coast celebration of the 15th anniversary of ‘Decolonizing methodologies’ she was organizing at CUNY. The result was DataCenter’s 35th anniversary event in Oakland, CA, the following year, titled ‘Decolonizing Knowledge: Towards a Research Justice Praxis,’ in partnership with the American Educational Research Association in time for its annual meeting, transcripts of which are included in this book.
As DataCenter’s five-year plan draws to a close, we are proud to have published groundbreaking Research Justice resource guides for grassroots communities ready to strengthen their organizing through their own research (www.datacenter. org/research-tools/research/). Complementing these works, The Research Justice Handbook: Strategies for Sacred Methodologies opens up the intellectual ‘sauna’ about the importance and power of transforming research methodologies and practices from the margin to the center, to ensure that all voices, especially those most impacted by social science research, are not only counted and heard, but also repositioned from subjects to genuine, recognized experts.
Genuine multiculturalism in research methods is the vision DataCenter seeks to advance as a Research Justice organization. If this were achieved, community members would be recognized by default to be the ‘real experts’ in the issues they face every day, not only among their families and sympathizers, but also the policy makers and other institutions participating in decision making at the table. Research Justice praxis continues to thrive. It is our hope that this book project help advance this important work, towards our collective vision of a beautiful paradigm shift.
Foreword
Mary Romero
The call for research on justice is crucial as the world experiences the emergence of repressive governments and reactionary nationalist movements. In confronting claims that social sciences must be value-free and objective, scholar-activists point out that empiricists’ research is often ignored and their biases denied. Assertions of value-free research have frequently been exposed as simply asserting the standpoint of the status quo. Scholars committed to social justice were often confronted with populist beliefs in falsehoods posed as legitimate and referenced as “alternative facts” or incomplete information. Ignoring scientific evidence in developing social policies deprives communities of the resources to initiate social changes to address problems. Ideological positions that maintain the notion of alternative facts to evidence-based research promote social policies that benefit powerful institutions rather than advancing social change required to address world problems such as climate change. Dismissing or ignoring major crises in the world only worsens social issues. Anti-science aggression has become increasingly apparent in “government efforts to restrict the use of public funds to address reproductive health, antiracism efforts, gender affirming health care, climate science and vaccine development” (Mendez, 2024). The removal of funding threatens the ability of indigenous, communities of color, LGBTQI/2Spirit, and other marginalized people and societies to engage in the production of knowledge. Researchers face a political climate that rejects evidence-based findings particularly those topics that conservatives consider “woke.” Evidence-based research conducted in the interest of marginalized communities is urgently needed to advance paths toward social change and transformations required to address the increasing wealth gap, lack of affordable housing, access to healthcare, warfare, and global climate change. These crises are not simply national in scope but are manifested across the “free world” including Western Europe, the Americas, and Pacific nations like Japan and Australia. They are also linked.
The United States is currently witnessing the public education systems stripped of many advances made in the past. The public schools that John Dewey called the engines of democracy are being privatized and replaced by special interest groups including religion, social class, and ideological perspectives. A growing number of legislators and governors promote university mandates to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programming, which is accused of disadvantaging white citizens. In higher education attacks on DEI have led to the elimination of, or budget cuts in, departments accused of covering race, class, and gender topics considered woke. These departments under fire are
sociology, gender and sexuality studies, and ethnic studies. Some DEI mandates include the elimination of women’s centers, multicultural centers, and even DEI contracts with outside vendors (Betts, 2024). Attacks on DEI initiatives followed the campaign to ban books on gender, people of color, and LGBTQI/2Spirit individuals. As I write this in August 2024, in the public “New College” of Florida, entire sections of library books with gender, race, and LGBTQI/2Spirit themes are being hauled off to dumps (Luscombe, 2024). In Utah, books banned in school libraries must be destroyed and rendered unreadable; they cannot be given away or resold (Harris, 2024). An increasing number of academics engaged in scholarship about slavery, critical race theory, LGBTQI/2Spirit, homelessness, poverty, or other social justice issues find themselves censored or receiving death threats and hate mail from conservative interest groups such as Turning Point, the United States’ “professor watchlist” (Abrams, 2023) or the Canary Mission that is proud to document and persecute people and groups that “promote hatred of the USA, Israel and Jews on North American college campuses” (home page, Canary Mission website). In the spring of 2024, faculty (Lennard, 2024) and even university presidents have lost their positions for allowing pro-Palestinian speech (Saul et al., 2023). These political actions not only silence and intimidate but also threaten to erase the history, experiences, and knowledge production of societies outside non-white western traditions (Kiger, 2023) or from the LGBTQI/2Spirit communities (Meehan et al., 2023). Perpetuating elitist forms of knowledge production silences scholar-activists, particularly indigenous and communities of color.
While research by marginalized communities is threatened, researchers enter those communities to conduct research without local knowledge, consent, or input into the research design. These published findings may not serve the interests of the community and may lead to the bases for draconian social policies having dire consequences for residents. Research conducted from the standpoint of the researcher’s career goals, disciplinary interests, or opposition groups, has left marginalized communities distrustful of federal, state, local, and university research projects. An increasing number of universities conceptualize research as a knowledge enterprise in which entrepreneurship is seen as vital to research funded and valued by educational institutions. Research partnerships with industry and corporations are valued more highly than collaborations with workers or powerless communities. The legacy of research on marginalized communities has left many distrustful of researchers and unlikely to perceive research as significant in their pursuit of self-determination and justice. Being a research subject carries centuries of violence that accompanied slavery and colonialization. To acknowledge the racist dehumanization of black people in research, recall “surgical experiments to correct vaginal fistulas without the use of anesthesia (performed) on enslaved women who did not have the power to consent or decline his surgeries” or the black men in the Tuskegee Study who were diagnosed with syphilis and not treated (Nnoli, 2023: 781). Cases of descendants of slaves and indigenous communities exploited as research subjects are rarely studied in the detail that students are taught methods, such
as interview skills or questionnaire design. Only graduate students conducting research may encounter these issues when having to get permission to research human subjects from the Institutional Review Board (IRB). IRB approval in the United States means the proposed research has fulfilled the federal regulations established by the Department of Health and Human Services and Food and Drug Administration. While these regulations were established to primarily keep persons identified as human subjects in research from coercion, physical, and emotional harm, they have a second purpose, which is to protect institutions sponsoring the project from legal jeopardy. Most university IRBs have criteria defining human subjects research as systematic investigation designed to produce generalizable knowledge. IRBs recognize knowledge that is “generalizable,” conducted in and for the standard academic work, such as presenting findings at conferences, publishing in journals, books, and dissertations, that contributes to an existing body of knowledge and from which other investigators, scholars, and practitioners benefit. Once students and researchers complete the human subjects research training modules of the IRB and become certified, further examination is rare and research abuse is no longer considered unless a complaint is filed. Furthermore, communities organizing around local environmental or economic issues may not produce the “generalizable knowledge” necessary for an IRB application, but rather are concerned with producing their own knowledge, sometimes called autoethnography, that reflects the researcher’s experiences. This misidentifies community members as insider researchers but may also produce data used in developing social policies. Moreover, justice research may be unrecognizable to many academics because emphasis is placed on insider-led research, that not only places the needs of the community at the forefront but emphasizes community control over knowledge production, ownership use of knowledge, and social betterment rather than “generalizable science.” Beginning with the development of the research question(s), design of the study, analysis, interpretation, and dissemination of findings, the community has the research legitimacy attributed to academics and practitioners. Justice research turns standard institutional research back on its feet as it employs research activity to understand local issues in the way community members face daily life. Research questions generate data that recognize community knowledge and lived experiences. Activist scholars and researchers work as allies rather than outsiders doing a research project; the goal is to empower communities to support a movement for social change. The process is built on the belief that community input and partnerships in designing, conducting, and analyzing research strengthen the potential of developing relevant social policies. Engaging in research helps communities to be better able to shape policies that are based on scientific evidence rather than what may be anti-democratic policies favoring universities and rich corporations.
Methodologies engaging justice research have become more critical than a decade ago when Andrew J. Jolivétte’s first edition of Research justice: Methodologies for social change was published. New generations call for research embracing social justice and assure that communities of color and the poor are at the
center of decision-making. In this political climate, universities may no longer be the best places to engage in justice research. So-called “public universities” are increasingly buffeted by the winds of power—rejecting research on, for instance, climate change, environmental effects, war, and genocide. Some states have passed anti-DEI legislation that restricts funding for social justice research. Even private universities are pressured by rich benefactors to prohibit certain kinds of research. Educational institutions are increasingly shifting educational projects toward profit-making projects and collaborations with corporations, rather than committing to service for surrounding communities. Building on literature on decolonizing multidisciplinary methodologies, Jolivétte and his former colleagues at the Oakland DataCenter have developed best practices for using methodologies that place control of the research process in marginalized communities. These communities may include impacts from industrial brown fields, environmental racism and classism, the effect of political policing of hospital procedures, and banning some educational subjects and library collections. Since conducting justice research is different that mainstream research, rethinking the process includes discussing essential questions about the link to social change:
How is research going to help us build a sustainable movement? What is the right model and approach of “research” to pursue this goal, if different from existing academic or journalistic investigative models, if at all? And how should it be used in the context of grassroots organizing? And, ultimately, for those of us identifying as research allies for communities, what does all this mean for how we do our research? (Lee, 2015: xix, original emphasis)
Research presented in the following chapters demonstrate obstacles researchers may confront in conducting social justice research, ways to establish equal partnership with community-based programs and grassroot organizers, and how to include journalists, foundations, and government officials to retain community control over knowledge production. In the western world there are a great many social policies with major impacts on the lives and livelihoods of communities devastated by knowledge production across disciplines that continues to be subjugated by the dominant classes in the west, resulting in depictions of life experiences represented by persons living in the richest countries in the world. This produces a distorted understanding of social issues that are disconnected from the western world and ignoring first world impacts on the global south. Without knowledge production from marginalized communities in the west and the global south, we are limiting our ways of knowing. During the decades that the Oakland DataCenter thrived, it was one of a few truly transformative research centers offering communities equal partnerships with researchers.
Jolivétte’s conceptualization of Research Justice reminds us of the valuable work faculty and students can do by not only embedding our scholarly endeavors with community organizations and non-profits but by recognizing community activists’ comprehension of social issues and valuing their visions for
their neighborhoods and for their children. To appreciate and recognize their visions, Jolivétte reminds us that we need to recognize more than mainstream knowledge. Other significant forms of knowledge are experiential, cultural, and spiritual (I would add historical)—all of which should have equal political power and legitimacy rather than just maintaining the hierarchy of mainstream knowledge. Social justice research goes beyond simply collecting data, analyzing, and generating findings but includes the goals of building the tools and visions of self-determination for community mobilization, social transformation, and policy reform. Jolivétte introduces the notion of sacred methodologies, unrelated to any religious meaning, but rather refers to methodologies that center a “reciprocal relationship between researcher, participant, and community” (7) and consist of radical love (for example, caring for research participants as family), transformative justice, and collective action. Within this context, research is envisioned “as a ceremonial act of mutual respect and co-sharing” (7). Embracing these components of Research Justice allows marginalized communities to begin healing from the violence of being exploited and dehumanized by past research endeavors and the ongoing trauma of globalization and capitalism. Marginalized communities can experience the empowerment of knowledge production and the research process as a collective action of resistance.
References
Abrams, Z., 2023, Academic independence under fire, Monitor on Psychology, 54, 5, 71
Betts, A., 2024, What to know about state laws that limit or ban D.E.I. efforts at colleges, The New York Times, April 21, www.nytimes.com/2024/04/21/ us/dei-education-state-laws.html
Canary Mission, home page, https://canarymission.org
Harris, E.A., 2024, Utah bans 13 books from all public schools, The New York Times, August 6, www.nytimes.com/2024/08/06/books/utah-public-schoolbook-ban.html
Lennard, N., 2024, University professors are losing their jobs over “New McCarthyism: on Gaza,” The Intercept , May 16, https://theintercept. com/2024/05/16/university-college-professors-israel-palestine-firing/ Luscombe, R., 2024, “Far from ideal”: DeSantis’s war on “woke” colleges goes painfully awry, The Guardian, August 25, www.theguardian.com/us-news/ article/2024/aug/25/ron-desantis-woke-university-policy-florida-sarasotanew-college
Kiger, P.J., 2023, The 15 most banned books in America this year, Los Angeles Times, May 15, www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2023-0515/15-most-banned-books-2022-2023
Lee, M.K., 2015, Foreword, in A.J. Jolivétte (ed.) Research justice: Methodologies for social change, Bristol: Policy Press, xvii–xx
Meehan, K., Friedman, J., Baéta, S., and Magnusson, T., 2023, Banned in the USA: The mounting pressure to censor, Pen America, https://pen.org/report/ book-bans-pressure-to-censor/
Mendez, S., 2024, Anti-science harassment is on the rise, Inside Higher Education, August 14, www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2024/08/14/antiscience-harassment-rise-opinion?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_ campaign=8e63ac97c4-DNU_2021_COPY_02&utm_medium=email&utm_ term=0_1fcbc04421-8e63ac97c4-197569029&mc_cid=8e63ac97c4&mc_ eid=5ae66179e3
Nnoli, A., 2023, Historical primer on obstetrics and gynecology health inequalities in America: A narrative review of four events, Obstetrics& Gynecology, 142, 4, 779–86
Saul, S., Blinder, A., Hartocollis, A., and Farrell, M., 2023, Penn’s leadership resigns amid controversies over antisemitism, The New York Times, December 11, www.nytimes.com/2023/12/09/us/university-of-pennsylvania-presidentresigns.html
Preface: Research Justice 10 years later
Wi hokišak
kuš: We the Seeds. We the Circuits. We Are the Answer.
In the 10 years since this book was first published the world has changed considerably. The lines between the researched and the researcher have not yet collapsed, but we have put millions of holes in western foundational tenets that once suggested that the only way to do credible research was to disassociate from our subjects. To be objective was to leave our own identities at the door. This is absolutely the worst and least informed type of research we could ever do. Over the past decade the term Research Justice (RJ) has exploded all over the world. From articles, books, and conferences to a Justice Studies Ph.D. program at the University of New Orleans and the Research Justice Scholar in Residence program at Mills College in Oakland, California, we have witnessed the seeds of change beginning to sprout. We have seen what I term rupture making grow from city to city across the globe.
Rupture making is a process of disrupting, refusing, challenging, and transforming societal and colonial norms about power, belonging, community, and social justice. Each of us is what I identify as a rupture maker in a constellation of rupture makers where we make up a circuit that can collectively transform society for the better. But when we remove one of us, when one circuit is disconnected, the entire constellation comes to a halt. From 2015 to 2016 we saw a shift in global thinking related to conservative principles with the election of Donald J. Trump. Since the end of his time in office through the near end of President Biden’s term as president we have seen a rising tide of white nationalist and white supremacists hate groups not just in the United States, but across Europe. In 2012 I wrote about the election of then President Barack Obama and what his election and his multiraciality might signal for the shifting political terrain of the United States. In the book, Obama and the biracial factor: The battle for a new American majority, I argued that the election of Obama to a second term might solidify what direction the United States might take … one perhaps more committed to education, social justice, and equity. And I also argued that we might witness what sociologists had been debating since the late 1970s and early 1980s—would the United States become a people of color majority country ruled by a white minority?
As we sit in anticipation of the coming United States presidential election of 2024 where we might witness another first (the first woman of color president in Kamala Harris), we are still plagued by questions about where this country and our world are going. No matter the outcome, the fact that 45–7% of people in the United States still support Donald Trump is more revealing about racial, economic, social, cultural, and political divisions than it is about Trump or
Harris. It tells us that racism, bigotry, transphobia, Islamophobia, and xenophobia continue to be pervasive in contemporary society. And after nearly a year of brutal violence in Gaza and a very strategic genocide being waged against Palestinians, after countless more police and school shootings, after greater environmental and health disparities, we are still fighting for research that is accessible, that is less violent, for research that acknowledges, affirms, and transforms for the better.
In the 10 years since our book on RJ was first published, the architect organization for RJ, the DataCenter, had to close its doors due to funding issues. This sadly is a common theme to be found within the non-profit policy world where funding competition is tight and cities, states, and governments continue to fail to direct funding where it can have greater impact and social change for the betterment of our society. Despite the collapse of the founding RJ organization, you have others that continue the legacy of the DataCenter. Data Justice Scholars at the University of California, Los Angeles is a program designed to support undergraduate learning experiences through a scholarship and year-long RJ curriculum and community-based project experience.
The Data Justice Scholars program fosters collaborative and community-engaged learning experiences for undergraduates. Over the course of a year, students will enroll in courses and interact with community partners to consider the interactions between databased research and social justice. As a result, students gain a critical understanding of how data-based technologies, search engines, and algorithms shape everyday experience, but also how data skills can be applied to strategically address community concerns and social inequities. Students will also engage the Los Angeles Data Justice Hub, a critical interactive educational tool offering a curated list of open-source datasets.1
For thousands of emerging leaders, scholars, community organizers, researchers, and policy makers, questions of how we go about solving the world’s greatest problems is deeply connected to the how we solve versus what we solve. This is because no matter the problem or social issue, if we do not address it with care, with love, with a sense of justice and with the community at the center of addressing the how, then we will ultimately fail. One of the many positive outcomes of RJ over the past decade has been seen at the high school and college level. A colleague and fellow RJ collaborator of mine, who is a recognized leader and high school/college educator, worked with students in Oakland, California high schools on developing their knowledge and skills around RJ by focusing on the work of some of the contributors to the first edition of this book. About a year ago, my colleague asked if I would share a quote to help inspire the students who had profiled the work we had done with the Research justice book. The following is that quote:
1 https://communityengagement.ucla.edu/programs/data-justice-scholars-program
Research Justice is ceremony. Research Justice is love. Our young folks are often robbed of the opportunity to recognize their full power. Research Justice is one tool that restores their power and ability to thrive and to center their own truths. Research has been both an ugly and violent word in our communities and RJ offers new restorative processes for acknowledging our own genealogical knowledge systems. BIPOC youth can harness Research Justice throughout their entire lives to witness and signify the truths of their own ancestors and perhaps most importantly the truths of their own generation in making justice a reality through lived spiritual and experiential knowledge production. This generation is the anecdote for generations deferred. Research Justice is the love language that may set us all free. (Personal communication, January 31, 2023)
This same educator communicated to me that “I’m facilitating a district-wide professional development workshop I designed this Thursday for all the capstone/ senior project teachers in Oakland about applying a research justice framework into these courses when teaching the youth about research.” In addition to this work, this educator also curated a RJ resource guide for the University of California, Berkeley library. Some of the organizations and resources attached to this guide are communities of practice that center RJ, data justice resources, and community archives, among others. The list identifies the following RJ communities of practice: Center for Disability Research Justice, Community Health Access Initiative, Public Science Project, Research Justice Institute, Solidarity Research Center, TM Health Justice: LA.2
While the list curated by my colleague, Fatimah Nadiyyah Salahuddin (Lecturer and secondary Humanities Faculty Advisor for the University of California, Berkeley Teacher Education Program) is not meant to be exhaustive, it is a critically important and foundational space with ample resources for both those new to and experienced in the work of RJ.3 In responding to Fatimah’s request for a quote I wanted to think about the collective power of communitydriven data collection and dissemination. The quote was shared with these educators from across the school district. This is one of many ripples, or what I call circuits, that contribute to cultural shifts within institutions that traditionally have not created space for thinking outside of the hierarchies of past research and data models of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Each educator, each student, each policy maker, tribal leader, and youth leader is a circuit in the constellation of circuits that make social change and transformative justice possible. When one circuit is halted, diminished, silenced, all other circuits suffer and so it is with the lessons of the past 10 years in mind that I share three key concepts to move us forward into the next decade and to
2 To learn more about the RJ Library Resource Guide, visit https://guides.lib.berkeley.edu/c. php?g=1353693&p=10028824
3 To learn more about Fatimah’s work, see https://bse.berkeley.edu/fatimah-nadiyyah-salahuddin
steward the vision and teachings at the foundation of the Research Justice and the DataCenter’s initial call to:
1. redefine research and expertise;
2. build legitimacy of community knowledge; and
3. under stand the role of research institutions.4
So, as colleges and universities and high schools develop RJ courses, Ph.D. programs, and faculty fellowships among other RJ-centered opportunities, there continue to be major issues that RJ must contend with to increase space for community to be stewards of research agendas and practices. The goal of RJ has not changed. It is strategic. It is transformative. It is revolutionary.
As the RJ toolkit (2015) argues, transforming and engaging the research process is as important (if not more) as the research outcome. This has never been truer as we look at the many changes to our world, from Brexit (the UK withdrawal from the European Union) to the creation of the Paris Climate Agreement in 2016 that called for global reforms to climate change and climate justice movements. What we need is to also hear from those most marginalized who have held knowledge for centuries but who have been silenced. American Indian and indigenous leaders, for example, have led on climate justice before it was ever called climate justice because we cared for the world in ways that didn’t require us to make policies that would curb the destruction of the environment.
Linda Tuhiwai Smith, one of the amazing contributors to this volume, argues that self-determination in research allows us to more than accomplish political goals. Self-determination in research allows us to achieve social justice and positive societal transformation. This is the ongoing gift and struggle for RJ movements in the academy and in the public sphere. Two questions that I am often asked regarding RJ is how to implement it and how it differs from Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) or Participatory Action Research (PAR). While I’ve addressed the latter question in the first edition of the book, I want to add here that we owe a great debt to CBPR and PAR practitioners who are connected to a longer legacy and genealogy of justiceoriented research that many contemporary thinkers attribute to Paulo Freire, who, through his writing, became a global figure in the origins of a global movement for justice-oriented education, research, and organizing.
Control over knowledge production, like power to control the means of production in the economy, has a similar effect in creating hierarchies and disproportionate access to information, data, and policy-making capabilities. In our 2015 RJ toolkit, the DataCenter shared the following model for what we termed the Knowledge Factory. The three major components of this model must be utilized today. We are still working to transform the Knowledge Factory and the shift in access to media, devices, and communication devices through the
4 https://www.powershift.org/sites/default/files/resources/files/Intro_Research_Justice_ Toolkit_FINAL1.pdf
emergence of new platforms and technologies such as TikTok, X, and artificial intelligence that force us to re-examine both the new capabilities open to us to expand access, but also the risk of the few controlling the data and information being received by even more communities. So, in 2025 and beyond, let RJ practitioners center the Knowledge Factory model, where we:
1. identify sources of information found across the spectrum from grassroots to mainstream;
2. collect, assess, and process information so that it tells accurate stories and gains power with its audience; and
3. package and present the information to move different audiences to action.
So, what do we do now that more information is so readily available at our fingertips with the click of a button than we have ever had before?
As we return to this conversation 10 years later, we must recenter the original call to leverage community knowledge, to provide the space to be heard, and the right to know, so that we can utilize mainstream information alongside community knowledge to package and create new policies that will have a transformative impact on society. Think, for example, of the ways that Black Lives Matter, the #MeToo movement and No DAPL (NO Dakota Access Pipeline) have all leveraged community knowledge to create grassroots social movements to resist mainstream knowledge that has served to uplift and maintain the status quo. Think about how Black Lives Matter and the protests of 2020 around the murders of black women, men, and transgender and LGBTQI/2Spirit people was made possible through online technologies.
Other world events since Research Justice was first published shed light on the current state of the world and of the challenges that remain. Events such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the legalization of gay marriage, the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and 2024, the Gaza genocide, the Russia–Ukraine war, the fall of Roe v. Wade and abortion rights all signal that not just the United States, but the world, is at a critical cross-roads where access is the number one determinant of justice. Access to education, to healthcare, to work, to food and a healthy environment, and adequate housing and clean water are all questions that RJ can address when we understand that we cannot continue to follow past research and governing practices that are violent, colonial, exclusionary, hierarchical, and, most importantly, that center the individual over the collective.
COVID-19 is a perfect example of centering individual rights versus the collective good. As many of the emergent and emboldened white nationalist groups post-Trump demonstrate, public health and safety was second to people’s right to be maskless, to not get vaccinated, to congregate in public and in private, because, after all, COVID-19 was a “government hoax,” a “conspiracy,” and the government had no right to meddle in people’s lives, yet the reverse has been true when it comes to a woman’s right to choose. So, as we work collectively in ceremony to bring about greater access to RJ, we must turn to epistemological systems that are centered in the holistic rather than the
individualistic worldviews. Most contemporary societies are deeply rooted in capitalism, so to ever completely move toward a center where justice is enacted we also must change our ideological foundation which is rooted in imperialism, individualism, and competition. One such model I want to share with readers is the Louisiana Indigenous Thrivance Model that I developed in 2020. The model was first published in 2023 and argues that we must center community as our medicine and our collective purpose can only be accomplished when we turn to the water and to the land of our origins and hold ceremony. In this context, ceremony does not have to be in the religious or spiritual sense. It has more to do with a level of commitment and a pedagogical practice that is guided by working with others who we share a common bond with to collectively act.
Source: Jolivétte (2023)
So, as we turn to thrivance models we must center joy and what I wrote about as radical love in the first edition of this book. As some readers may recall, radical love is about acknowledging our vulnerabilities and facing them collectively with others so that we can begin a process of healing. Indeed, radical love in action is to turn our collective traumas and joys into moments and opportunities to save our lives so that we might thrive. Additionally, I want to call on readers, organizers, researchers, and policy makers (all of us) to center our core values and pedagogies. In the thrivance article (Jolivétte, 2023), I argue that there are eight core values and pedagogies that can help us to move intersectional RJ research forward in a productive way. These include centering kinship relations; engaging inheritance refusals; fostering relational accountability; emboldening radical love; envisioning multiplicity; prioritizing transformative justice; activating ceremonial wellness; and weaving collective thrivance circuits (Jolivétte, 2023). I want to focus briefly on the very last of these principles or core values for achieving RJ,
Land
Water
Ceremony
Medicine
Wi hokišak kuš
Figure 1: Louisiana Indigenous Thrivance Model
weaving collective thrivance circuits. The phrase Wi hokišak kuš in our Ishak language means we are all deeply connected. This work of creating and weaving thrivance circuits depends upon our ability to see one another as our relatives, as connected to my own life story.
When I traveled to Sydney, Australia, for the first time in 2014 for the International Indigenous Pre-Conference on HIV/AIDS, I quickly noticed many similarities between the local Indigenous communities there and with Native communities in the United States. The relationship building felt like a weaving process as stories were shared and kinship was created in a sustainable way. To this day, I continue those relationships with Indigenous peoples I met from Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. The theme of the conference where I was to deliver a keynote address spoke powerfully to this concept of collective weaving to produce thrivance circuits, “Our Story, Our Time, Our Future” centered our interdependent relationships as community members, knowledge keepers, organizers, scientists, and researchers. It was during the conference meetings and events that I got this strong sense of kinship from the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples that I was fortunate to meet. The best way to describe the experience is that I felt like I was at home in Louisiana. Reflecting on that moment, it wasn’t just the similarities in terms of gift exchanges, land acknowledgments, or cultural protocols and dances, it was the shared sense of humor, the connection around land and food and family. I also felt one of the strongest senses of belonging in my life. Black Australians, like me, face color discrimination and yet are quite proud of their identities even in the face of anti-Blackness and “settler” violence. It was there, in those moments, that I knew kinship, not citizenship was the driving force behind Indigenous thrivance. Enacting research justice-based kinship requires an understanding and a centering of BIPOC practices, knowledges, and critical engagements of reciprocity or what Shawn Wilson (2008) terms “relational accountability.” The Core Values of Research Justice have and will always be about relational accountability to something greater than our individual selves. It must be about collective, transformational liberation for us all. (Jolivétte, 2023: 234)
It is with this purpose of creating the language and tools for building thrivance circuits and for planting seeds to forever change how we engage data and research that I offer the following five recommendations to practice, steward, and build upon RJ into the next decade and for those generations still yet to come.
1. Wellness seeds: Moments, events, places, people, and unspoken signs that contribute to positive reinforcement of your core values, encouragement
of your ability to overcome and do great things even when you’re told that you cannot, and collective growth and wellness through the sharing of these moments, events, places, people, etc. These are foundational moments that we store in our memory bank that we can return to repeatedly to replenish our souls when we get tired, confused, frustrated, or hurt by social, political, cultural, or economic policies and events that diminish our abilities to be our best selves. Wellness seeds can come in the form of our neighbors, our mentors, a stranger, an accomplishment, and when it is shared and contributes to the growth of others this is the garden of justice bearing fruit.
2. Collective joy creation: This is actualized when people with shared experiences, identities, and histories come together to address both the most joyful and the most painful moments of their lives so that they can fortify themselves with bonds that cannot be broken and become relationships that can be returned to in moments of triumph and challenge. Collective joy creation is when people committed to social change and transformative justice through education, data justice, and RJ work to build kinship networks and communities of love and action that are welcoming spaces for member of our communities who are often left out of discussions related to public policy, data collection, and political decisions. When we center and enact collective joy creation we come together with respect for our uniqueness, and we acknowledge that each of us has a voice in making the world a better place.
3. Intentional stewardship: When we are born, each of us receives some sort of teachings. They can come from parents, other relatives, teachers, mentors, friends, enemies, ancestors, water ways, and other natural elements. They will serve us in some way no matter what they are and even if they might be considered “negative” we can take that information, that teaching and experience, to find new and more just ways to live in the world. We take what we inherit, and we refuse what doesn’t work and we embrace that which nourishes our wellness and knowledge base. This then allows us to be stewards of justice studies, of research practices that uplift rather than judge, of social movements that create growth and new futures of possibility. Intentional stewardship is when we have a mission and a commitment to work to make the local, regional, and global spaces we inhabit more safe, more affirming, and more just for all communities. We then act with intention to pass along our knowledges to those who may need it most and we are also open to a reciprocal exchange where we accept and learn the first teachings and stewardship practices of other members of our communities as well as from strangers that we come into contact with on a limited basis as well as on a permanent basis. These are stewardship kinship networks that, when enacted with wellness seeds and collective joy creation, allow us to act from a place of reverence and sacredness that acknowledges every action we take has a direct impact on all living things.
4. Ritual resonance: Gatherings are where communities are made. Rituals are where we create connections and lifelong relationships, and these rituals come in many forms but what they all have in common is that there is a
sense of resonance that nurtures and fortifies the spirit and determination of social justice advocates, researchers, and knowledge keepers.
5. Thr ivance circuitry continuance: All four of the previous recommendations lead us to the fifth and final recommendation/RJ framework. When we plant wellness seeds, we become the answer! We become the solution! We create a kinship network that is now dependent on the ability of each seed, of each person and each community to form new circuits that will continue well past our own lifetimes. In this way we begin a joy practice that is contagious, consistent, and operationalized through a daily commitment to renew our hearts to do the work of centering the most vulnerable, of uplifting and stepping back so that others can lead. We are all here for a short period of time and what we leave behind are circuits of continuance that instill a focus on thriving as opposed to competition. Thrivance continuance is at the center of a RJ love practice that is embodied through daily actions that ensure future generations will continue and will be even better positioned to engage in RJ as a practice of freedom and liberation.
As you read through the multi- and trans-disciplinary chapters of this collection, may you recall the ways in which the formerly incarcerated, the survivors of natural disaster, and the indigenous peoples of the world are calling for global liberation and for more just and archives. May you recall the words of Miho Kim, Michelle Fine, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, and each of our contributors who are still calling out to us to remember that we are the seeds. We are the circuits. We are the answer. May the next decade bring more RJ practice through writings, performance, data justice, archive justice, through seminars, scholar programs, podcasts, and other multi-media platforms. May the power of RJ ignite each of us to do more for our planet and for our communities. Below you will find a few practical items that were not included in the original text.
First, try out the DataCenter’s RJ bingo activity followed by the flower petals of knowledge. Each of these exercises will allow participants to engage with one another in meaningful ways and will equip readers and research practitioners with skills and tools to communicate how to best practice RJ through a shift in the center of power from institutions to people. Many years ago, I was working with the University of Washington’s Indigenous Wellness Research Institute as an IHART (HIV/AIDS Research Training) Fellow, and I recall the following quote that was shared by a Native elder from the Pacific Northwest. She said, “We don’t need more Indian experts. We need more expert Indians!” The idea as a simple one, but still difficult to accomplish in the face of ongoing colonialism. The idea is that we need to lead within and across and outside of our communities, but the expertise always begins internally. I hope that you will enjoy the activities below and that they will inspire you to act in your own local, regional, national, or international communities. I hope that you will see yourself as the seed. As the circuit. As the answer. I end with a poem that I wrote several years ago, “Give it All to the People,” which was recently published in the book, Gumbo circuitry: Poetic routes, gastronomic legacies. I share it to close this 10th
anniversary edition as my call to all of you to do everything you can on behalf of your ancestors. On behalf of the people who give you life. The people both blood and chosen that sustain you and inspire you to be a RJ steward. As you end this poem and as you read or re-read the book, I call upon all of you to do one last thing. Write your own one-paragraph Research Justice Commitment Statement (RJCS). Share your RJCS with those with whom you collaborate. Review it daily or weekly or whatever works best for you. Revise it. Recommit to it. Live it and spread wellness seeds. You are the seeds, the circuits, the answer to deepening the impact of RJ today and tomorrow.
Give it all to the people When shadows come. When disaster strikes. When sorrows invade …
Give it all to the people!
Give your love.
Give your heart.
Give your commitment … Give it all to the people!
When you fear failure. When you are silenced by machines. When you have lost your will.
When you lose sight of footprints in sand …
Give it all to the people!
Give your breath.
Give your light.
Give your vulnerability … Give it all to the people!
Make the people your sacred love. Make the sands of immortality your salvation. Make love to justice. Make love to city streets.
When all around you seems unforgiving.
Give your breath,
Give your spirit,
Give your talent,
Give your will …
Give it all to the people!
Give as it has been given to you …
The people, your mothers, grandmothers!
The people, your fathers, grandfathers!
The people, your ancestors, your ancient ones!
Give it as it has been given to you.
Sacrifice.
Nurture.
Love unconditionally.
Whisper beauty through concrete walls …
Whisper beauty through institutional systems …
Whisper beauty in day and in night!
When all around you seems like defeat …
Give your breath.
Give your spirit.
Give your talent.
Give your will.
Give it all to the people!
… and remember—
You are sacred!
You are sacred!!
You are sacred!!!
You are of and by the people.
When you give,
You become free!
When you give,
You become flesh!
The flesh of the all the people.
You become re-birth.
You become the light.
You become a link.
You become—all the ancient ones …
Your become the answer.
You become all of the people.
Over and over again!!
Let Research Justice be an Answer.
Andrew J. Jolivétte October 2024
References
Jolivétte, A.J., 2023, Thrivance: An indigenous queer intersectional methodology, in M. Romero (ed.) Research handbook on intersectionality, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 234–5
Jolivétte, A.J., 2024, Gumbo circuitry: Poetic routes, gastronomic legacies, Oklahoma City, OK: That Painted Horse Press
PART I
Research Justice: Strategies for knowledge construction and self-determination
Chapter 1 examines the history and genealogy of Research Justice as both a theory and a method developed by the DataCenter: Research for Justice organization in Oakland, California. In this chapter, I explore the importance of Research Justice as a methodological intervention strategy to produce policy reform at local, regional and national levels. A comparative analysis of different types of knowledge (experiential, cultural/spiritual, and mainstream) and their forms of utilization demonstrate the power of centering community members as experts in the research process. The chapter also introduces two new innovative terms, radical love and Collective Ceremonial Research Responsiveness to frame the transformational approaches being taken on by each of the contributors to the volume. Building upon Community-based Participatory Research (CBPR), Collective Ceremonial Research Responsiveness (CCRR) in a Research Justice model contains three fundamental aspects: (1) it defines research processes as a collective endeavor and a shared knowledge creation process between academic and community researchers; (2) it creates, maintains, and engages with the knowledge that is produced by community experts, traditional knowledge keepers, as well as cultural leaders in ways that envision research as a ceremonial act of mutual respect and co-sharing; and (3) only research that is responsive to the social, legal, economic, cultural, and political policy needs as identified by community experts should be conducted.
The Collective Ceremonial Research Responsiveness model takes Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR) and Participatory Action Research (PAR) models a step further by shifting more dramatically the distribution of power in the research process by seeking to build ceremonial relationships and by yielding to the specific needs of community experts and community researchers. Chapter 2 by Antonia Darder builds on Chapter 1 by offering a much needed contextual discussion regarding the political and pedagogical significance of dissent in the process of producing various forms of knowledge and self-determination within a democratic society. Important here in this work is the author’s ability to highlight the struggle to move away from the hegemonic domestication of traditional schooling within the context of neoliberal reforms and toward a critical pedagogy of imagination, grounded in a humanizing and emancipatory ethics of everyday life.
Darder’s essay is a call to other education researchers to shift the pedagogical narratives that miss the importance of building relationships with all participants
in education reform from the student and parent to the teacher and administrator. Ultimately, her essay is about mutual respect and understanding within the context of a multicultural, democratic society where majority-minority relationships must be deconstructed and replaced with transformative acts of justice in the policy agendas of education officials at all levels of education in the United States. Her contribution, like the others in this section, attempts to link sacred methodologies with critical pedagogy and political dissent as tools of Research Justice in the contestation of hegemonic models of schooling that too often marginalizes students of color and indigenous peoples.
Building on the notion of a pedagogy of dissent, Chapter 3 examines the importance of single mothers as agents of change within political systems that often render women invisible. Like Darder, Freeman argues that it is crucial that researchers, policy makers, and community stakeholders build relationships that involve as many people as possible in the process of understanding contemporary social problems.
Amanda Freeman’s chapter, similar to the other chapters in Part I, asserts that knowledge construction and self-determination in a Research Justice framework can be accomplished by building relationships based on solidarity, transformative justice, and radical love. Freeman acknowledges both the gains and pitfalls of sharing an identity with the research participants in her study on poor single mothers. Rather than place these women into a deficit pathology model, the author asserts that, by encouraging the women to tell their own stories and to define their own forms of knowledge, they are achieving a certain level of self-determination and transformative justice.
This chapter, as with the others in this section, calls upon researchers to consider the sacred obligations and responsibilities of scholars and activists to create a space for mutual respect in defining research goals and questions. Ultimately Freeman’s scholarship is a call to other academics to understand their own subject position, and how it impacts their level of vulnerability in developing a relationship of solidarity and justice, without assuming that justice is the same thing as equality. Indeed, her chapter is a reflection on the power of Research Justice and sacred methodologies to build community knowledge and self-determination through an active engagement with participants as ‘family members,’ not simply as ‘human subjects.’
The prison industrial complex as a social and political system of oppression has existed for generations. Liam Martin explores the intricacies of positioning the incarcerated and formerly incarcerated at the center of research dealing with prison reform.
In Chapter 4 Liam Martin suggests a new, sacred methodology for conducting ethnographic research within the context of the Prison Industrial Complex. His deep connection and intention is to build a co-researcher relationship with Joe Badillo (a formerly incarcerated prisoner and co-investigator with Martin). Martin’s discussion reveals a high-level of commitment to the principles of Research Justice as a tool for shifting the power of academics as the sole researchers to one that places participants at the center of their own lives
and research questions. By forging a relationship based on solidarity, mutual respect, and transformative justice, Martin connects indigenous methodological practices with western methodologies to demonstrate the importance of knowledge construction and self-determination among incarcerated and formerly incarcerated peoples seeking justice and policy reform. This chapter, together with the others in this section, asserts that old research paradigms based on unequal relationships and outsider knowledge construction are no longer sufficient for working with populations that have traditionally been oppressed.
Traditionally oppressed populations are often marginalized to such a degree that members of these populations often become invisible. Over the past decade there has been a growing amount of attention globally on the rights of LGBT individuals, particularly related to same-sex marriage. Not unlike the prison reform movement, the Gay rights movement is often anchored in local and regional activist organizations that fight to bring greater attention to the disparities in the law that prevent queer people and the incarcerated from gaining greater social mobility.
Mél Hogan and Andrea Zeffiro (Chapter 5) posit that archival work within the context of queer movements and social science research has the potential to create new sacred methodological frameworks for creating community knowledge and self-determination among activist LGBTQI (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersexed) organizations and individuals. Building on the work in previous chapters in Part I, Hogan and Zeffiro offer innovative strategies to respond to the needs of traditionally marginalized queer populations vis-à-vis arts activism in Canada and beyond. Their work complements the other chapters in this volume by demonstrating the ways that communities that share marginal identities can come together to articulate, document, and disseminate important archival records that have the potential to shift traditional western approaches to conducting research where the knowledge of outsiders is often valued as more objective than that of the insiders who belong to the communities that are the subject of scientific study.
By claiming a space for queer organizers, artists, and activists, the co-authors are laying important groundwork for future studies within queer communities that seek to prioritize the sacred knowledge of research participants and community advocates who seek changes in public policies that have a tremendous impact on people who identify as LGBTQI. Moving the voices of queer people from the position of observer to participant provides crucial new strategies for bridging the divides between academia and the community as a space where sacred methodologies can produce social change at local, regional, and national levels.
Academics who come from communities of color or from other marginalized populations often feel torn when working within academia as a result of possibly having an activist and/or political organizing background. Making a commitment to academia that does not compromise one’s commitment to issues of social justice for the sake of tenure and promotion at the university level is a difficult act to balance, especially when it comes to maintaining researcher ethics and responsibilities to the communities where many of us have our origins.
According to Nicole Blalock, author of Chapter 6, ‘Committing oneself to the career path of an academic requires spending a lot of time thinking about “me.”’ She continues, ‘Decisions on performance, promotion, and tenure are based on what each of us can prove we accomplished, particularly on measures valued in academe—publishing in highly ranked journals, securing large grants, positive teaching reviews—and decisions inevitably include at least a little bit of politics. Sometimes, it can feel like the things that draw us to research in the first place are lost in the milieu.’ Written from the perspective a mixed-heritage scholar, her chapter, ‘More than me,’ is a reflective essay about maintaining the complex purposes and goals of choosing a career in educational research. In writing this, Blalock uses her own historicities (as she personally understands them) to ‘develop the narrative; in a voice that exists at the intersections of memory, narrative, and academic prose.’ It explores personal influences on the decision to engage in research meant to strengthen communities through their active involvement. By examining the role of self-development and scholar identity exploration during her graduate school experience, readers are shown the impact of interactions with faculty and peers during these formative years. Part story, part analysis, this chapter calls attention to the struggle to persist in community-centric research, where self-definition/determination and academic expectations often clash.
While embedded in her own experiences, this chapter highlights a historical way of knowing, understanding, and being in this world as elements impacting the practices of self as not just human, but as researcher as well. According Blalock, ‘It is a manifestation of my own radical love—vulnerable in its revealing of the many ways which colonization has broken down the manifest Indigeneity of myself and my family, but also hopeful that my contribution to the conversation of identity and reclamation prompts further exploration for how to build strategic alliances among all Indigenous Peoples for our collective push towards self-determination.’ Her chapter speaks to the profound ways by which academics are bridging the divide between indigenous methodologies that concern themselves with the sacred as a relationship of mutual respect, self-determination, and community-based knowledge construction. In many ways, Blalock’s chapter personifies that tenets of radical love by exposing the author’s own vulnerabilities and struggles with auto-ethnography, oral history, and Research Justice in her work as an indigenous researcher and activist.
1 Research Justice: Radical love as a strategy for social transformation
Andrew J. Jolivétte
Research Justice: Methodologies for social change builds upon the methodological frameworks developed by the national non-profit organization, DataCenter: Research for Justice (DCRJ). Research Justice is a strategic framework and methodological intervention that seeks to transform structural inequities in research. Research Justice centralizes community voices and leadership in an effort to facilitate genuine, lasting social change, and seeks to foster critical engagement with communities of color, indigenous peoples, and other marginalized groups to use research as an empowering intervention and active disruption of colonial policies and institutional practices that contribute to the (re)production of social inequalities in research and public policy.
DataCenter believes that Research Justice is achieved when marginalized communities are recognized as experts, and reclaim, own and wield all forms of knowledge and information. With strategic support, the knowledge and information generated by these communities can be used as political leverage to advance their own agendas for change. (DCRJ website, 2014)
Research Justice calls upon all community experts and witnesses to violence, legal violations, education and health disparities, and other social inequities to be active participants in processes for change and policy reform at local, regional, national, and global levels.
Research Justice2 examines the relationships and intersections between research, knowledge construction, and political power/legitimacy in society. Research Justice as an intervention centers community experts as vital partners in contributing to the emergence of Research Justice as a powerful, transdisciplinary set of methodologies that envision the coexistence of three forms of knowledge production (experiential, cultural/spiritual, and mainstream; see Figure 1.1). Research Justice examines how the coexistence of these various form of knowledge
2 When italicized Research Justice refers to contents of this volume, while Research Justice in regular font refers to the concept.
Source: DataCenter: Research for Justice © 2010
can lead to greater equality in public policies and laws that rely on data and research to produce social change.
Building on the tools and visions articulated by DCRJ, the contributors to this historic collection write from three fundamental perspectives of Research Justice as a movement-building strategy: (1) strategies for knowledge construction and self-determination; (2) strategies for community mobilization; and (3) strategies for social transformation and policy reform. Accordingly, each chapter is divided into one of the three foundational perspectives of Research Justice as articulated by the DCRJ organization, which is based in Oakland, California. Each of these chapters, along with community/university research intervention models, provides students at undergraduate and graduate levels, faculty, and community researchers with new and unique sets of tools to produce social transformation and justice in the research processes they will undertake throughout their lives.
The production of knowledge in the world today is typically constructed, transmitted, and maintained by those with the most power and privilege in society. The poor, indigenous peoples, and people of color, along with women, those with physical and mental disabilities, LGBTQI/2Spirit people, and other marginalized groups are seldom in a position to produce or control nor own the system of mainstream knowledge production that is generally used to create policies that impact these often under-served populations (DCRJ website, 2014).
In the DCRJ model above (Figure 1.1), Research Justice as both a theory and a method envisions equal political power and legitimacy for different forms of knowledge including the cultural/spiritual and experiential. By centering knowledge production and research projects based on cultural, spiritual, and experiential frameworks, we as academics attempt to share power and in many cases surrender our own power ‘over’ research subjects. Research Justice also attempts to put indigenous theory in conversation with the Research Justice movement as crafted by DCRJ and explicated by each of the book’s contributors.
Figure 1.1: Knowledge production
By turning to notions of sacred methodologies we do not necessarily imply a religious meaning, but rather a reciprocal relationship between researcher, participant, and community. It is our hope that, by pushing the boundaries of how we define justice to include the sacred, we might radically transform not only the ways that researchers are defined, but how the research process is practiced within the social and behavioral sciences. When we redefine methodologies within the context of the sacred we shift the fundamental relationship of the research process from one based upon unequal power relationships to one based upon mutual respect and reverence for all those impacted by the focus of our studies, documentation, and efforts to reform public policy. Furthermore the sacred pushes us to reconsider justice as more than simple equality. Equality suggests sameness, without regard to fairness. Simply having the same things does not necessarily mean that justice has been achieved. Sacred methodologies include at least three important components: radical love, transformative justice, and collective action.
I contend that radical love as a fundamental aspect of a sacred Research Justice agenda requires that we see research participants as members of our family and not as a group of study participants or as sets of data to study and simply write about for our own career advancement. We have to invest in what I call
Collective Ceremonial Research Responsiveness (CCRR). CCRR responds to both the need for transformative justice and collective action as outlined by a sacred responsibility to take our role as researchers as seriously as possible when we work with individuals and communities to produce social change.
CCRR in a Research Justice model contains three fundamental aspects: (1) it defines research processes as a collective endeavor and a shared knowledge creation process between academic and community researchers; (2) it creates, maintains, and engages with the knowledge that is produced by community experts, traditional knowledge keepers, as well as cultural leaders in ways that envision research as a ceremonial act of mutual respect and co-sharing; and (3) only research that is responsive to the social, legal, economic, cultural, and political policy needs as identified by community experts should be conducted. The Collective Ceremonial Research Responsiveness model takes CommunityBased Participatory Research (CBPR) and Participatory Action Research (PAR) models a step further by shifting more dramatically the distribution of power in the research process by seeking to build ceremonial relationships and by yielding to the specific needs of community experts and community researchers. An example of CCRR in action would entail the creation of cultural protocols and IRB (Institutional Review Board) procedures controlled not by universities alone, but in a separate review process controlled by community groups.
This Research Justice anthology also acknowledges and documents the many ways in which Research Justice functions as a daily ceremonial process of resistance, revitalization, and cultural autonomy that supports the knowledge production, design, dissemination, and stewardship of critical research practices by and from the communities most impacted by the negative consequences of globalization and capitalism. The anthology recognizes the positive and innumerable ways
that people on the margins utilize research to transform their communities with the ultimate goal of liberation, self-determination, and self-actualized freedom. The most fundamental goal of Research Justice is the development of global citizens who actively work to transform the structures of power and privilege to engage everyday people as research leaders, change agents, and visionary leaders equipped with the necessary tools to build community infrastructures that will support the healthy development of self-sustaining, grassroots, and CCRR approaches that will support the advancement of human rights in all fields, disciplines, and social sectors where research/knowledge is produced. This project also centers a concept that I have worked on for the past four years: radical love. Radical love, as I discuss above, is an important aspect of conducting sacred methodologies. I argue that, as we re-center community members, tribal experts, and marginalized populations as leaders in research, we must also center radical love as a primary and foundational component of our research agendas both within and outside of academia. Radical love may be defined as ‘the activation of a deeply embedded and reciprocal devotion to holistic and ethnic specific self and community care through a balance of human feelings, emotions, and practices that reduce egocentrism while centering a symbiotic relationship between the physical and spiritual as co-constitutive factors of health promotion among indigenous peoples and communities of color.’ When it is defined in this way, radical love in sacred research is also about speaking individual and collective truths, no matter how painful. Radical love in these collective essays requires that each author ask important questions about who will benefit from their research and how we learn from past mistakes to ensure that we are building respectful research relationships today. In some of my previous writing, I define radical love within the context of vulnerability:
Radical love is about being vulnerable. It is about being unafraid to speak out about issues that may not have a direct impact on us on a daily basis. Radical love is about caring enough to admit when we are wrong and to admit to mistakes. Radical love should ask how the work in which we are engaged helps to build respectful relationships between ourselves and others involved in social justice movements. Radical love asks if we are each being responsible in fulfilling our individual roles and obligations to the other participants in the struggle for social justice and human rights. Finally, radical love in critical mixed race studies, means asking ourselves if what we are contributing is giving back to the community and if it is strengthening the relationship of all of those involved in the process. Is what is being shared adding to the growth of the community and is this sharing reciprocal? Is what we are working toward leading to a more peaceful and equitable society? (Jolivétte, 2012)
As researchers both in academia and in the community we must be willing to constantly ask ourselves if we are being ‘responsible in fulfilling our individual
roles and obligations to the other participants in the struggle for social justice and human rights’ (Jolivétte, 2012). Each of the contributors to this volume was asked to address this precise question. Chapters 2 through 7 begin by examining how Research Justice can be used as a strategy for knowledge construction and self-determination. In Chapter 2 Antonia Darder examines the uses of critical pedagogy in education research and reform within the context of international and neo-liberal articulations of terrorism and fear that lead to a silencing of those most marginalized within educational institutions. In a compelling manner Darder asserts that critical pedagogy as an act of dissent must ‘forge a socially just pedagogy that supports political dissent in the face of persistent inequalities [that] requires educators to remain thoughtful about the manner in which neoconservative values and neoliberal policies can easily conflate to protect profits and a hegemonic stronghold on the economy,’ while leaving those most marginalized in a state of social, cultural, political, and economic disadvantage. In Chapter 3 Amanda Freeman’s provocative essay addresses her experiences as both an insider and an outsider in a research project dealing with single mothers from low-income backgrounds, an essay in which she examines the blurred lines between being a researcher who is unexpectedly impacted by the same issues facing her research participants.
Similar to Darder’s chapter, Freeman’s claims that, ultimately, it is the voices of the marginalized—in this case poor, single women—that become central to understanding issues of gender inequality, economic disparities, and mothering because of their own efforts in starting a support group to chronicle their experiences and empower one another through their daily challenges in a society that treats the women like second-class citizens. Darder and Freeman both articulate a framework for using Research Justice as a strategy for knowledge construction and self-determination. Students and single mothers know better than anyone else the challenges they face and what types of information, knowledge systems, and practices will best support access to services while reducing social stigmas in education, health, and employment. In Chapter 4, ‘Ethnography as a Research Justice strategy,’ Liam Martin is even more specific in his discussion of ethnography as a Research Justice methodological tactic for defining and documenting the knowledge and acts of self-determination utilized by both the incarcerated and the formerly incarcerated. Martin’s chapter deals with his strong commitment to centering the subject as researcher. In this case, Joe—who resides in a halfway house—is also a co-researcher and a participant in Martin’s ethnographic study. By moving Joe’s voice to the center of the research, as an expert, Martin underscores DCRJ’s first principle of Research Justice: research as a strategy for knowledge construction and self-determination. What better method of transformation than to center the formerly incarcerated as the experts when it comes to understanding life in prison as well as life after prison? Similar to Freeman’s chapter on centering single mothers as experts who produce useful knowledge in thinking through difficult questions of policy reform, Martin’s project also removes the stigma of ‘research subject,’ or ‘victim’ to be ‘saved,’ to a role that gives those most impacted by research a
mechanism to contribute to their own empowerment and self-determination. Chapter 5, by Andrea Zeffiro and Mél Hogan, documents how NMP (No More Potlucks) supports marginalized voices and modes of knowledge production and dissemination, which facilitate acts of self-determination and cultural autonomy among queer writers, artists, and activists in Canada. These collective writings are put together in a journal to document the possibilities of new media publishing venues and a sense of urgency around the dissemination of underspoken voices and underappreciated perspectives. Zeffiro and Hogan offer practical methods for understanding the importance of archives in documenting often invisible histories. Using archival and oral history approaches, the authors unveil a uniquely postmodern method of Research Justice that supplies communities with their own knowledge systems that will support greater self-determination and international visibility. The first five chapters of this reader, along with the final contribution to the first section of the book, are in many ways not just statements about the role of researchers and subjects in the making of the research project, but are also interventions into areas that I would align with a human rights agenda. Nicole Blalock’s ‘More than me’ (Chapter 6) perhaps speaks most specifically to the issues of cultural recovery, invisibility, and knowledge construction/self-determination as human rights issues, as she interweaves poetry and prose to tell the story of her own family with that of indigenous peoples throughout history who have struggled with trauma, poverty, and the very essence of research as a tool for self-determination and knowledge construction as necessary steps towards justice and liberation.
In Part II, ‘Research Justice: strategies for community mobilization,’ we learn the story of Alan Crotzer through the work of Akeem Ray and Phyllis Gray, who enact Research Justice as a strategy for mobilization through teaching. Ray and Gray explain the pressures that students undertake in studying wrongful convictions and the limits of the criminal justice system when it comes to those most marginalized in society. Continuing with the theme of prison incarceration, Chapter 8, ‘Formerly incarcerated women: returning home to family and community,’ also examines the impact of the prison industrial complex on the lived daily experiences of women and mothers who were formerly incarcerated. Marta López-Garza asks critical questions about the role that these formerly incarcerated women play in their own healing processes in the face of societal inequalities. Again, López-Garza, like Ray and Gray, reveals how issues of solidarity, collective action, and resistance to unfair policies can lead to mobilization as well as new forms of knowledge production. The Belmont Report, which was created by the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research in 1978, not addressed key guiding principles for conducting research, but also identifies vulnerable populations. The incarcerated and formerly incarcerated are among the groups identified as vulnerable, at-risk populations because of the exploitation that has taken place within this segment of society. These chapter contributions go along way toward reimagining how we can better support those who are at risk or already living within prisons. While Zainichi Koreans (Koreans
residing in Japan) are not physically incarcerated, they are politically, socially, and ideologically displaced and removed from conversations about equity and social justice in the face of natural disaster. In an effort to understand how these processes work, one must consider the history and representation of Japan as an ethnically homogeneous nation. The displacement of Koreans, according to Haruki Eda, in the face of Japanese disaster nationalism functions in both structural and social mechanisms that rob Zainichi of true liberation as a result of imperialism and ongoing colonial acts during natural disasters. In Chapter 9 Haruki Eda demonstrates how utilizing Research Justice arms Zainichi people with effective mobilization strategies to respond to Japanese colonial rule in the face of natural disasters that scapegoat and ignore the material and physical losses of a minority population in an imperialist nation. Chapter 10, ‘Undocumented research and researchers: a collective journey to document our stories and speak for ourselves,’ similar to Eda’s chapter, takes up the issues of mobilization through direct participatory research. Alma Leyva, together with Imelda Plascencia and Mayra Jaimes Pena, demonstrates how placing the power of constructing a research agenda into the hands of those being researched can bring about powerful changes at both the micro and macro levels of policy reform in disenfranchised populations such as those fighting for legal status in the United States. Chapter 11 by Oparah and her co-authors, examines the politics of birthing within the context of public space, racial representation, and gendered politics. Chapter 12 by Merla-Watson with the Corazones del Westside, takes up the question of the digital divide in Latina/o communities by making use of Research Justice methodologies that focus on access to technology as a tool for empowerment, historical preservation and as a strategy for community mobilization.
Part III, ‘Research Justice: strategies for social transformation and policy reform,’ examines the ways in which Research Justice as a strategy for social transformation and policy reform can re-center the political, economic, legal, and cultural concerns of indigenous nations and across different communities of color. Chapter 13, by Sandra Weissinger, begins the final section of the book with a look at discrimination in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and what mobilization tactics are most useful when we consider the need for policy reforms that disproportionately impact communities of color and other marginalized population demographics. Chapter 14, ‘The revolutionary, nonviolent action of Danilo Dolci and his maieutic approach,’ offers an important overview of a key figure in revolutionary theory, Danilo Dolci, and presents the maieutic approach as a tactic for achieving social and political reforms by shifting the modes of knowledge production and power. Amrah Salomon uses oral tradition and storytelling as a methodological intervention in documenting the stories of resistance and survival among marginalized populations both in Mexico and across the Mexican diaspora. The final chapters are transcribed written remarks from leading international scholars Linda Tuhiwai Smith and Michelle Fine, who were both invited to deliver keynote lectures to an audience of nearly 600 people for the 35th anniversary of DCRJ and to also celebrate the
15th anniversary of the groundbreaking publication, Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. This event, ‘Decolonizing knowledge: Toward a critical Research Justice praxis,’ brings together many of the central themes of this book. Issues of power, knowledge, and policy are covered by each of the speakers, along with remarks that will inform, inspire, and motivate students and academics alike to study the foundations of Research Justice as a new methodological framework that can shift the balance of power in not only producing knowledge, but also in disseminating that knowledge and cultivating a generation of leaders who will focus more on research as a relationship of solidarity and reciprocity to achieve liberation, democracy, and justice for those global citizens who are most often marginalized by traditional western research practices that render them invisible and/or powerless.
References
Jolivétte, A., 2012, Obama and the biracial factor: The battle for a new American majority. Bristol: Policy Press
DataCenter: Research for Justice website, www.datacenter.org