Abstract
Literature on civic engagement has long held an adult bias and is rooted in understandings of civic participation undertaken by adults, not youth. Youth are rarely treated as civic actors in their own right, but instead as would-be civic actors. We make a case for building social science research capacity as a critical tool for civic action, especially salient for groups working toward organizational, institutional, and/or legislative change and encapsulated in youth participatory action research (YPAR). To explore the link between social science research and civic involvement we take as a case a formally organized Youth Research Council (YRC), founded to support youth civic action, build young people’s civic tools and social science research capacity, and provide opportunity for adult allies to partner with youth in support of youth-led civic interests. We explore the impact of the YRC as a durable organizational conduit to promote youth civic involvement and support movements and initiatives working toward greater community-based data justice and we identify a set of replicable practices for local adoption of youth research councils.
Personal Reflexive Statement
We are members of the Youth Research Council. We are high school students, teachers, university researchers, and university administrators. As a research collaborative, we came together in 2021 and created a mission statement that guides our community-based research. This is our mission statement: We strive to achieve change in our community by conducting research to give youth a voice. We conduct our own mindful and comprehensive research that identifies and addresses inequities in our community, coordinates with local entities, and positively impacts the lives of youth in Northern Virginia. Our research centers diverse and open-minded viewpoints to prevent and solve issues in underrepresented communities. We actively seek diverse data, do not tolerate racism, and inspire and educate our community.
Since the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) human rights treaty, efforts across the globe to promote young people’s political participation have grown considerably. The formation of youth advisory councils, the formal democratically elected youth parliaments in the U.K. and Pakistan, for example, and more robust civic education, have all intended to thicken democratic participation among youth as youth fortify pathways for involvement in civil society for generations to come. Yet, literature on civic engagement has long held an adult bias and is rooted in understandings of civic participation undertaken by adults, not youth. Bogged down by deficit frameworks of youth as “citizens-in-the-making,” and too often focused on youth’s civic development over and above their actual civic activities, many initiatives to strengthen infrastructural and organizational supports intended to promote young people’s civic actions have ignored how adult-structured organizational practices and logics derail genuine youth participation in civic life and have also obscured existing forms of youth civic involvement because they don’t fit the established categories of civic involvement derived from adult forms of engagement in civic realms. The effect is youth are rarely treated as civic actors in their own right, but instead as would-be civic actors. Mired by developmental schema, youths’ political-civic roles are typically cast in terms of eventuality, that is, in terms of civic roles in adulthood, thereby eliding “the possibility of adolescent political participation in society” (Gordon 2009:9). The effect of these conceptualizations at the individual level are often alienation (Cohen 2010) and disaffection from political realms among youth. At the organizational level, the effect is forms of youth civic programming and design that depoliticize youth, narrowing their political imaginations and the possibility for innovative and creative mobilizations and public actions as members of civil society. In this article, we are especially interested in understanding these dynamics at the organizational level. Despite many studies of civic involvement, most center adult actions and engagement, with important exceptions from scholars writing at the intersection of critical youth studies and social movements (see Clay 2012; Gordon 2009; Kennelly 2011; Taft 2010, 2019). Critical youth scholars have raised important questions about what constitutes civic action, noting that civic engagement is too often narrowly understood in formal political terms, measuring voter participation, or direct action in policy realms, which renders youth’s civic involvement largely invisible. Conceptions of civic involvement can also be overburdened by a focus on formal volunteerism in associational groups, emphasizing the types of community organizations, rather than the range of what Lichterman and Eliasoph (2014) term “civic action” that bring individuals, including youth, to political and civil spheres. Drawing from critical youth studies, as well as more expansive framings of civic involvement from cultural sociology (Eliasoph 1998, 2013; Lichterman 1996; Taylor 2016), we understand civic involvement as individual and joint efforts and activities intended to have an impact “. . . in the civic life of . . . communities and developing the combination of knowledge, skills, values and motivation to make that difference. It means promoting the quality of life in a community, through both political and non-political processes” (Ehrlich 2000:vi–x). Conceptualizing civic involvement in broad and inclusive terms allows us to account for the varied forms of civic participation youth demonstrate. We point to one type of civic action that has been little studied as a form of civic involvement among youth, Youth Research Councils.
In our attention to Youth Research Councils as an organizational form that can build civic capacity, this article makes a case for the importance of social science research as a critical tool for civic action, especially salient for groups working toward organizational, institutional, and/or legislative change, and are often marginalized in and from those very institutions, and terrifically encapsulated in youth participatory action research (YPAR). To explore the link between social science research and civic involvement we take as a case a formally organized Youth Research Council (YRC), which was founded at a major public mid-Atlantic university in 2021 to support youth civic action, build young people’s civic tools and social science research capacity, and provide opportunity for adult allies to partner with youth in support of youth-led civic interests. The article’s purpose is twofold: to explore the impact of the YRC as a durable organizational conduit to promote youth civic involvement and agency, support movements and initiatives working toward greater community-based data justice in order to intervene in and address deepening social inequalities, and also to identify a set of replicable practices for local adoption of youth research councils with the longer-term goal of building a transnational network of youth research councils. The YRC considered here is a research-driven democratic collective documenting the practices, policies, and structures that produce institutional inequities, primarily as they occur in school, a setting where most youth spend much of their time. The YRC is founded on the idea that not only do youth voices matter in policy and decision-making at local, national, and international levels because youth possess valuable expertise based in lived experience, but that youth must be integrally involved in and leaders of efforts to gather, analyze, and share the evidence upon which institutional decision making that directly impacts young people happens. As such, the YRC belongs to a broader set of initiatives to grow research capacity in communities in order to address what is often called data injustice. We take the view that social science research is not only a public good, but a critical tool that can be mobilized to strengthen democracy and facilitate “thicker” forms of democratic participation, especially at municipal and community levels, and perhaps is especially valuable for youth as they engage civic spaces and advance claims for change, given the easy dismissal of youth as something other than “actualized political actors” (Gordon 2009:10). We also see this as especially critical at this political juncture, a moment in our shared political history dogged by intensifying polarization, and accelerating efforts to politicize school and classrooms, curriculum, and learning, whether talking about recent contestations over book banning, or critical race theory (Call-Cummings, Zenkov, and Keller 2024; Warikoo et al. 2024). Finally, we recognize the importance of civic involvement that centers social science research, given the increasing efforts to weaponize science for ideological ends among citizen groups and massive disinformation campaigns. Limited understanding of social science evidence and low levels of statistical literacy make possible misinformation campaigns of the sort we have witnessed in the last decade. These all point to the importance of focusing on building social science knowledge as a core competency for civic ends and organizational capacity for that work to occur.
Youth and Civic Involvement
Over the last two decades, critical youth studies scholars, mostly grounded in ethnographic inquiry, have worked to build a set of dynamic conceptual and normative frameworks in order to understand youth civic involvement as both discursive object and as historical practice, noting its often uneasy relationship to youth political activism, and highlighting the tensions between individualistic renderings of youth actors in civic realms, often prioritized in mainstream Western civic education and the more robust forms of collective organizing and mobilizations that often prevail across the globe by young people. Rightly, critical youth scholars have troubled enduring representational constructs by which we understand youth as civic actors, pointing to their constraining effect on the possibilities for collective action by youth organizing with adult allies and independent of them. Clay (2012) in The Hip Hop Generation Fights Back makes the point that idealized cultural images of youth activism circulating in popular culture focus too narrowly on individual activists over and against on-the-ground collective movement activity. Consider the broad circulation of images of Greta Thunberg, seemingly divorced from the citizen and science communities of action that have mobilized around and helped to solidify cultural understandings of the climate crisis, for instance. Individualistic forms of civic participation are also promoted in mainstream civic education instead of more collectively organized forms of participation. In Citizen Youth Kennelly (2011) makes the point that most models of civic education are predicated on the idea of “youth civic deficits,” suggesting civic education functions as a form of governance designed to limit and discipline youth political participation, not inspire. She identifies a core tension between the youth citizen and the youth activist, unpacking the citizen construct as tethered to a nation state that both constrains and constitutes youth activist commitments with depoliticizing ends. The effect is to dampen political and civic imaginations and foreclose more expansive repertoires of expressive civic actions. Kennelly treats “youth citizenship” as a concept that holds force as a form of governance visible in and through civic education and central to the contemporary project of neoliberalism, which actively undermines political engagement as it narrowly constructs the “youth citizen” through a deficit lens. This is exacerbated because the political project of neoliberalism valorizes a type of runaway individualism that conflates citizen and consumer and promotes a form of “good (youth) citizen” often antagonistically set against grassroots “youth activism” (See also Furlong and Cartmel 1997). Kennelly concludes that state-sanctioned citizenship education often has a disciplining effect on youth activism, destabilizes collective forms of mobilizing, and thus, holds limited emancipatory promise.
Recognizing the disciplinary effect of deficit-oriented constructs of youth civic actions, sociological researchers have also carefully documented the range of political and civic actions youth actually engage, the conditions and organizational contexts that both enable and constrain their involvement in civic realms. Taft’s (2019) The Kids Are in Charge asks the question, what facilitates children’s political agency and participation? Taking Peru’s movement of Working Children as her case, Taft explores children’s democratic decision making, intergenerational collaboration between adults and children, and the conceptualization of children’s participatory rights outside a U.S. context, identifying “young people’s ability to influence political institutions” (p. 215), while also noting the tokenism that can prevail in political organizations that serve to limit young people’s participation as full democratic actors (see also Zare 2022), especially in a U.S. context that has too narrowly emphasized children’s political socialization, failing to recognize how youth are political actors in their own right. Youth scholarship has also examined the effect of adult allies on how youth engage in civic activities. Adult-child collaboration can both reinscribe and level adult authority in interactions with children. Much depends on context. Gordon (2009) in her ethnographic investigation of two high school youth-led activist organizations identifies the institutional mechanisms that divert and undermine youth involvement. Adult allies often infantilized youth, devaluing their contributions despite the impressive repertoires of contention the youth activists Gordon studied had developed. Taft’s (2010) comparative examination of girls’ activism across the Americas found that girls’ embeddedness in organizations including movement coalitions, adult-led and youth-led movement organizations that mediated the forms girls’ civic and political engagements took, suggesting the importance of organization structure to youths’ engagement civically (Mireles and Bumgardner 2022).
Sites of adult-youth collaboration, like youth advisory councils, have been championed as effective models for civic participation rooted in project based, experiential, and collaborative learning, especially for a population ineligible to vote (Gordon and Taft 2011). Youth advisory councils are often platforms to promote civic involvement for youth and are appealing because they promote “a theory of democracy that emphasizes authority and impact, not just voice” (Taft and Gordon 2013:89), which are critical to genuine youth democratic participation. Yet all too often youth advisory councils sideline dissident views held by youth (Gordon and Taft 2011), especially historically under-represented and marginalized groups, reducing their potential engagement in political, social, and civil spheres. Youth advisory councils run the risk of tokenism, sometimes called “youthwashing,” and often rely on a limited set of democratic tools, rather than thinking expansively about what democratic participation is and can be. In this sense youth advisory councils can be “thin” participation.
The YRC is envisioned as something different from this. The YRC is a site of/for critical thinking that builds from social science conceptual and methodological tools, rooted in critical traditions, by centering the views and voices of students of color. The YRC imagines social science and sociological research as a critical component of contemporary civic education goals and critical citizenship that both promotes and reflects conscientization (Freire 1970). We believe that youth-led and participatory collaboratives like the YRC help to ensure youth, particularly youth of color, drive action. Indeed, building youths’ collective power, civic capacity and youths’ democratic participation is facilitated by belonging to democratic communities of practice like the YRC.
Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR)
We aim to make a case here that critical social science research, when grounded in the principles and practices of YPAR, could belong to what Sidney Tarrow has termed “repertoires of contention,” sitting beside more culturally recognizable protest movements and activism forms (Tarrow 1993). These repertoires of contention define the forms of activism that are officially recognized historically and make legible types of civic tools and action that can be mobilized for civic and political ends (Lichterman and Eliasoph 2014). YPAR is an approach to research that recognizes the valuable knowledge held and created by youth. YPAR also recognizes the violence and harm to young people that can result from adult-led academic social science knowledge production about young people. In YPAR, research is co-designed and co-facilitated by youth, and it seeks to identify and address the injustices faced by youth (Brion-Meisels and Alter 2018; Torre et al. 2012). In YPAR, and in keeping with our approach to youth civic involvement, youth knowledge and experiences are centered and honored as genuine expertise and local, context-based knowledge. Three specific YPAR principles guide us: (1) Participation: Those who have been historically marginalized by and in research should be centered in knowledge creation processes (co-production). (2) Action: Research should be used to create positive social change that is valued by those it affects. (3) Anti-Deficit: Research should take an appreciative approach, centering the strengths and assets of communities it affects as it attends to structural constraints.
One of the goals of YPAR is often to influence policy and decision-making bodies to implement policies relevant to the lives and needs of youth. One of the ways YPAR succeeds in influencing policy- and decision-making at multiple levels is through trust networks, or the networks of existing relationships across organizations that facilitate communication and change. Spalter-Roth, Best, and White (2018) found trust networks are key to moving research into the policy process and facilitating social change. They developed a conceptual model delineating the networks and relationships that shape the use of social science research in the policy process. In their formulation, trust networks should be treated as key relational resources facilitating policy impact, especially when the broader context (e.g., political divisions, distrust of scientific authority) of knowledge reception is inhospitable. They note these networks of trust are often forged in the context of resource sharing (reciprocity), which can be considered a type of collaboration that can set favorable conditions for uptake of research for policy change. The YRC engages this idea by intentionally building these types of trust networks between youth, researchers, and policymakers through the YPAR process.
In the field of educational research, Penuel et al. (2020) recognize the critical need for new kinds of collaborations between educators and practitioners, noting the urgency for “new ways to organize the enterprise of education research to be more of a ‘two-way street’ between researchers and key stakeholders in the improvement of practice” (p. 631), especially given the increasingly fraught political contestations over schooling that are having pretty dramatic impact on daily life in school for teachers, administrators, and students. Accordingly, Penuel et al. (2020) call on researchers to systematically investigate interventions and generate evidence that is conducted collaboratively with educators. They identify community-based approaches to research, which center collaborative problem solving, as particularly effective in integrating educators, families, and communities in the knowledge creation process. Penuel et al. (2020) recognize community-based collaborations, of which YPAR is an exemplar, as well aligned with the democratic and inclusive tenets foundational to public education. With that in mind, it is important to note that the authors of this article represent both the Youth Research Council’s (YRC’s) adult facilitators and its youth Fellows. Table 1 offers glimpses into who each of the authors is, as described by each author.
How Article Authors Describe Themselves.
The Youth Research Council
The YRC was founded in 2021 to gather young people as co-researchers (“YRC Fellows”), alongside university-based researchers from universities in the Washington D.C. area, to conduct research on issues important to high school-aged youth in the region. The intent was not to conduct research on a particular topic or using particular methods; rather, the goal was to center the experiences and expertise of diverse youth with the aim of effecting evidence-based social change at the community and school levels. In line with Penuel et al.’s (2020) recognition of the value of community-based collaboration, our work through the YRC is interested in “positioning participants as co-researchers” and “democratizing the search for solutions to persistent problems” (p. 641), to increase the use of youth-generated evidence among decision makers. The YRC is grounded in tenets of critical youth studies, anti-racism, and YPAR. This means recognizing the entanglements of knowledge and power, seeking to correct for the historical sidelining of youth in matters of direct relevance to them, and striving for greater epistemic justice as we proceed with our work. The YRC embraces an ethos of relationality in research and is committed to non-extractive and restorative inquiry in line with critical branches of sociology that have also sought to trouble the knowledge/power nexus within the discipline (Embrick 2023).
The YRC, now in its fourth year, meets twice per month for two to three hours for a total of 11 times during the academic year. We also meet over the summers with Fellows who are interested in extending their work through writing articles, presenting findings at academic conferences, creating professional development modules and workshops for in-service and pre-service teachers, and organizing for future cohorts. In October 2021, we used our first Saturday meeting to create a mission and establish group norms to guide the collaborative and appreciative inquiry. We each—including the YRC’s adult facilitators—signed our names to these founding documents to indicate our commitment to conducting research that is explicitly anti-racist, anti-deficit, and intentionally inclusive. To focus on systems-change thinking critical to anti-racist work, we engaged in an activity called “ripples of change,” which allows participants the opportunity to map out their interests and goals from individual-level change to community-level, institutional-level, and finally systems-level change (Call-Cummings and Hauber-Özer 2021; Chambers 2002). At the next meetings, university researchers facilitated interactive data gathering activities to elicit broad participation and discussion, including activities such as card sorting (Chambers 2002) to prioritize our collective’s interests and concerns. During our initial concept mapping session, YRC Fellows were organized in small groups to prioritize a series of index cards on which they had annotated ideas for how to focus our research. Using these index cards as a tool to facilitate discussion, Fellows across each small group began discussing and noting the most relevant themes. As we reconvened as a large group, it was immediately apparent that racial and ethnic injustices had risen to the top of each small group’s list. After an open discussion with the entire collective, the YRC Fellows articulated how these racial-ethnic inequities affect their mental health outcomes, and in turn, the overall educational environment in their high schools. This ultimately led to the creation of a multi-method research project focused on exploring the mental health effects of racial microaggressions on high school students. After two years of conducting this study, we extended our interest to include teasing out the multiple meanings of school safety, acknowledging discriminatory behaviors like racial and ethnic microaggressions and hate speech often decrease feelings of safety among school-aged young people. Our current (fourth) year is now dedicated fully to taking our findings and evidence-based demands to decision- and policymakers for action and change, though data sharing has been a part of our work each year and has included end-of-year gallery walks of research findings using art-based visualizations, and a full-day retreat with high school administrators engaged with school-based diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.
Research Design and Methods
YRC Fellows began this study in Fall 2021 by conducting exploratory qualitative interviews with their peers (n = 70) and engaging a story circle technique intended to allow the YRC Fellows to gain a sense of both shared and diverging dimensions of their own individual experiences with race in the context of school (Tachine, Yellow Bird, and Cabrera 2016). Racial microaggressions and hate speech were the most frequently discussed race relevant phenomenon among the Fellows’ story circles. Led by the values that YRC Fellows collaboratively identified at the beginning of the academic year, the YRC Fellows analyzed these interviews and story circle data through a dialogic, participatory approach that allowed individuals’ stories (experiences) to remain intact and that ensured each participant’s voice remained a part of the story itself, thus increasing the impact of each story as well as the group of experiences (Hallett et al. 2017). We used multiple tools to engage in this process. For example, we used the online tool Mentimeter to ask questions that would allow Fellows to contribute to and see snapshots of their growing understandings around a particular question of interest. These snapshots would act as jumping-off points for dialogue around the nuances of the data we had gathered.
Findings from Fellows’ data analysis informed the creation of a questionnaire to identify the prevalence of specific racial microaggressions and the effects of racial microaggressions on the mental health of high school-aged youth, as reported by those youth. The questionnaire the YRC Fellows developed built upon the facilitator-identified Racial Microaggression Scale (Torres-Harding, Andrade, and Romero Diaz 2012), a validated instrument. Questions were modified based on YRC Fellows’ lived experience with racial microaggressions and in order to use language and terminology relevant to the local context. Qualitative and descriptive quantitative analysis of completed questionnaire responses (n = 732) were triangulated with interview and story circle findings.
Context: Some YRC Findings
While it is not the purpose of this article to detail the YRC study on racial microaggressions, we think it is important to provide samples of the study’s findings in order to contextualize our claims that the YRC represents a promising structure to promote youth civic involvement and support movements toward greater community-based data justice. In this spirit, Table 2 provides an overview of the type of survey data we have gathered.
Findings From YRC Questionnaire Data.
These and other findings have been presented by YRC Fellows, including Authors 3 to 9, to a group of local decision makers, representing multiple municipal governments, school districts, and individual schools in the Northern Virginia/Washington D.C. metropolitan region. In year one, the presentation of preliminary findings and the screening of a seven-minute documentary on the Youth Research Council (https://cssr.gmu.edu/initiatives/yrc) was followed by a discussion among YRC Fellows and their peers, high school representatives, parents, and university researchers and program administrators. Decision makers urged YRC Fellows to continue to expand this research and present it to various decision-making bodies across the region and state, suggesting that this evidence could gain traction among those bodies if presented in actionable ways. During the second year of the YRC, 2022 to 2023, Fellows continued this data collection effort and also presented findings at a regional academic conference, as well as a national education conference. We delivered a major presentation to local stakeholders that included high school representatives, parents, and university researchers and program administrators at the annual Youth Research Council Exhibition. The exhibition also included a gallery walk of arts-based research by YRC Fellows, and the debut of a second documentary that detailed YRC processes and included YRC Fellows’ testimonials. We also co-authored a research brief that was distributed to county- and school-level administrators. At the start of year three, YRC Fellows, university researchers, and key officials from four of the participating school districts reconvened during the all-day YRC kick-off event. The goal in doing so was to build and strengthen networks for deeper ongoing collaboration with school administrators from the outset, and not just the end of the research cycle, in an effort to better center institutional change and civic action as a key research priority.
Voices of YRC Fellows: How We Experience Civic Engagement
As a group, and in keeping with a YPAR approach, we decided that we wanted to center the voices and experiences of YRC Fellows in presenting how youth-led research can be a type of civic involvement. In this section, six Fellows have written short narratives to offer a sense of how they define civic involvement, what it looks like in the context of the YRC, and how the experience of the YRC might translate to life.
Sara Berhe-Abraha
Within my first weeks in the YRC, I was introduced to creative research methods and meaningful, personal conversations with other fellows and community members. The act of acknowledging, identifying, and further exploring social issues that are pertinent to my daily life encourages me to see social issues as something that might be worked through rather than a perpetual reality. There’s power in giving people a space to be heard. By creating that for ourselves and exploring the depth and gravity of social issues, we’ve invested into our ability to work toward a better future.
The YRC is not only culturally inclusive, but equitable in the sense of being promoted toward diverse communities and being varied in time commitment. This opens up doors for people of different backgrounds and levels of availability, which can be impacted by socioeconomic status. In turn, creating an opportunity for civic work that spotlights the concerns of the multicultural community that Northern Virginia is in a world where civic engagement is more accessible to people in positions of privilege, sustaining oppressive structures through erasure of already underrepresented populations. By creating a space that is foundationally anti-racist, the YRC performs civic involvement by imagining and creating a new table, rather than sustaining an old one.
I felt free to be fully present and contribute to the YRC because we established an inclusive environment early on. As time went on, I noticed myself developing more of a voice and becoming more in touch with my observations, reflections, ideas, and how they connected to our research. Being able to bring my whole self to the table allowed me to contribute to the research by informing it in a personal way. Hopefully, more people would see details of their experiences represented in findings as a result, especially when compounded by the contributions of all the fellows.
As youth researchers, we were given space to explore our awareness of issues we’ve been confronted with personally and within our own communities. The Youth Research Council focuses on researching what we believe is most prominent, rather than what researchers who are far removed from our realities do. In this process, we’ve been intentional about thoughtfully crafting surveys and conducting interviews to avoid simplifying and thus misrepresenting the reality of individuals’ existence. I think that civic involvement is most authentic and meaningful when it creates space for everyone’s well-being to be advocated for. We did this by serving communities through connection to, rather than observation of them.
Natale Gray
I wanted to join the Youth Research Council because it seemed like a great way for me to make a change in my community. I had always wanted to do something that impacts my community and others’ lives for the better, so this program seemed like an amazing opportunity to be a part of. Right off the bat, I was meeting people from all over Northern Virginia, all of whom had different experiences and backgrounds. Everyone had something in common, though; we all wanted to make a change. I love being in a group where we are all passionate to make a difference in our schools and being around leaders that really care about the Youth having a voice.
I loved being involved in my local community and school by giving our questionnaire to many students from my area. Talking to students in my area also allowed them to have a voice, even if they weren’t directly in the group. It also was a great starter to having conversations with other students about their feelings toward schools and how they thought their school’s responses toward microaggressions and racism were flawed.
In the Youth Research Council, I also had the opportunity to present at the Eastern Sociological Society conference in Baltimore and the American Educational Research Association conference in Chicago. At these conferences, I was able to speak to other researchers in the sociology and education fields. It was amazing to see people from all over the country, and even from other countries, share their findings and methods of research. As people came to listen to our presentation, many of them were impressed and wanted to know more about our research. I loved being able to discuss our findings with people who have experience in these fields and that have made change in their time within the fields. Additionally, we had an end of year presentation within the Youth Research Council. It felt amazing for people from Northern Virginia school counties to listen to us present our data and answer the questions they had. As we were presenting, I saw them taking notes, and it made me feel like they were really listening to what we had to say and coming up with ways to implement our suggestions in their schools. Within the Youth Research Council, I have felt more involved in my community by speaking to more people from Northern Virginia about their experience with racial microaggressions and presenting to a room of people that have the power to change the schools and systems in place.
Widad Khalid
As I step into the Youth Research Council’s meeting room, I learn more about myself and my community. We engage in difficult, important conversations and share personal knowledge as well as personal experiences on microaggressions in high school. We share a passion and desire to change our communities for youth through research. I used to be in school, witnessing or being the victim of microaggressions knowing they were wrong, but everyone seemed to accept. But in the YRC meetings I realized the need to combat it.
In the context of the YRC, civic involvement is about using our voice to make a positive change in the community. Civic involvement, to me, isn’t just being a member of a community but it’s actively seeking to make it better. Civic involvement and the YRC are intertwined.
As we conducted our research, we collected qualitative data through interviewing highschoolers in our communities. Sitting down and discussing microaggressions we have experienced in school with my peers during interviews forced me to confront the reality of what was truly happening in our schools. Many of my friends and classmates had been carrying the weight of these microaggressions, feeling unheard. The interviews became a space for them to express their feelings and experiences openly, a chance to be seen and validated.
One of the most memorable days in the YRC was the final presentation day. My fellow council members bravely made impactful video testimonials sharing their stories. Slowly, I started tearing up as I heard their experiences with microaggressions. In that moment I was reminded of the importance of the research we conduct in the YRC and the need for real change for real people.
As I step out of the YRC meetings every other Saturday, I carry a pair of fresh eyes and a more open mind, continuing civic involvement.
Oaklen Kalinichenko
As a recent immigrant, I’ve always wanted to give back to the community that welcomed me to this country. However, I was never sure on how to start making a real, tangible impact in those people’s lives. After joining the Youth Research Council, I have had the opportunity to have conversations with such a diverse group of people from all avenues of life and learn each of their stories. Through this, I was not only able to meet other immigrants who may have lived through similar struggles to mine, but I was also able to engage with them and work toward changing their experience in the American community for the better. This year, I got the chance to present our research at the American Educational Research Association Annual Conference in Chicago. Having this opportunity to meet people in the field who made a real difference in their communities themselves really pushed me to put myself out there in my own community. Through this conference and the impact it left on me, I got the chance to meet so many vastly different groups of students, researchers, and educators all over the state and the country, which was an overall amazing and eye-opening experience.
However, not only did I engage with my community through the influence that YRC had on me, but also through the activities I performed while serving as a Fellow. An activity that stands out to me as one of the best forms of civic engagement I’ve had the opportunity to partake in were interviews. Through those interviews, I was able to really learn and inquire into another person’s life experiences and, hopefully, make them feel seen, despite the shocking levels of discrimination that many have faced throughout their lifetimes. Hearing those people’s experiences first-hand really motivated me to become more engaged in the community I live in with the goal of helping my local school systems grow into a better and more positive experience for students.
Overall, the experience of meeting groups of people from different backgrounds and with different perspectives from mine really opened my eyes to the difficulties that my community is facing and what I, myself, can do to help my community feel as welcoming to those people as it once was to me.
Liz Rotherham
Civic involvement can be defined as active participation to address social or community issues. In terms of the YRC, this is exemplified through our meaningful involvement in collecting qualitative and quantitative data about student experiences in the Northern Virginia area. This year, our council collected significant data surveying more than 700 students to gain insights into the challenges and realities they face. Through the survey, we collected data on the frequency of events through questions such as, “over the past three years, how many of the experiences listed below have personally happened to you at school?” In addition, we surveyed the intensity of discrimination and bias through questions such as “how often does this experience occur to you at school,” with a scale of answer choices ranging from “never” to “always.” We sent this survey to be completed online, and collected data through a form of interview we classified as “speak back” surveys. These interviews were completed with the same survey questions being asked, but instead, the respondents were encouraged to provide more open-ended responses rather than just selecting our predefined options. This allowed for more detailed responses that could encourage data collection on additional categories.
One particularly impactful experience for me was during my first “speak back survey” interview with a 16-year-old Black male student. He shed a light on the intensity of his experiences as he switched schools due to the lack of administration taking action against racist comments by other students. This encounter reinforced the significance of our data collection efforts and the urgent need for fostering change within educational institutions.
This civic involvement has been significantly impactful to me as it has changed my perspective into the subtle yet impactful ways in which racist microaggressions can affect individuals’ well-being and educational experiences. I firmly believe that education is the cornerstone of a thriving society. However, far too many children and young adults are being left behind due to systemic inequalities in our educational system. This can be highlighted in our research as out of the 732 students we surveyed, 54 percent of those students stated that discrimination occurred most often in classrooms and that the second-most likely aggressor was a teacher (after other students). This was the most shocking statistic to me as school should be a safe and inclusive place for students to learn, not be faced with microaggressions.
For some time, I’ve wanted to pursue a career in psychology. However, through my involvement in the Youth Research Council I’ve furthered my desire to continue doing social science research to learn more about the challenges students face in our education system and ways we can collectively create a better experience.
Sara Martah
When I first joined the YRC I was interested in the topic but had no idea what kind of impact we could create. I believe the first time I realized the impact we could have was when we started having discussions on different aspects, from racism and discrimination to family experiences, and slowly people started to chime in and we soon realized pretty much everyone had an experience to share. This made me see that through the YRC we were giving a voice to the youth in our community, and by participating in the YRC, I was helping make that possible for my community as well. Every time I walked into a YRC meeting it felt like I had a purpose, and that I was actually giving back to my community. I felt engaged civically because the YRC allowed me to actually create the change I wanted to see in my community. When we were collecting our data, we actually had to go and do that ourselves. Of course, we had our survey that we created, but no big platform to just be able to share it and get instant responses. We had to go out there ourselves in our communities and get people to do the surveys. Even when conducting interviews, we never had people come to us, but rather had to ask people in our different settings to have a conversation. This experience not only resulted in me being involved in my community to get the data we needed, but also allowed me to get to know the people in my community and be exposed to areas I might never have otherwise.
In my second year at the YRC we had a chance to go present at a Baltimore conference, and immediately I knew I wanted to go. The feeling I had at that conference from being able to actually talk to others and share the research from our own community is indescribable, and the YRC made that possible. Of course, I was proud of all the work we were able to do just in our regular meetings but getting ready for the conference made everything seem more real. When you are still young, and you’re constantly shown that only adults can do the real work, and then you get the chance to actually do that change that adults normally do. That feeling is powerful, and it makes you want to continue to be involved in your community.
Discussion
Our focus in this article is to think through how participation in a youth research council is at once a form of civic involvement for youth, and a catalyst to expand young people’s repertoires of civic action, as well as to develop and deepen a sense of self where one’s civic role is critical. Because one of the goals of this article is to center the perspectives and insights of the YRC Fellows, we gathered as a collective on Zoom in June 2023 to discuss the patterns we saw in the Fellows’ experiences and the ways we see the YRC specifically, and youth-led research in general, as holding potential as a site to build civic capacity among youth. This section has been written using portions of that Zoom conversation. The words that follow then represent forms of talk by youth as YRC Fellows about the complex entanglements of institutional power, finding voice, claiming power, engaging civically, and imagining pathways to effect systems change and broader social change.
Talking to Real People About Real Issues
As youth, we don’t often get to talk to real people in our communities about real issues. In school, so much is forced on us because of the curriculum or standardized testing or even our own goals to get into specific colleges. What really made a difference for us at the YRC, and what really helped us taste that civic engagement, were the interviews we conducted, as Oak discussed in her narrative. People would share their experiences with us in ways that we just did not expect. Often these were our friends or at least people we were familiar with, so they felt comfortable sharing with us. They shared experiences that really resonated with us. Because of this, we could connect with them in different ways than we had previously. Just being able to talk to people was a huge part of civic engagement for us in the YRC.
In addition to being able to talk to our friends in different ways about real issues was that, because they were our friends, they trusted us. They knew research was being done and that gave them a kind of platform they had not had previously. Natale and Widad talked about the ways in which just the simple act of interviewing or offering someone a questionnaire meant that they felt heard, seen, and validated. So often our words are used against us as youth. Our words are weaponized in school. There might be discussions or surveys about our experiences but we often feel like there is some kind of ulterior motive. This was not that. This was about creating space for our voices to be heard. Our words were treated as powerful, as trusted, as expertise. So, the people we spoke with felt comfortable knowing they were sharing this information to spread awareness on microaggressions and things that they did not have a space to talk about or they hadn’t seen represented elsewhere. Our peers trust us and hope that their experiences might help others—they might be doing something important. We never actually see real change when we fill out those school surveys. Nothing really ever comes out of those, at least that we can see. But the YRC aims for real change.
Another way we were able to connect with people was through our presentations, whether they were the presentations we did just with local decision makers at the end of each YRC year or the national conference we went to in Chicago. Several of us mentioned that conference because it made us feel like we are engaging a larger community. It made us feel like we are making a tangible impact, working with adults, with actual educators to make a difference in our lives and the lives of our friends and peers.
The YRC has become a platform for us to speak out about things that we may have noticed or felt were wrong or unfair but we, as youth, did not have the ability or outlet to speak out previously. Even if we had school assignments about similar topics, we have never felt as passionate about a school experience as we do about the research we conduct with the YRC. We just want to be “good” students or “good” kids. But for the YRC, our motivation is different. It goes beyond the grade, and that excites us. It makes us want to work harder because we know something real and tangible is going to come out of it.
Making Real Change
The idea of talking to real people connects with another theme we noticed in our narratives, which was around the desire to create positive change. We all want to make a change. This is something that it seems like everyone had in common coming into the YRC. At our schools, we do assignments or we fill out surveys and we know nothing is going to come of them. We are not getting anything out of much of what we do in school. But the research we do with the YRC allows us to work toward bettering our communities. We might be talking to school board members or presenting at conferences. There is no ulterior motive. We know people trust us and they see that we care. They see that it’s not performative. This feels empowering and exciting.
YRC as Community
One of the aspects of the YRC that stuck out to us about our narratives was that the YRC is a kind of community unto itself. Just being able to talk to others who get you and who have the same interests as you is powerful and liberating. We talked about how school should be a community but really is not because school does not allow for the kind of vulnerability the way the YRC does. The way we speak to each other is comfortable in a way we often don’t feel at school. We worked on building trust from the very beginning at the YRC, even if we didn’t call it that explicitly. We committed to being open-minded, being able to have respectful conversations, and respectfully addressing other people’s ideas. Also, we acknowledged that racism, microaggressions, and other issues exist, and we don’t back down from them. We discuss them. If something comes up in that space, we talk about it instead of ignoring it—which is often what happens in school because of fear or politics. That builds a lot of trust, and it makes us want to be in that space.
Come As You Are . . . And Be Valued
Another way that the YRC connects with civic involvement is related to that space of trust, openness, and respect we have built. The community is equitable in the sense that there are no real barriers to participation. You don’t have to have a specific GPA or college aspiration or resume line. Fellows make different levels of time commitment, we have different backgrounds, and we show up in different ways. As Sara B. brought up, all of this increases access to being involved with research about social issues—access to civic involvement.
The YRC makes us feel seen. It makes us feel heard. Especially since 2020, the COVID lockdowns, and the murder of George Floyd, we are trying to educate ourselves more on issues happening around us, but it can leave us feeling sad because it feels like we can’t do anything about what we are hearing and reading about. We don’t have anywhere to spread our ideas. The YRC gives us a chance to do something, as Sara M. talked about. It’s empowering to know people are listening to us and we can actually do something in our community or school to make the world better.
Realizing the Goals of YPAR
We are aware that YPAR makes a lot of promises that can be hard to keep. The promise of epistemic justice or decentering the expertise of those who have historically held power, by centering the knowledge and experiences of people of color, women, and/or youth, is exciting in theory but exhausting and difficult in practice. Yet the words and experiences shared here by YRC Fellows suggest a viable and sustainable organizational form for doing so. Sara Martah shared, “When you are still young, and you’re constantly shown that only adults can do the real work, and then you get the chance to actually do that change that adults normally do. That feeling is powerful.” Sara Berhe-Abraha talked about the YRC as an “opening up” of opportunities for civic involvement, framing the YRC as a more equitable and accessible space to “develop more of a voice.” We suggest, then, that a Youth Research Council that embraces the principles and practices of YPAR as its guiding logics, represents a novel and effective structure and organizational conduit through which young people can cultivate the types of self and collective efficacy upon which thick democratic participation depends.
The testimonials of YRC Fellows here point to some of the transformational elements in how they come to conceive of themselves as critical, agentic systems-change thinkers and civic actors through their participation in YRC activities. Their testimonials also speak to the significance of the YRC as an organizational form for building collective capacity for youth to think more systematically about institutional practices schools can embrace to promote anti-racism. And while few YRC Fellows engaged street-level protest actions during their time in the YRC, YRC Fellows have joined student equity boards, become student representatives on school boards, and served in leadership roles in Black Student Unions and other school clubs. Some Fellows transitioning to college reported the decisions to integrate sociology, racial studies, and African American studies into coursework, with greater interest to engage equity-based considerations into their selection of majors and post-college plans.
We take the view that social science research tools are civic tools for communities and that seeking epistemic justice for communities historically marginalized, including youth and especially youth of color, is a political act that holds restorative promise for communities harmed by policy and research in the past. Efforts to build social science research capacity within communities and groups has been an important pathway to build collective efficacy and counter policy harms. We are inspired by the proliferation of community-based data trusts held by First Nation peoples, which provide a critical example of how research can be seized as a tool to build collective power, facilitating, for example, greater control over narratives about a given group, in our case, youth. When social science research is treated as a civic tool, it becomes a resource that can be used to deepen participation in systems change among groups who have historically been sidelined in political and institutional decision making. When social science research is viewed as a community resource it enables greater community control over the social and explanatory frameworks to understand what conditions hold a problem in place, and what solutions are needed to changes those conditions. When youth engage with research that builds upon the expertise they hold about their communities and their schools, they are also building their repertoires of civic action. As adult researchers grounded in critical youth perspectives and are critical of the adult-youth frameworks that unthinkingly assume adults as knowers and youth as learners, we (Authors 1, 2, 10, 11, 12) follow YRC Fellows’ lead. As adults, we learn from and through reciprocal exchange as we earn their trust. These connections built through collaboration feel restorative (Dazzo 2023). It has stretched us to reevaluate our own thinking about research practice, knowledge building, civic actions, and systems-change. We have learned to listen more and have found when youth lead other youth within the organizational structure of the YRC, and we as university researchers commit resources, that new ways of thinking and doing emerge. We aren’t alone in this thinking. As Natale so aptly observed, “They were really listening to what we had to say and [were] coming up with ways to implement our suggestions in their schools.” Widad mentioned that the YRC was “a chance to be seen and validated,” and Oaklen noted that part of the work of the YRC was to “make [her peers] feel seen.” This—allowing young people to see themselves as civic actors and institutional and systems change agents and pushing those with institutional influence to see and then value the same—represents the type of transformational project the YRC was designed to marshal.
Conclusions
In a U.S. context, youth are rarely conceived of as agents of democracy in their/our own right. The U.S. is marked by a high level of age segregation which constrains youths’ political and civic participation. Within the realm of political debate and discourses on democracy, youth are defined largely in terms of their “becoming” rather than their being. Anxieties about youth not being properly socialized to civic roles and what it means for a healthy civil sphere and participation in democracy for generations to come are widespread. Universities, schools, and the U.S. government have each sought redress by building programs to engage youth in political and civic activities. We support fundamentally a more robust social infrastructure to nurture, support, and amplify youth civic involvement. However, we also recognize the very real limits of frameworks and practices focused too narrowly on forms of civic education tethered to the idea of youth as “citizens in the making” because they inadequately center the types of expertise youth already possess and gloss over the creative strategies young people deploy and the cultural resources they/we mobilize as they/we navigate their/our schools and communities to make them more livable (Gordon 2009; Taft 2010). We have suggested in this article that Youth Research Councils represent an organizational form to strengthen collective capacity for youth to engage sustainably and more deeply with political and institutional realms where decisions that have direct bearing on their lives are made.
As the YRC, we argue that youth’s political and civic participation is constrained by the dampening force of prevailing cultural schema that structure youth civic education. We call for alternate ways to imagine civic education’s social infrastructure and the cultural toolkits of youth civic action. This call is inspired by lessons learned from critical youth studies and from youth themselves participating in YRC. Like Clay (2012), in her ethnographic investigation with youth activists of color in a post-Civil Rights’ context in urban Oakland, we recognize the importance of stretching the repertoires of what constitutes community-based actions in order to identify new forms of community and civic involvement engaged by youth. Doing so requires attention to the “organizing sites that are available to teenagers” (Clay 2012:174) to collectively build critical consciousness and skills to frame and advance claims to address problems relevant to their lives.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The work referenced in this article was supported by the George Mason University Anti-Racist and Inclusive Excellence Research Grant and the George Mason University College of Humanities and Social Sciences Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Grant.
