MOBILIZING YOUTH VOICES
Mobilizing Youth Voices for Racial Justice is a collaborative project intended to amplify the powerful work youth of color in Madison are doing to advance racial justice in their respective community organizations. This project will engage young people to analyze issues of race and disenfranchisement, develop intergenerational learning and action opportunities, and create a community forum to develop an agenda to implement solutions based on their collective work. Working across three institutional spaces--the Madison Metropolitan School District, The University of Wisconsin, and community based organizations in Madison--the program aims to: build social capital, generate new insights about racial justice, and facilitate meaningful progress toward racial justice in Madison.
Co PIs: Drs. Kendra Alexander, Erika Bullock, & John Diamond
EXPLORING RACE + EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITY IN COMMUNITY-BASED SPACES
While schools are consistently included in discourse about race and educational opportunity, community-based educational spaces (e.g., afterschool programs, community-based youth organizations) and the pedagogical strategies they employ are overlooked in the ways they both challenge and reproduce racial disparities and inequities. This study explores how racial disparities discourse manifests in a context where liberal and progressive ideas are overtly expressed even as persistent racial and structural inequities pervade these ideas. As such, this research examines the processes community-based educational spaces cultivate to assist Black youth in making meaning of racial disparities and educational opportunity. This multi-year qualitative study includes historical mapping and narrative collection of the ways racial discourse has shifted over time via media archives and interviews with youth workers, and focus groups with Black high school youth.
This study attempts to fill gaps in research on community-based educational spaces and explore the role they have in shaping, resisting, or reproducing racial narratives about Black youth. This project seeks to affirm youth voice and the knowledge and expertise of youth workers (1) to help legitimize the work of community-based educators who are often intimately aware of complex struggles facing youth in settings where racial disparities are immense even as progressive discourse thrives, and (2) to recognize the critical role that community-based educational spaces can play in fostering racial identity and critical consciousness of young people, and their educational experiences and outcomes.