Intro To Participatory Action Research Par A Primer For Governance Researchers Stoudt
Metagovernance Seminar Archive | 2025-10-21 | Unknown
Speaker 1: Alright. Hey. Welcome everybody. So rather than give a kind of formal bio introduction, I actually just wanna tell a kind of story of how this seminar came to be and a little bit how it sort of connects to my involvement with Medigov and my desire to contribute something to the community, and also introduce Brett to a really interesting intellectual space that I think is quite...
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Transcript
Speaker 1
0:00 – 0:00
Alright. Hey. Welcome everybody. So rather than give a kind of formal bio introduction, I actually just wanna tell a kind of story of how this seminar came to be and a little bit how it sort of connects to my involvement with Medigov and my desire to contribute something to the community, and also introduce Brett to a really interesting intellectual space that I think is quite outside of what we tend to do in the graduate center and our kind of more humanistic social sciences. So, you know, I've been a member of MediGov for over two years now. And actually around the time that I joined the Slack, I was also taking a class that Brett was teaching called critical inquiries into statistics and quantification. It's still one of my favorite classes. It was really life changing, really amazing. I had a really bad stats class my first year that was kind of a cookbook by the numbers, you know, just burn through all this r code and do these formulas with, like, no no explanation as to why things were where they were, and breast class is all about the why and what does this mean in the society that we live in and the, you know, kind of the knowledge systems that we produce. So it was really quite fascinating. I was looking at critical data studies and visualization at the time and did some work on that. Mostly turned it into teaching resources for some of my classes, and it's been kind of in the back burner. There was a seminar in December about community participatory ocean governance or ocean data governance. And the idea of participatory action research kinda came up as a topic, and some members mentioned that it's something they didn't really get exposed to in their formal educations or in some of their practice. So I thought Brett, who has an amazing breadth of experience in this world and is a great teacher, would be someone that would be really interesting to bring into MediGov to offer a window into that and a way to also just showcase a little bit, like, what do we do at CUNY grad center, which is an r one university, but also is, like, an urban public university and is situated very differently, I think, than some of the institutions, especially where, like, MediGov's founding came out of. So it's an opportunity for engagement on that. And I'll just leave it at that. Brett, if you wanna say anything a little more about yourself or your background, or you wanna just launch in?
Speaker 2
0:15 – 0:15
I'll just go into it, and can I I can share my screen?
Speaker 1
0:30 – 0:30
You should be able to. Yeah.
Speaker 2
0:45 – 0:45
And thank you, Ian. For those who don't know, Ian is a is a force here at the Graduate Center, and I really appreciate him. So thank you, Ian. Thank you for the invite. He told me this is an incredible community. I saw your website. Your website's cool. I really like I really like it. So so I get the privilege of whereas how I see my task is to help you understand what what participatory action research is and and how I've applied it. I have a lot of different examples. I'm only gonna ultimately give you one very brief example because I think we have about twenty minutes. Right, Ian?
Speaker 1
1:00 – 1:00
And Take a little longer if you need to, but
Speaker 2
1:15 – 1:15
Well it's
Speaker 1
1:30 – 1:30
about the estimate.
Speaker 2
1:45 – 1:45
You know what? My I I see it as my job is kinda going through some of the assumptions From what I saw on your website, I'm a by training a social psychologist, you know, I'm a social scientist, I'm also a participatory action researcher. So I think some of the values and commitments that I try to enact overlaps with this community. But also, I think we do very different things. So, hopefully we can, it'll be a really interesting conversation once I finish. So, I am a professor at the Graduate Center in a program called the Critical Psychology Program. And it's a program, psychology is huge, but the Critical Psychology Program takes critical theory approach to psychology. So critical race theory, decolonizing theory, queer theory, feminist theory. If you think about the critical slants on sort of the human experience, that's our approach. And I also represent an organization called the Public Science Project, which is within the context of the Graduate Center, the City University. It's a it's a a group of scholars and students who kinda make it our business to work in collaboration with communities in New York City and nationally and internationally to kinda do research together in collaboration, ground up, and then and then sort of enact, pursue some form of action. So I just wanted to explain kinda my different positionalities here. As a scholar, a community based scholar, I work in a lot of different sectors and areas, but one of my primary lines of inquiry involve policing, state surveillance, and particularly the sort of the grounded, often racialized in The United States experience of that. And so over the last ten, fifteen years, there's more now. I've worked on a number of participatory projects. You know, I consider myself a local researcher. It just so happens that my locality is New York City. So, you know, from early on 2010 to to now, there's been a series of really deep long term community based relationships where we've analyzed, you know, we collected data ourselves, analyzed it, and tried to push forward different policies or actions. Today, I'm gonna speak to you a little bit about the Morris Justice Project, which really was at the very beginning of the stop and frisk movement in New York City, where there was just hundreds of thousands of stops, you know, in New York City that often led to violence and and other forms of harassment and turned into some pretty big lawsuits. And what I wanna show you to to to begin is my commitments. And so I I wanna show you this map that I did back in, I think it was 02/2011. So it's it's a little bit I'm not gonna show you the whole thing. But I took all of the you know, there's a lawsuit that allowed us to get the data around stops. And I had a whole bunch of different things. And and then I was working with a group, a cop watch group in the South Bronx. I was also working with a group of mothers in the South Bronx, very close to Yankee Stadium. And they were saying, if you wanna understand our experiences with stops, you can't just understand it uniformly, you have to understand it that there's a rhythm to it. And like when Yankees games come up, if you if you hear foul baseball, there's cops flood the neighborhood to essentially protect the wealthier, probably certainly whiter folks coming in spending a lot of money from the neighborhood. Right? And so they felt these rhythms. They knew that after certain times and on certain days, there would be rhythms. So from the ground, we heard a theory. And then we tried to take data. We turned it into an action, which became this thing that we put out in the Internet sign. But we started with, well, can we examine your analysis of the rhythm? And so we took all the data and we spent, you know, every stop over a year. And then the blue that you're seeing that we're we called the the scars of the city are innocent stops. They weren't they were stopped, but they weren't arrested. They were not given a ticket or a summons. You know, we know that even those that were, most of them were innocent as well. But it's a way of showing just both how you see it kind of go in and out, but also how needless the stops were. And what I like about that is it represents what I see are sort of the six pillars here of the kind of work that I do, which is it's grounded in and with community knowledge, so it came from ground up. And it was theoretically informed. It was informed by sort of grounded theoretical perspective of the rhythms and awareness, you know, of Yankee Stadium and other, you know, power relationships. But also it was informed by, you know, my own knowledge of the state data that we could get and how I thought from my own analysis that would play out. And so we were attuned to context, we were attuned to history of The Bronx, the South Bronx, we were into the power relationships. In this case, we told a sort of a quantitative story or but it's really a quantitative qualitative story. And throughout the work, we use multiple data points to kind of tell the story. So we don't privilege one or the other. It was interdisciplinary. Certainly, we had lawyers, we have community members, we had lots of people on the team, but we always centered the lives of those most impacted in the area that where we were. So in this case, it was, as you'll see the South Bronx near Yankee Stadium. And we were focused on urgent policies or institutions. So there was something going on before the lawsuits, people, mothers and others were saying something's going on. We're getting stopped. It's more than usual. It's violent. And, you know, there's right? So that from the ground, we're hearing what the issue is. So the you'll see that all of the work that I do kinda relates to these six pillars. But and and Ian had mentioned someone had suggested, you know, to talk a little bit about the history and I can go into this more. There are a lot of methodological and theoretical influences that I could talk about. From a participatory standpoint, one thing to just know is that it is deeply embedded in the social sciences. It's embedded in psychology with Kurt Lewin. It's embedded in educational research. It's embedded in work from South America and Central America, South Africa. There's a long history of thinking about a more collaborative from the ground approach to understanding the world and then using that information to push against the powers that be. I'm happy to go into some of that history. The work we do here, we call it critical participatory action research. And one of the reasons is because participatory action research has often lost its criticality even though it's founded from a critical, a strongly critical perspective. It's been, there's an interesting book called The Tyranny of Participation. And it's an interesting examination about how part participatory spaces can be quite seductive and controlling and and and can create a space where there's a lot of group think if you're not intentional. And so powers that be and governments and other things can use participatory spaces as a form of manipulation, not a form of democratic relationships. And so the critical part is to acknowledge a kind of take on the history of par and to not flatten the need to look at power. But there are a set of assumptions and ideas behind par, and so let me go over the general purpose first. Each of these bullet points have a lot to unpack, and I'm happy to discuss them in more detail. And please unmute yourself if you're unclear. But the first is is that there's a desire there's at least an acknowledgment that research matters, that research is useful, that gets harder and harder when everyone just has their facts. And I guess, you know, I have my facts, you have your facts, we have different alternative truths. But we still maybe naively hold on to a commitment to conducting research to help us understand the world and and act in that world, kind of like a freerium praxis to theorize and act and then keep learning iteratively. And we put the word quality as in there on purpose because I think we've all been around research that I'm not sure it feels like we can trust. We expand the idea of what quality is in many ways, but still it is worthwhile. Some research gets to certain truths that I think others, you know, could be critiqued. And that it's connected to issues of injustice. And this is also part of that critical part that it's about pushing against oppression, injustice. It's an emancipatory approach. It's a liberatory approach. That's its foundation. And the goal is, the second bullet is to do this around issues that are understood and defined by those closest to the issue and that we intentionally consider who are considered the stakeholders or the community members who have the knowledge and should be included in that space. So you can already see the critique then of traditional expertise that are top down and often extractive like university researchers. Right? The the third bullet is, you know, that the goal, the purpose then is that the research can not only allow us to best understand the issue, but also how to best then act given our understanding. It is a very frame practice perspective, but we're acting from the standpoint of those closest to it. And I put in parenthesis the parenthesis there process and outcome because both are seriously important. The outcomes are often what we focus on in more traditional reports. But in par, the process is equally important, and it's part of the critical consciousness building. It's part of the relational. It's part of it might take longer, but it's part of the intentional community we're building collectively. So that's the purpose. The assumptions, I would say are, at least there's lots, but here are five that I'm gonna bring up. It's that critique of expertise, right, that expertise doesn't just sit in hospitals, in places of higher ed, political and cultural powerhouses, lawmakers, right? That's where it traditionally sits, and it's not an absolute critique of that, but it is a widening of that with the acknowledgment that those closest to an issue from their standpoint, from their lens, have a particular understanding of those institutions, the power of relationships, what is going on from the most marginalized, and also a certain validity as to how best to address it, move forward to act. And so I handled that. So third, and that those who bear the greatest burden have an ethical right to seek answers on issues that are important to their lives. And this is really, this is more of that idea that a lot of traditional, historically, particularly in psychology, research tends to be extractive. You go into a community. Anthropology is famous for this. You extract information, and you leave. It's not about supporting the community, but it's also coming from issues in a standpoint that are not grounded in the concerns, the issues of those who are directly experiencing it. And so you'll note the ethical part because there is a morality, there is an ethical component. Participatory action research is an epistemology. It's a method, it's a design. It's also an ethical approach. There's also other components that we really need to think about that are beyond the university institutional review boards, for example. Getting back to a more traditional, the fourth bullet, you know, researchers like myself are worried about issues of validity. We have loads of different types of validities that talk about quality of work. I don't wanna give up that idea. I think quality of work remains really important. But I'm adding, and we're adding as par researchers, that you a white guy like myself who is rarely, if ever, targeted, surveilled by police, at least in the more traditional sense. I know that's a good widening in lots of ways with state surveillance. The the the it's I'm not the for me to just do research top down, I actually think I can't get the best quality research. That if you take away everything else I'm saying, I actually think I can't do the best, most impactful research without engaging those closest to the issue and being in a theoretical conversation. Not just at the beginning, what gets baked into research questions, but all the way through all the millions of theoretical decisions, conceptual decisions that happen throughout a research process. And then there's the, and the last idea is that the quality of research is also maximized by the intentional democratic, open, inclusive spaces you create. That bring people's gifts into the room, their talents, their diversity is the strength of that process. To not flatten it, to think intentionally about power, that this all, different knowledge bases, this all needs to be in the room and it improves the work, it doesn't hurt the work. So those, again, you can critique all of these, the purpose, the assumptions, but just to be very clear with what assumptions are being brought into the room. And so then we have goals, and the goals are very kinda connected then. You have to kinda understand those epistemology assumptions, the ethical, the epistemological assumptions to then get to the place where most people kinda start, which is, oh, well, you participate, there's action, and there's research. Right? Like, if you just stick with what par is, you miss the deeper it's like the tip of the iceberg. You miss the full complexity. But when we get to the goals then, you can you can kinda see where they're derived. You're very, it's not just about outcome, it's about process. And if you're thinking about process, you have to think about what kind of intentional space allows the participatory collective, the research team to bring their best multiple sales and expertise into the room to for inform not just the end, but the full process of research. Right? And so that could mean something like, well, if we're studying quantitative analysis, but most of the people in the room can't offer their ideas because they don't understand the analysis, that's not an intentional space. If you have a police officer in the room along with community members who are being targeted by that police officer, Even though we're all individuals, that police officer is representing an entire state institution that's very powerful. That's not understanding power relationships. Right. So thinking about who needs to be in the room and what they need to offer themselves is a big key part of it. And then we all know, you know, or for those who have been involved in research, as I know many of you or all of you have, what you bake into the beginning, the assumptions, theories of change, the questions you ask, determines what you get at the end. So it very much matters who's asking the questions from what perspective and what kind of, you know, to use kind of a more traditional term, what instruments are being created. In other words, what surveys, what whatever the methodologies are. In psychology, third bullet point, quantitative work is is is rises to the level of religion at times. And so in psychology, an intervention is to bring quantitative down and bring qualitative and other methodological strategies up as equal and doing having different strengths and weaknesses. And so I'm very much a multi methods person, and I think that helps improve the outcome. And, again, as a psychologist, we often myopathy focus on the individual and lose the multiple levels. And it's easy to do that. It's easy for all of us to do that, to forget that we're within multiple units of institutional units, different power relationships, policies. But we need to situate ourselves not only in history, but context, and that that needs to be part of the analysis. So those are the goals, ultimately. So now I'm gonna go into a quick tool to help you understand, participatory accountability structures and what participation looks like, and then a very brief, case study. When people first start out with par, they'll ask things to me of, well, how do I even think about it? How do I do it? And there's lots of nuance. There's lots of you know, it's a rich tradition. But the way I think about it, at least again, and maybe I'm on maybe I'm more on the conservative side, at least methodologically in in research. But a a traditional academic research project often has four areas. You design the research, you you and by designing the research, you go to the literature, you do the literature review, you think about what gaps are there, how you can advance the conversation. You're in conversation with other academics. So that's a phase one. Phase two, you then as a kinda you know, so phase one, the accountability structure is I'm in conversation with other academics, and I'm accountable to those other academics. Phase two, obtaining data. You know, there's all sorts of sampling. If you're a quantitative researcher, you're gonna think about random sample or you might, you know, non random sample. There's all sorts of you take whole classes as many of you might have about, okay, well how do I actually collect information? And it's absolutely critical. It's who am I speaking to? The accountability there though is that, you know, you can say I can fly, but now we're sampling, right, we're outside of our own experience, we're holding ourselves accountable to other people and what they say, whether that's qualitative work or quantitative work, you're holding yourself accountable to a particular type of sampling strategy and making sure you're speaking outside of just your sort of imagination or thoughts. Phase three then is you collect that information and you analyze it. And for those who have taken quant courses or coding courses or, right, this is another form of accountability. There are rules, there are guidelines, there are ways of doing it, there are degrees of freedom. Right? And same with whatever it is you choose, structural equation modeling, hierarchical linear modeling, you're holding yourself accountable to an approach to analyzing the information. And then you communicate it, and phase four is the most known to the larger public form of accountability. You communicate in the form of a paper, and it goes through peer review, and that's your accountability. What I always say about about participatory action research is we vastly expand the critical accountability structures of the work. And that each of these phases, we look for ways to include those closest to the issue, those stakeholders who need to be in the room for various reasons as helping us along the way. And so you'll see as I go through this quick example, yes, we did go to the literature in phase one. We also reviewed a whole lot of state level data. We reviewed community level reports and NGO reports, and you know, reports in communities. We had our participatory research team, so that's a form of new accountability based in the community. We just expanded the part phase one to have more contact. Phase two became a community conversation. So now people in the community were sampling people in the community, having conversations. So we and so many people were involved in the sampling process. It wasn't extractive. It became that ethical part, communities have a right to understand their communities. Communities were having conversations with their neighbors. Phase three, we expand now and we analyze it together both within the research group. Right? So it's not just researchers and their eyes on the analysis, but we're analyzing not just with the research group, with the sample, but we're also then taking our analyses out, and we're holding impromptu conversations on the street to say, what do you make of this? Right? And then phase four, we expand it wildly. Not we started out not just speaking to academics. We didn't speak to academics actually for the first three years. We only spoke to people in the lawsuits, to people to giving the data back to the community from where it came. We did things called sidewalk science, in other words. We wildly expanded the discussion And actually held back ourselves from talking to academia. The more important thing right now was talking to the community and New York City during this sort of lawsuit. So I see the timing, Ian. So I'm gonna go quickly through this, and then we're done. Is that okay?
Speaker 1
2:00 – 2:00
Yeah. And then there's one good question that I
Speaker 2
2:15 – 2:15
Oh, I don't see it. Can you show it can you show it?
Speaker 1
2:30 – 2:30
Yeah. So Lydia just asked it's interesting. I know it's interesting that there's not conceptual work on the table. They're kind of mentioning of, I think, the conceptual piece, if I understand correctly, like, in your table of the different meth stages of the research process.
Speaker 2
2:45 – 2:45
That was phase one, but it's really phase one, two, three, and four. Like, even the communicating data, we're still conceptualizing it. Every new audience, we're conceptualizing it. There's, you know, there's phase three. There's we're always conceptual. I'll show you some of that. So maybe with the exception of phase two, although even that became, it it was all four phases because you're in a constant conversation with various people. That's a good question.
Speaker 1
3:00 – 3:00
Fal also noted that this the first three years and was asking how long the study took.
Speaker 2
3:15 – 3:15
Oh, many of these types there's lots of ways that I've done par, from advisory groups that meet three times to something like this on the other extreme, which we were together five years, and had you can see all of our participants, all the people who were part of the research collective. So there were a lot of people at various levels. But often these look like ethnographies, in the sense that they're longer term relationships because the work is centering relationships. So it's not so easy to get it done in a few months. And you know, that has its costs as well, especially in moments where we need to move quickly for other reasons. So we call it the Morris Justice Project, and this was during the time when stop and frisk was becoming a really big issue. And we were, for various reasons I won't go into at the moment, we were in the South Bronx working with some mothers and other community members, and it was a vibrant community, but also an extremely heavily policed community. You can see these kind of Foucaultian towers and these mobile command centers. It's really it's really overpowering with lots of police everywhere. And so in the phase one, we organized a team, and here are some of the members, there were many more, and we spent the summer asking questions. We, you know, the state has epistemic power to control the narrative around policing, around any issue, what they collect, how they report it. So really how I understand this kind of work is a kind of sous surveillance, like a surveillance of the power where we on the ground are pushing back against the power that the state has to define the issue through their data. And what that often means is working with the data to see how, you know, the NYPD is interpreting the information, what's missing, and how we can fill in the gaps and expand the gaps. So for example, with this stop and frisk, it was by case, not individual. So we knew lots of people were getting stopped individually many times, but that's not something you can get from the state. So what we did is we asked questions around police stop that we could then compare directly apples to apples to cases, but then look at it by individual and go, oh, actually, most people who got stopped got stopped multiple times. And we do this a lot as a way to then it's one way to intervene with their epistemic power. But we start out looking at what the state says about their neighborhood. I just put in a bunch of different things that we did. We stayed very low maps or very, spatial maps are very important. We asked where do you get healthy food, what's it like living in the neighborhood, what neighbors do you have that you're friends with, how do you move in the neighborhood. We did a lot of, like, on the ground mapping around a table Two, ultimately decide a lot of things, but also what our boundaries were. These are not census track. These aren't right? This was about this was about how do you understand your community, not how the state understands it. So we decided to ask, you know, what are your experiences and attitudes towards police in these 42 blocks east of Yankee Stadium? So a lot of conceptual work happened here where we ended up developing a short community based survey that had some open ended, some closed, and then we widened outside of our group to have an advisory group of various folks, young people, business owners to help again weigh in. So it wasn't just our collective team, but bigger. And then we came up with a fairly easy survey to fill out, still use the map, dichotomous kind of did you experience or not, and some other things. So that was the first phase. I'm going through this quickly. But second phase then is how do we how do we sample? Well, we had different needs here. One is we knew that we needed to be in conversation and push against the larger conversation that police and the mayor was having. And if we just look like an activist group, which we were not, then if we just collected people that we knew, we wouldn't be as trusted. Our data wouldn't be as trusted. So we did take and also it's very hard to get to some of these areas in the community. This this is not an easy subway. So we had to systematically go around the neighborhood to collect data so that we could be trusted, but also so that we could hit everyone and have community conversations with every block. And we also put a randomized component in there so that we could capitalize on some of the probability and allow us to rhetorically use that in our conversations with policymakers. And that worry always about at each phase, there's both action and research. It changes in emphasis, but in the sampling, what we did is there wasn't there wasn't anything that organized all of the resources by different sectors in the community. So as we also gave people we incentivize through metro cards and stuff, but we didn't wanna just take their information. We wanted to give them something that was valuable. And you'll see that through each of the phases we think about what's the action here. So action for us isn't just at the end. It's throughout. So that's what that was. And then we went around block by block systematically, not we expanded beyond our research team to include, I think, at 1.25 community members who were helping us collect data. So it really was a community conversation. And we also collected through know your rights training where they would take the survey and then get know your rights. Again, another action. Know your rights if you're stopped. And we did a good job of collecting information across the neighborhood. Then phase three becomes the participatory part. And the participatory analysis part started with your data entry. We had these surveys. We put them into at the time, it was SPSS, and we noticed some people said they were stopped a 100 times in a year. So we put all these sticky notes of, like, can we trust that? So it was and then we took that back to the group, and that became sort of a community based outlier analysis. Can we trust a 100 stops or does that seem outlandish? Right? And there were lots of examples like that. There were also some legal questions. We had a lawyer in the group. So, the analysis and the conceptual idea started right from the beginning. Also, lots of people wrote in the margins, so that became an important qualitative analysis for us because they were trying to tell us stuff. And so we were holding meetings around the data entry from the beginning. And then we do what I call stats in action. We stick to frequencies like case based analysis versus various variable based analysis, cross tabs, and frequencies. People are able to learn that quickly. I I would bring my projector up. We had space in the library in their block, and we taught them how to read it. And basically what happens is we very quickly realize they very quickly realize they're in conversation with a thousand people they had they had conversations with. So when we put up an analysis, they go, yeah, yeah, but break it down by race. They're now we're now having an iterative theoretical conversation, conceptual conversation, and we're deepening our analysis together back and forth. We also did a kind of participatory factor analysis where we asked light switch questions. Have you experienced or not? Dichotomous. And then we took those and we did a kind of cue sorting where people worked in groups. How should we aggregate these? What is physical violence? What is verbal violence? What's sexual violence? There wasn't always agreement. We were theorizing together and also creating new variables. You can see an example here of us doing some of that. And we ended up calling this a bullshit game, a, because someone said that's bullshit. Once you get those aggregated variables, it's a fun game to say, well, what do you think VNL what do you think the percentage is? And what you learn then is people's assumptions of the outcome. And you then you get to interrogate that collectively and you keep deepening your analysis. That's bullshit. I thought violence was gonna be a lot higher. A lot of people say that, but then we have to think about, okay, who, where, and how. And then we also took it out into a a kinda community analysis where we organize the things we really didn't understand, places where neutral was really high or whatever, and we went around, we just said, hey, we did this. Can you help us understand? Can you we don't fully understand. And so it was a qualitative conversation on the data. Last, real quick, we didn't wanna do a traditional report, so we did what they called a a back pocket report, something that rather than throw it in the garbage, you would put in your back pocket. And we handed around the community and to lawmakers and and others, had qualitative and quantitative components. We worked with the illuminator to project our data and have an impromptu presentation on public housing, which brought the police to shut it down, but it served its purpose to really communicate our data back to the community. We held what we call sidewalk science across the neighborhood systematically where we would kinda take over a corner and have different modules and maps that you could write on. It was a way of giving information back, but also having further conversation. What makes you feel safe in the neighborhood? Write it down, take a picture, it grows, and people can walk around neighborhood and and kinda learn. We passed out buttons. We did all, you know, all sorts of things that was about communicating the data and having a conversation. We worked with an artist to it was called Broken Windows. It moved from stop and frisk to Broken Windows policing. Politically, it was in the world, so we kinda worked with an artist to kinda say, actually, this is what broken windows means. We're part of the community. Here's what we did, and we learned how to we paste it. And then we we pasted it all over the community. We, again, kept working with maps. We did some digital stuff that I just showed you, more traditional stuff, but always infused with data. And then we did on the day that Derek Jeter retired, we wrote a community based letter. Lots of people were involved where it looked like it looked like it was like something, you know, for the Yankees, but in fact, it was about broken windows policing. And when you open it up, it had the photo and a conversation about, you know, when you come into our neighborhood, you think it's violent, and here's and you think we need more police and here's what we really need. So it was an intervention back to the privileged kind of intruders. And, yeah, we were part of a lawsuit and we got to go to the White House. And then after all that, we started publishing and the intervention was in academia. We started publishing together. So I'll leave it at that. I have some critical questions and I can share it with Ian or it can come up in question and answer, but the kinds of things you would think about if you would do this work. Thank you.
Speaker 1
3:30 – 3:30
Thank you, Brett.
Speaker 3
3:45 – 3:45
Thank you so much, Brett. Will you if you have the, slide deck, maybe if you have it in link form, if you could share it with us so we can use it or look back at it or even just those questions at the end. I'm like, maybe just leave them up because they're very awesome and provocative.
Speaker 2
4:00 – 4:00
Yeah. I I can leave them up. Well well, there there's three of them. I'll I'll put it in the chat here, and I'll send it to you. I can
Speaker 1
4:15 – 4:15
Awesome. Thank you. Yeah. I think I'm really curious what folks think, and there's a lot of there's a very deep dive. It's really interesting. I've read some of the papers that were published, and then they had these conversations, like, live through that era of New York. And so it's very interesting to see this kind of we know into history and there's, like, long research projects. I guess a question that comes to mind maybe to kinda prompt the audience is, like, how do you imagine looking through this approach to research and, like, engage scholarship and these questions about, like, who does information get collected about when it comes to social problems or how does that affect, like, real social problems and inequalities? What work are you currently involved in that might benefit from this lens, or how might it challenge it?
Speaker 2
4:30 – 4:30
Well, what work you mean what work might benefit from a participatory lens, you mean?
Speaker 1
4:45 – 4:45
Yeah. It's kind of an open question to just throw out
Speaker 2
5:00 – 5:00
to the whole Oh, you're you're talking to everyone? Yeah. Yeah. Sorry.
Speaker 1
5:15 – 5:15
That's okay. I figured it might prompt some questions from folks.
Speaker 3
5:30 – 5:30
I think one thing, I mean, I've been thinking about participatory action research ever since that seminar with Araba say that I threw in the chat. And then I've been I I noticed that you used the term, like, epistemological violence, and that has come up in my research recently. So it's kind of like the the powerful entity sort of shaping narrative, and that that is ultimately, like, you know, the narrative about a community or about anything, about a problem, about a whatever that narrative is, like, whoever gets to shape that and sort of cast people potentially in, like, a bad light or yeah. That that is, like, a a form of power to exert. And I guess, like, I'm just kind of reflecting back. I don't know if this is a question, but I think, how well, maybe it is a question. Like, how do you how do you describe, like, the problem that participatory action research tries to solve? Is it that, like, epistemological power imbalance and that that like, this methodology corrects that? And or, like, what are some of the other kind of Yeah.
Speaker 2
5:45 – 5:45
That's a great question. And I I if you if you got in there's various traditions and histories of par, and it would answer it it could answer that differently. The work that I'm involved in, I would say the primary idea is to address the epistemological violence often of control of state numbers and the story it tells. And because a lot of the work, at least as a New Yorker, I'm interested in doing involves the intervention is to fill in the gaps or revise the whole framing of the way our policy makers use data to understand black and brown communities, you know, and justify certain policies that are so harmful. And so these are ways of pushing back and they then they the data, because we approach it using, I think, rigorous methods, it opens up doors that we would otherwise not get. Like, we were at the time, because we had a research project like this, we then were we were able to get the community members in a room with the the police commissioner at the time. There was a there was a small group of people invited, and we were able to get them in the room, and they could share the data. One of our members was then part of a big lawsuit, one of the big lawsuits that ultimately won against Stop and Press. Another member became part of the federal monitorship. So it opened up doors because the levers we were interested in were were you know at the the lawmaker and and policy level. There's a whole tradition of YPAR, youth participatory action research, and a lot of that, and it and it it does resemble sort of a Frearian kind of history of praxis. A lot of that is creating carving space for young people who are already often squashed as just young, does not have thoughts, you know, doesn't think critically. Creating spaces to really go deep and think about their place in the world, to ask questions about their place in the world, to seek answers, and then in in a way that empowers them. So I've produced par work. And again, it opened up doors. It got them in front of city council where they didn't have to be then used as this is my experience as a young person. I remember this person saying I am speaking as a young person, but I'm speaking for 2,000 other young people, and here's my data. And then we analyzed how much time they got at city council, and it was almost like 80% of the time, because then there was a different conversation. But so that's kind of a youth par tradition. I'm working with Drug Policy Alliance right now, and to to the other, to what Ian said, someone said in the chat. My intervention there right now is I'm giving them space in a very confusing time to really think conceptually about what they mean, what's our sample? Well, is it opioids? It's not, like really theorizing, because often in their space, they're just moving, And so it's an opportunity to conceptualize and theorize and then think about what gaps we need to fill. So I think it serves different purposes, but but it is about a discussion that centers relationships and thinks deeply about power.
Speaker 1
6:00 – 6:00
Awesome. Lydia has a really good question too and observation. Right? That par is often very seems very time consuming. Right? And that it also feels that we need some time for maybe for some low hanging fruit to enhance research like focus group design. There was a to discuss results. And so what can be seen as the most helpful for smaller interventions? Maybe aren't you
Speaker 2
6:15 – 6:15
just time to raise
Speaker 1
6:30 – 6:30
your hand?
Speaker 2
6:45 – 6:45
I've moved from calling myself a participatory action action research researcher to someone who's in the public scholarship and public science as a way to expand beyond what can be, I don't know, it's a way to open my degrees of freedom because participatory action research is time consuming and also not always needed or the best in a moment. The commitments I think are always useful, but but, so I I I'm just doing I'm doing work right now where I think I mentioned it, where we have a small team. It's not a par project. It's not, the team is, you know, some folks at an NGO. But the goal is how do we have conversations and create, expand our accountability structures? And so we're just holding three dinners. One where we go and say, this is the kind of work we're doing. You are all experts because of where you're positioned. Thoughts, revisions. Right? The second is, hey, here's here's what we're making of it. Can you help us think about this, expand it, deepen it? And then the third is we wanna communicate it. What do you think about what we're communicating? So it and and the the methods are very traditional focus groups in a few interviews, Lydia. So I think there's ways to incorporate that speed it up and are necessary, particularly in these moments that are moving so rapidly. I'm working on as Ian is some academic freedom stuff. If we wait two years, we won't have academia or freedom. We need to move now. So I I'm I'm very much with you.
Speaker 1
7:00 – 7:00
Yeah. Well, given that it is 12:59, should we wrap up, though?
Speaker 3
7:15 – 7:15
Yeah. I don't want to, but yeah. Me neither.
Speaker 2
7:30 – 7:30
Thank you so much. Feel free. Ian, you can give my email. I'm always around. I'm I'm I'm always happy to talk.
Speaker 1
7:45 – 7:45
Yeah. Thank you, Brett. And should we unmute and do our MediGoof tradition?
Speaker 2
8:00 – 8:00
Yeah. If I give Brett
Speaker 1
8:15 – 8:15
a round of applause.
Speaker 3
8:30 – 8:30
Everyone, please come up mute too. Give Brett a big thanks for
Speaker 1
8:45 – 8:45
Hilaring my boy.
Speaker 2
9:00 – 9:00
Yay. Thank you. Thank you so much for the invite.
Speaker 1
9:15 – 9:15
Thank you, Brett. And I'm happy to monitor and kinda participate in follow-up discussion in the Slack channel. But I know you're not in there, and you don't have to attempt to get in another thread. But I really wanna keep this conversation going within Medigov. So thank you so much.
Speaker 3
9:30 – 9:30
Thank you, everyone. Thank you, Brett.
Speaker 2
9:45 – 9:45
Bye all.
Speaker 3
10:00 – 10:00
Yes. We're continuing conversations in Slack. See you all over there. Great. Hopefully, see someone with me tomorrow. Bye.
Speaker 1
10:15 – 10:15
Bye.