Prefiguring Research-Practice Partnerships to Pursue Racial Justice in Education

Abstract

Processes of integrating explicit anti-racist goals in research-practice partnerships is under-examined in scholarship, yet intentional anti-racist research-practice partnership (RPP) design and implementation can leverage liberatory and collaborative action research approaches that address the root of racial inequities and advance corrective measures to justly service youth and their families. In this paper, authors analyze qualitative data from the first year of their RPP to describe how they approached their design and launching process as a form of prefiguring for racial justice. They pinpoint how their efforts yielded opportunities, challenges, tensions, and benefits. Their process aligned with Akom’s (2011) Black Emancipatory Action Research (BEAR) framework, which is conceptualized with Afrocentric lenses, honors Black communities, and constructs research as a tool for Black liberation and self-determination. Authors detail findings related to inviting authentic community engagement with justice-driven partners, nurturing youth-centered critical care, disrupting Whiteness norms, and revisiting and negotiating RPP expectations.

Objectives

In January 2020, we launched a research-practice partnership (RPP) devoted to dismantling the school-to-prison pipeline (STPP) in Detroit, believing that the interests and insights of those most impacted by the educational inequities and institutionalized anti-Blackness of the STPP—namely Black youth—should be centered. The STPP refers to a network of ideologies, policies, practices, and relationships that contributes to school age children encountering the prison industrial complex, and eventually experiencing some form of incarceration (Meiners, 1991). This network interconnects the legal system and PreK-12 schooling in racially unjust ways. For Black youth, who are disproportionately impacted by the STPP, this often means being subjected to anti-Black school discipline, expulsion, and behavior regulation policies that are criminalizing and can be a precursor to imprisonment trajectories (Alexander, 2010; McGrew, 2016; Meiners, 2011; Sojoyner, 2013; U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights, 2014).

We knew that effectively facilitating an anti-racist RPP would require us to “prefigure” our RPP design and process with thorough intentionality. Indeed, prefiguring involves planning research in ways that move beyond technical issues of design to anticipate the relational and political dynamics of research implementation and role definition, and respond to those dynamics through a praxis centered in research partners’ values, commitments, and goals (Campanella et al., 2022). We committed to systematically documenting and studying our prefigurative work to increase the chances of our research being a justice-driven tool, and to further insights into how anti-racist intentions can be actualized in research-practice partnerships.

While RPPs in education join university researchers with educators and/or community members to enrich educational practice and policy through action-oriented inquiry (Brown & Allen, 2021; Coburn & Penuel, 2016), attention to integrating explicit anti-racist goals in RPPs is under-examined in scholarship. Intentional anti-racist RPP prefiguring and implementation, however, has the potential to leverage liberatory and collaborative action research approaches to address the root of racial inequities and advance corrective measures that justly service youth and their families.

In this paper, we describe our first-year efforts to design and coordinate an anti-racist RPP called the Justice Now ¹ alliance, aimed at dismantling the STPP. Our research collaborative is a networked, intergenerational and community-engaged RPP that unites researchers from two Midwestern research universities, a partnering civil rights organization, and community resident advisors to coordinate the RPP. In turn, our partnership worked to convene and support four predominantly African American, community-based action research teams composed of additional university, youth, and community practitioner researchers who were also interested in combating the STPP. Through analysis of our qualitative study of the RPP’s first year, we describe our prefiguring and implementation process and pinpoint how it yielded opportunities, challenges, tensions, and benefits in advancing anti-racist action research.

Background and Context Relevant to the Justice Now Alliance

Countering anti-racism, and more specifically anti-Blackness, in ways that ultimately help children, families, schools, and communities has been our partnership’s overarching goal. In developing a grant proposal to fund our Justice Now research alliance, we identified an RPP model as a vehicle for Black emancipatory praxis. We, along with our community resident advisors—four African American women elders and one young Black man—helped determine that Justice Now would focus on disrupting the school-to-prison pipeline (STPP) in Detroit. The STPP, as a metaphor, has come to represent the deep entanglements of racial injustice and systemic educational inequality that disproportionately endanger Black children (Alexander, 2010; McGrew, 2016; Meiners, 2011; Skiba et al., 2014). We saw the RPP as an opportunity to explore the injustices of pipeline dynamics and contribute solutions, and thus to directly tackle anti-Blackness and merge critical methodological frameworks with practice. ²

Early in our partnership, the STPP became a common shorthand for our focus on the systematic devaluing, unwarranted fear, restriction of educational opportunities, and overly-severe punishment that racist educational policies and practices perpetuate (Alexander, 2010; McGrew, 2016; Meiners, 2011). In our RPP’s request for proposals we stated our desire to support action research teams committed to dismantling “the broader dynamics of White supremacy that biases educational ideologies, practices, and policies and thus endangers youth of color in Detroit and other cities” in light of the STPP (Justice Now RPP RFP, 2020, p. 2).

Our RPP coordinators recruited action research teams through a mini-grant application process which concluded with our partnership granting four research teams approximately $20,000 each. We were able to share these funds through a larger foundation RPP grant that our PI team was awarded. ³ Each action research team in our RPP was dedicated to conducting research to help dismantle the STPP in Detroit. Teams varied in research design, but all incorporated some youth-engaged research methods and strove to develop relevant school community resources related to curriculum, professional development, extracurricular programming, and/or restorative justice initiatives that countered the criminalization and harm of Black youth in schools. This meant each team engaged youth researchers as co-creators of knowledge and partners in research question development, data collection, and analysis in developmentally-appropriate ways that supported their skill building and empowerment as social change agents (Bertrand, 2018). They also “position[ed] them as the experts of their own educational experiences” (Bautista et al., 2013, p. 7), an essential step to countering the disregard that urban Black youth often face in the inquiry into educational inequities. The first team, Youth Circle of Power (YCP), brought a high school administration into accountability with youth who embraced intersectional restorative justice. The second team, Black Boys Becoming Mindful Men (B3M2), implemented a participatory evaluation of a martial arts after-school program. The third team, Sisters Achieving for Each Other (SAFE), facilitated socioemotional supports or “circles of care” for Black high school girls struggling through the COVID-19 epidemic. Finally, the fourth team, Suspending the Oppressive Practices (STOP), involved a participatory assessment and evaluation of a middle school’s suspension practices.

Conceptual Framework

Scholarship on collaborative inquiry, RPPs, and conducting research for social justice and Black emancipation informed our conceptual framework. Action-oriented, collaborative inquiry encompasses many different options for research designs, including participatory action research (PAR), community-based design research, and survey research (Hesse-Biber & Leavy, 2011; Moss & Haertel, 2016). Like other forms of collaborative inquiry, RPPs bring differently-situated individuals together to enact research and social action (Bang et al., 2016; McIntyre, 2008). When community-based and action-oriented, such collaboration positions researchers to alter hierarchical institutional relationships to better meet communities’ self-defined needs throughout the research process (Bang et al., 2016; Root, 2007; Wilson et al., 2022). This involves co-constructing a dialogic process that prompts community and academic researchers to engage in deep listening, establish shared goals and norms, and carefully negotiate their individual and group work roles to each other’s satisfaction (Bergold, Jarg & Thomas, 2012; McIntyre, 2008). Still, Brown and Allen (2021) note “interpersonal tension is more or less unavoidable in RPPs” (para. 3), so it is imperative that RPP coordinators continually work at fostering “synchrony and trust” amongst their teams (Brown & Allen, 2021, para. 16).

Whereas RPPs in education have traditionally existed among university researchers and school districts (Ferrell et al., 2021), our Justice Now alliance reflects the growing recognition and establishment of community-engaged, non-district partnerships that link universities with schools and other community organizations to draw upon the expertise and influence of community-based practitioners, too. As discussion of our methods later shows, we employed racially-conscious approaches to collaborating with our university, community, and youth partners that stem from participatory action and decolonizing research traditions rooted in justice-driven inquiry and activism (Akom, 2011). Such traditions privilege the experiential knowledge and inquiry of marginalized citizens, engage in systemic critique, promote critical consciousness, and counter the exploitation of oppressed peoples (Guishard, 2009; Patel, 2016; Tuck, 2008). Consequently, each of the action research teams were largely guided by the experiential knowledge of Black educators, youth, and community members. As part of their action, each team collected data to inform the tangible improvements of schools and/or community-based education organizations that countered the racist effects of the STPP, taking steps like developing research-informed, revised school discipline policies, and developing and promoting more inclusive after-school program outreach approaches. Our design further synced with Gordon da Cruz’s (2017) call for critical community-engaged scholarship to join universities and communities of color in implementing research as a form of praxis embodying race-conscious analyses, asset-based understandings of communities and their members, and privileging of subaltern experiences that critical race theories stress (see p. 375). One way we did this was by ensuring via our mini-grant application process that each team’s work was anchored in strength-based framings of Black youth, explicitly equity-oriented and racially conscious conceptual frameworks, and critical methodological designs. Our approach homed into our commitments to practice Black emancipatory work (Akom, 2011).

Black Emancipatory Research and Prefiguring as Critical Care

In Akom’s (2011) Black Emancipatory Action Research (BEAR) framework, racism is understood as an international “pigmentocracy” that privileges White skin, emerging from a process of structural racialization that involves “the interaction of multiple institutions in an ongoing process of producing cumulative, durable, racialised outcomes” (powell, 2008, as cited in Akom, 2011, p. 114). The framework is intersectional in its intent to be a “theoretical, methodological and pedagogical tool to challenge racism, sexism and classism and work towards social justice” (p. 114). This is often done by integrating critical ethnographic and PAR approaches that involve self-reflexivity, transformative goals, and participant-observation methods in local communities. Akom is clear, however, to frame BEAR as a “research orientation” (p. 120) that allows for the use of various methods. BEAR incorporates epistemologies, spiritual principles, and inquiry practices born from African freedom fighters who engaged in participatory research (PR) to inform their resistance to colonization. It is also influenced by complementary theoretical and methodological principles advanced from an array of pioneering critical scholars, educators, and organizers such as Freire, DuBois, Fanon, and Baker, and from critical race and Black feminist/womanist scholars challenging U.S. racism. Akom further explains that BEAR is inspired by contemporary participatory research scholarship dedicated to educational empowerment and co-researching with adult and youth community members. BEAR explicitly tends to race throughout the entire research process to advance the self-determination of Black people in a way we see as prefiguration.

The concept of prefiguration derives from social movement theory and refers to the process of change agents visioning a better future while planning the steps to help make that future possible via political organizing and activism. For instance, regarding disability activism, Eiler and D’Angelo (2020) suggest that prefiguration involves “engendering an empowered consciousness” (p. 364) to then take needed political action to counter harmful political norms and practices. Within the context of LGBTQ+ youth advocacy and political education, Uttamchandani (2021) refers to prefiguration as organizing for “ideal political futures” (p. 54). Campanella et al. (2022) bridge the notion of prefiguration into the planning and implementation of RPPs and reflect on their efforts to envision a collaborative research process that involved “democratic knowledge construction for justice that attends seriously to power and positionality,” (p. 3). Drawing on Boggs (1977), Campanella et al. further explain that prefiguration in research means to pinpoint and plan for valued forms of “social relations, decision making, culture, and human experience[s]” (p. 3).

We prefigured our Justice Now RPP to envision and embody anti-racist and liberatory values and commitments. We operationalized anti-racism in our RPP to include ways one works to advance the freedom, protection, success, and love of Black people, not just through interpersonal relations, but also via systemic policies, structures, and practices—including research practices.

Ishkanian and Peña Saavedra (2019) address enacting intersectional prefiguration that is sensitive to racial–ethnic and feminist identities, explaining that it means “confronting and acknowledging the harms and tensions and committing to addressing and transforming these as a group” (p. 996). We worked to counter the harms of centering White epistemological, structural, material, and/or relational norms that are misaligned to the knowledge, cultures, and experiences Black people (Twine & Gallagher, 2007). Our approach to prefiguring social relations specifically connected Black emancipatory and Black feminist traditions of critical care (see Collins, 2000; hooks, 2000; Lorde, 2003; Smith et al., 2023) that “emphasize African Americans’ traditional concern with both individual care and collective uplift, link caring relations to the contexts of racism, and reveal the political nature of care” (Cooper, 2009, p. 384). Linking the concepts of prefiguration and critical care underlines how interactions can both invoke and disrupt broader systems of power and oppression, including anti-Black racism. We contribute to the literature by applying prefiguration to both anti-racist educational and qualitative research contexts in ways that are praxis-based.

Methods

Our collaborative self-study involved systematic data collection and analysis to critically examine our RPP design and implementation practices using BEAR approaches (Akom, 2011). We locate our RPP’s “problems of practice”—the entrenched carceral systems endangering Black youth—with the prevalence and effects of structural racism rather than with youth or communities (Tanksley & Estrada, 2022, p. 11). In line with self-study approaches, we offer our context-rich, data-based narrative to offer a learning resource to researchers through our critical self-reflection (Feldman et al., p. 959).

RPP Design and Contexts

Our community-based RPP design is unusual in that a pre-existing Detroit collaborative of community residents and a civil rights organization in their neighborhood approached local universities in 2012 to co-design a process to develop neighborhood-level research projects and identify funders to advance these community-based research agendas. Prior to the formation of the Justice Now RPP, the collaborative completed several pilot projects and were ready for a larger-scale effort. One of the collaborative’s community residents had worked with our RPP’s PI on a prior educational advocacy partnership and recommended that the collaborative ask her to lead the effort. They did and she agreed. During our proposal planning meetings, we decided that addressing STTP matters would be the RPP’s priority, given the community residents’ voiced preferences. In the forthcoming sections, we draw upon archival and interview data to address two research questions. First, we asked: How did our research design and early implementation process help or hinder us in facilitating an anti-racist RPP in equitable, empowering, collaborative, and solution-oriented ways? Second, we asked: How did our first-year research process help or limit us in embodying our RPP’s racial justice goals, or not?

Operationalizing equity meant us striving to maintain reasonable expectations of each other and our 20 plus partners, while also sharing resources and supporting our partners as well as possible given our different positionalities and professional roles. We strove to be sensitive to our differing amounts of professional power, institutional resources, and personal and organizational capacities amidst both a global pandemic and the racial and political strife of 2020 and 2021. Our predominantly Black membership (including all Black youth researchers, ages 14–19) influenced our consciousness.

In prefiguring our partnership, we were also conscientious of the power differentials between academic researchers, practitioners, and community partners (Doucet, 2021; Henrick et al. 2019), and mindful that conducting research is a value-laden political endeavor influenced by researchers’ racial ideologies that either harm or benefit people of color (Kirkland, 2019). Nevertheless, we take accountability for our missteps as data later shows. One way we tried to balance power was to have more funding allotted to community-based research partners than to university-based researchers.

We regarded being empowering as offering resources and opportunities for team members and partners to enact their leadership and particular visions of our collective work given our shared goals and individual capacities. While our coordinating team’s prefiguring stressed particular goals and assessed team applications’ alignment with those goals, the teams had a great deal of implementation autonomy. Finally, being solution oriented meant being prepared to address any conflict such that each person involved felt respected and affirmed. As a predominantly Black RPP, with 25 of our 29 first-year members being Black, and 23 being Black females, we formed our partnership believing our racial consciousness and identities were embedded in our notions of equity and empowerment. See Figure 1 for information about RPP staff and action teams.

Figure 1.

Justice Now Research Practice Partnership Interorganizational Structure.

The authors of this paper are members of the Justice Now RPP first-year coordinating team, which included a Black female university PI, our community co-PI (CCPI) who is a Black male non-profit executive, formerly incarcerated; a White, male co-PI (UCPI) from a second university; and a White female research coordinator who was an advanced doctoral student at the time and the PI’s advisee. The first-year coordinating team also included a Black female community coordinator, who was a non-profit organization staff member. She participated in data collection but not data analysis, and left the organization prior to this article’s drafting. The authors collected and analyzed data for this article. Different authoring groups consisting of a variety of RPP members, including the action research teams, have authored other publications (e.g., Smith et al., 2023). ⁴

Participant Recruitment and Data Collection

We recruited and selected the RPP’s action research teams during the summer and fall of 2020, when our collective anger and grief was palpable given a variety of high profile racially motivated murders of innocent Black men and women—both by police and everyday citizens—along with the mistreatment of Black youth in and out of schools (e.g., Kishi & Jones, 2020). The xenophobic and racist discourse, mobilization, and policy threats of president-elect Donald Trump were also escalating (Kishi & Jones, 2020). Working online at home while juggling personal and professional responsibilities during the COVID-19 pandemic further shaped our contexts. This confluence of factors made us sensitive to engaging in the labor- and time-intensiveness that RPP work commands.

The four RPP teams were selected as part of a request for proposal (RFP) process. The coordinating team met biweekly to develop the RFP. The lead university PI and research coordinator wrote the first draft of the RFP and scoring rubric, which was revised extensively by the community partners and advisors, as is detailed later. The RFP was posted on the university and community websites, and then distributed by email to surrounding colleges of education and social work as well as existing community partner networks. During our information sessions, we discovered that interested university researchers, youth researchers and community partners did not have formed partnerships; they asked us if we could help them find partners given that the applicants had to apply as a formed team. We then held one in-person and one virtual “meet & match” session where prospective team members gathered, engaged in activities our team planned, and shared research ideas and contact information. Ten action research teams applied to receive mini-grants and join our RPP. The co-PI from the second university organized two meetings of Justice Now’s community advisors to rate and select the action teams’ applications. Ultimately, we reached consensus to select four teams.

The RPP team recruitment phase was complete in December 2020, and we pivoted to implementation. Beginning in January 2021, implementation involved consent and assent documentation, processing contracts with the teams, planning and hosting a kickoff orientation, and then the action research teams commenced their Justice Now-affiliated collaboration. The coordinating team held a retreat in May 2020 to jointly review Year 1 data.

Altogether, our data include 31 hours of observations from Year 1 PI coordinating meetings and RPP events, individual interviews with our three RPP PIs, totaling 3 hours; five oral histories with community advisors, totaling 5 hours—all collected by research assistants; and reflective memos written by PIs and research assistants. Finally, we consider 26 documents pertaining to first-year RPP orientation and retreat events (e.g., emails, agendas, activity instructions, and press releases).

Data Analysis

Our data analysis techniques include using the constant comparative process of reading fieldnotes, interview transcripts, and qualitative survey comments multiple times to comprehend, code, sort, and pinpoint themes. We also collaborated to pilot, refine, and apply descriptive and thematic coding schemes using Atlas.ti qualitative software, and then clustered data and mapped the frequency of codes and themes to verify patterns (Miles, Huberman, & Saldana, 2014; Hesse-Biber & Leavy, 2011). Each document was read and coded in Atlas.ti by two members of the research team. Further, we searched for specific axial codes of interest. For example, to interrogate this RPP as an anti-racist practice, we searched for and collated text that contained “race,” “racial justice,” “anti-racism/ist,” “positionality,” “Black woman/en,” “Black man/men,” “Black child(ren)/youth/boy(s)/girl(s),” and “Black.” We coded “gender” and addressed it in relation to race, when possible, to support an intersectional analysis. The PI reviewed and discussed the codes with research team members on a routine basis, and they made adjustments to ensure interpretive consistency.

Last, we considered insights from reflective memos that contextualize the other data (Miles, Huberman, & Saldana, 2014) and considered how documents conveyed our intentionality and decision-making shifts (Bowen, 2009). We wrote, reviewed, and discussed reflective memos approximately every 2 months to synthesize the findings and emerging themes from our RPP coordination, including the ethnographic fieldnotes taken at our near-weekly, 90-minute coordination meetings at which our coordinating team debriefed the latest RPP events, correspondence, and developments. The full Justice Now coordinating team reviewed and agreed to Year 1 themes in person during a May 2021 research retreat. While our RPP has evaluation and survey data focused on RPP interactions and outcomes, they do not assess the visioning and planning processes we largely constructed amongst ourselves, and in response to our community advisors, before onboarding the action research teams. Thus, this part of our study is critically auto-reflexive, with our four-person author team holding each other accountable for our thorough and accurate account and analysis, made easier by our detailed field notes and audio recordings that captured our areas of synergy, conflict, negotiation, resolution, and ongoing adjustments made throughout our planning. In November 2022, our three PIs also presented these and our Year 2 findings to the Detroit-based collaborative. Collaborative members asked us many clarifying questions, particularly around issues of Whiteness, yet did not challenge our accounts. Ultimately, they voiced appreciation for our work and candor.

Findings

Our findings relate to our efforts to evaluate and adapt our RPP process to prefigure its alignment with our equity-oriented values and anti-racist objectives. We marshal data to discuss four specific themes related to: (a) inviting authentic community engagement with justice-driven partners, (b) emphasizing youth-centered critical care, (c) disrupting Whiteness norms, and (d) revisiting and negotiating RPP expectations.

Theme 1: Inviting Authentic Community Engagement With Justice-Driven Partners

In summer 2020, our RPP coordinating team met regularly to draft and revise our RFP—a value-laden document—and organize the launch of the project. Data show we prioritized “authentic community engagement,” publicizing the project well, and centering racial justice in the RFP’s framing during our early meetings. This became evident in the language of our RFP, a document we distributed through various mass media and communication outlets targeting Detroit education institutions and community organizations. In the RFP, we acknowledged that “systemic racism and class disparities are endemic to the STPP” (Justice Now Request for Proposals, 2020, October 9, p. 2). We named the STPP’s unjust impact on youth, families and communities, and we emphasized the relevance of “poverty, and intense socioemotional trauma, p. 2” thus inferring our intersectional lens in alignment with the BEAR framework (Akom, 2011).

To foster intergenerational and cross-institutional inclusion through our engagement approaches, our coordinating team assumed the responsibility of attracting and facilitating connections amongst potential team members by hosting both in-person (physically distanced) and virtual community “meet & match” events in Detroit to help introduce and link university, community, and Black youth partners. These events followed two online information sessions we organized and hosted for potential applicants. More than 50 people—both unaffiliated individuals and people affiliated with more than 15 different institutions/organizations—registered for or attended at least one of these events.

Over the course of several “meet & match” planning meetings, we were clear in who qualified as university and youth researchers, yet less clear about the qualifications of a community researcher. We worked together to develop a responsible and inclusive definition, as evident in excerpts from the following exchange among Justice Now PIs in a July 2020 meeting (condensed for clarity):

University co-PI:

Can we touch on the membership of the collaborative inquiry teams? Can someone who is not part of an organization apply as the community practitioner [e.g., a parent]? I think our easy answer is no. If someone applied and they had a good application, but they were not affiliated with an organization, what would we do? Would we get applications like that?

Community co-PI #1:

I could see it.

University co-PI:

People at the very least volunteer somewhere, and they could maybe do this under the auspices of a block club, a church, a mosque. I don’t find that as limiting.

Community co-PI:

Do we need the applicant to be an employee? Are we advocating for that?

PI:

I think we have been moving all along with the idea of it being a community-based organization [CBO] practitioner, but I see the value of revisiting that to either pinpoint reasons to open it up in some way, or stick with that.

Community co-PI:

What are we trying to accomplish either way? It could be limiting for some people.

PI:

So Community co-PI, what you just said does make me think more about it. What if there was someone who is definitely rooted in the community and is well-affiliated with a CBO, but for whatever reason they would want to be affiliated with a collaborative inquiry (action research) team independently, so they aren’t tied to institutional expectations and politics? That’s an interesting possibility.

Community co-PI:

I’m thinking of my own experience coming home [from prison] and feeling like I had to jump through too many hoops to do good work, especially when it became about having access to dollars. Like with the [Black Male Engagement project], you could be part of an organization or an individual, and it was important for that “individual” part because these were Black men who were a part of the community, and it was like, “We’re talking to you; we’re not just talking to the [large organizations] of the world.”

PI:

It also makes me think of . . . the story of how before there was [a long-standing CBO in the city], there was a group of folks who met in [a] living room. If it’s a down-home group of folks, that matters too.

Eventually, given the various contexts and possibilities we contemplated, our Justice Now coordinating team decided to welcome applications from prospective applicant teams with community partners participating as individual advocates, grassroots educators, or staff of education and community-based entities.

In the same July 2020 planning meeting described above, our coordinating team turned to picking a location for the “meet & match” gatherings and determining the recruitment responsibilities of the Justice Now community coordinator. The PIs decided that our community coordinator—a staff member of our community partner organization—would play an important role in matching interested community members and university researchers who may not have a pre-existing partnership. Accordingly, the university co-PI suggested having the in-person matchmaking session at a local farmer’s market in the Detroit neighborhood that inspired our RPP formation. The farmer’s market held significance in several ways, like its status as an established gathering place in the neighborhood where our community resident advisors lived. This connection related to the group’s considerations of engaging the advisors, too, as they were co-organizers of the market.

The university co-PI shared that the farmer’s market was where he most often saw the resident advisors in person (particularly given the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions). Our coordinating team did not want to hold the event at the farmer’s market in a way that would compete with community programming there—for example, a regular libations ceremony or a weekly yoga session. Rather, we wanted to ensure that people attending the event looking to develop an applicant team had seen and participated in the neighborhood community. If they were not already connected with the neighborhood, they would be introduced to each other and the STPP project on, literally, the predominantly Black community’s turf. Thus, the coordinating team coalesced around the farmer’s market location idea for the “meet & match” given its location, its tie to resident advisors, and its affordances for hosting a physically distanced, outdoors, and thus safer and more inclusive event in the pre-vaccine era of the pandemic.

Ultimately, the chosen teams’ community partners included two school principals, a teacher, and a non-profit staff member, all African American. While these partners all positioned themselves as wanting to both improve their individual practice and advance the justice-related work of their institutions, our coordinating team had precautionary conversations about us not wanting anyone’s institutional ties to undermine the emancipatory aims of the larger RPP. For instance, our community co-PI emphasized the importance of trying to ensure adult community researchers felt accountable for contributing to a justice-driven process, too. He explained that there are organizational pressures and policies in non-profit spaces that can prompt community-based professionals to “step out of the grassroots and out of our convictions and tend toward politics.” He added, “Because we can’t trust the system to do it [be emancipatory and democratic] for us—within the system that we’re working in—we have to find ways to liberate ourselves so that we are free to pursue change in the areas that we care about.” He, and the Justice Now team, conceived of our RPP serving as that change space.

Tending to Intergenerational Inclusion and Support Needs

After holding the “meet & match” event on September 16, 2020, the coordinating team debriefed on how the gathering had and had not fulfilled our aims. The community coordinator shared that many of the youth who showed interest in the project during her recruiting efforts attended schools located in the suburbs, so attending an in-person event during the week was less feasible for them. She and others on the team also noted that there were many university researchers there, but only a couple of community practitioners who were relatively less participatory. Our community practitioner co-PI noted that, in his view, the “value proposition” of partnering with researchers may not be immediately evident to community folks already doing social justice work in their everyday lives. Relatedly, members of the coordinating team—including the community practitioners—discussed how “we haven’t thought about the big disconnect or understanding [that] when folks see this RFP, the language is really heavy on research.” Consequently, our team revised some of the RFP language to be more appealing to education practitioners and grassroots community members. For instance, we stressed:

An educator at the preK-12 level can be considered as a team’s community-based practitioner, or they can be included as an additional research team member. Community-based practitioners and youth research team members do not need to have prior experience with university-based research.

This clarification supported our idea that the community partners could lend experiential knowledge to their teams, regardless of having any formal research ties. We also stated in the RFP that the “school community resource” each team would develop based on their data and community’s desires should “assist at least one school community (or an organization that has close relationships with local schools) in their efforts to dismantle” the STPP.

Lastly, the PIs reflected on the shift to online meetings during the pandemic and turned our attention to planning online information and matching sessions. We then agreed that our RPP community practitioner PI and the RPP community coordinator would exercise more leadership and license in recruitment efforts aimed at publicizing the RFP given their local professional and communal networks, and their knowledge and ties to the city as their hometown. These steps, and others we present later, link to our effort to be inclusive and affirming of all of our coordinating team members’ talents. They also reflect our commitment to disrupting the primacy of university-based structure and norms in the research process.

Theme 2: Emphasizing Youth-Centered Critical Care

The complex and nested organization of networked RPPs, like Justice Now, involves RPP coordinators being accountable for achieving many different objectives for a variety of stakeholders. Tantamount in all of this was us prefiguring and co-designing a RPP process aimed at advancing anti-racism for Black youth, and setting the foundation for protecting, empowering, and caring for those youth during the RPP process.

Expectations for Protecting and Caring for Future Youth Partners

We prioritized crafting careful language and explicit expectations in our mini-grant application to help ensure empowering collaboration with youth. For example, applicants were required to submit an Engagement and Mentoring Plan for Youth Researcher to support adult accountability. Our application scoring rubric, evaluative discussion, and overall vetting process also entailed us considering indications that “adult research team members will support the youth’s research learning, honor their perspectives, and facilitate their engagement in equitable and age-appropriate ways across the stages of the project, (p. 1).” We also required that the youth researchers, who would receive stipends from the grant, would not incur any expenses in their participation. Applications further required signed parental/guardian permission forms for minors, and awardees had to submit proof of Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval before receiving their mini-grants.

As we sought to assess applicants’ integrity and qualifications for mentoring youth researchers, we emphasized that youth participation in research should be just as humanizing as the overall research aims. The Justice Now coordinating team was able to leverage our collective expertise and the various sensibilities and backgrounds we had as Black parents of school-aged children, a former high school teacher, a university researcher who had successfully collaborated with youth researchers, and/or as professionals who had been service providers to children in non-profit education settings. As our community co-PI stated, and we all agreed, “many people don’t know how to work with youth, and we need to provide leadership around that.”

Additionally, youth researchers had to agree to put forth their best effort to learn, investigate, share insights, and productively collaborate with their research team members. Applications required their pledge to do “their best to communicate openly about their ideas and needs, be on time for meetings and team activities, [and] meet project work deadlines as agreed upon ahead of time with their team members,” while also being “fully engaged at the four RPP research team events.” We stressed to youth and adult partners that all of our RPP events would be free of cost for everyone, that we would work to ensure all RPP activities would “be a beneficial and affirming opportunity for them,” and that “no activity or interaction should place youth at risk in any way (emotionally, mentally, physically, etc.) for any reason.”

Our efforts addressed multiple layers of accountability regarding potential youth partners. Our reference to “risk” voiced expectations of adults protecting youth’s safety; we did not intend to infer that investigating the STPP would not involve some discomfort, sadness, frustration, or righteous anger. We assessed adult team members’ qualifications to appropriately collaborate with youth via application materials, IRB clearances required, and the guardian permission statements submitted to us. Through these mechanisms, we sought to project our team’s thoughtfulness, care, and protective expectations. Once teams were onboarded, they had the autonomy to organize themselves and their relationships as both adults and youth preferred.

Our prefiguration for caring for youth researchers involved planning for the coordinating team to stay attuned to youths’ RPP experiences. We planned for independent evaluators to survey the eight youth researchers to gauge their satisfaction working with university and community researchers and our coordinating team. Response rates were low throughout the partnership, with youth being more responsive to simple text messages or phone calls from our community coordinator or community co-PI, who periodically checked in with them.

Our community co-PI’s notes captured that youth researchers with frequent contact from their team PIs were most satisfied, and concerns voiced related to COVID factors complicating their participation, or in one instance a youth researcher feeling distanced and out of the loop from their team. The co-PI then followed up with that team’s PI by phone to suggest ways to facilitate connection. All three PIs also moved to meeting with the separate teams online occasionally, to hear updates and offer support, including more flexible funding, methodological suggestions, affirmations, and extended timelines.

Ensuring an Asset-Based Framing of Youth

Communicating our understandings of racial contexts, the city, Black youth, and our RPP goals went hand-in-hand with the continuous processes of aligning our individual understandings with our collective RPP vision. We spent hours across many meetings reflecting about our framing and wordsmithing. For instance, we discussed the drafted text, “We also recognize that the economic forces, politics, schooling conditions, and race relations apparent in Detroit and in the broader Metro region can affect the STPP dynamics oppressing Detroit youth and youth of color living near the city.” The university and community co-PIs agreed to “make [the language] more blunt,” eventually stating that the named systemic conditions “underpin” STPP dynamics, rather than leaving the more conditional phrasing that they “can affect” STPP dynamics. Our Community PI added that he wanted to use “language that isn’t deficit-oriented about [the city’s] youth.” With all in agreement, the lead PI suggested, “Let’s say ‘endanger Detroit youth.’ It’s saying the youth are not dangerous, the system is endangering them.” Our Justice Now team adopted this suggestion to more strongly clarify our belief in the innocence of Black youth and the culpability of adults and structurally racist systems.

Another key issue we discussed and debated across several meetings in summer and fall 2020 was whether to require that grantees conduct their research in Detroit, or if we would also fund research conducted in a nearby suburb where many Detroit youth attended school and/or still faced racial bias. Our community co-PI strongly advocated for the latter option, asserting the importance of potentially engaging applicants doing work outside of Detroit in a meaningful way. He stated:

The outer coating of the STPP is the surrounding communities (predominantly White, and many affluent suburbs) that never come into contact with people of color and that’s what ends up with me with a knee on my neck or something.

He added:

[Our Justice Now RPP] is the only work I know of that’s happening to address this [STPP] issue locally, and I don’t want to miss out to call this [effects of suburban racism on city youth] what it is. . . . The assumption is that the behavior of Black boys needs to change, and that’s where the intervention is. But we know that this pipeline is more like a waterfall. If we’re only researching what’s happening in the schools that I [any Black boy] attend, then we’re not going to get to the question of how to create an anti-racist society. If we’re not doing that, we’re inadvertently contributing to the narrative that this is a “Black problem.” And I keep saying the “Black community” because the problem affects Black people primarily, but the problem begins somewhere else.

After a few minutes of exchanging brief clarifying questions and comments, the three PIs agreed to frame the STPP as both “intruding on Detroit” and “surrounding suburbs” given the systemic racism “that hurts Black youth and Black bodies.” Our coordinating team then incorporated that language and expanded our RFP to allow for teams in nearby suburbs. Eventually, one of those teams, which partnered with a predominantly Black school within a predominantly White town, received mini-grant funding. This decision also represented our efforts to be accountable not just to our youth partners, but to all Detroit Black youth at risk of being ensnared in the dangers of a school-to-prison pipeline that adults maintain (McGrew, 2016).

Theme 3: Disrupting the Whiteness of University Norms

We erred and then progressed in decentering Whiteness in university norms and practices when it came to prioritizing Black community resident voices in the selection of the four action research teams, and in navigating university bureaucracy to challenge implicit White norms of demarking intellectual property.

Challenging Whiteness by Centering Black Residents

During a coordinating team discussion about ensuring that community resident advisors could offer feedback about the RFP in a time, place, and mode that would be accessible and equitable, our university co-PI urged us to adjust our plans given feedback he received from a resident advisor. The advisor was a Black woman elder he encountered in the community in the days following a June 2020 RPP planning meeting. The meeting included members of our RPP coordinating team, our resident advisors, and several White women allies primarily affiliated with universities and large non-profit organizations who had previously collaborated with our resident advisors. At the subsequent encounter, the resident advisor told the university co-PI she wanted to be more involved in the Justice Now RPP and that she had some ideas to share. Similarly, the PI reflected that the dynamics in that broader meeting, when questions and comments of White women allies dominated the conversation, had likely replicated the type of hierarchical, university norms our coordinating team had pledged to disrupt. Those norms are birthed from Whiteness. So, the university PI and co-PI discussed that seeking written feedback may—in the words of the PI—create more “equal opportunity . . . versus [having] another meeting like we had last week where the airtime won’t be shared as much.” She added that such an approach would “allow people to give feedback at times that are convenient for them,” and that:

If people are sending feedback and posting things on a Google Doc, it gives us a chance to step back and see who is saying what. Is this suggestion coming from a university staff member or a resident? And we can weigh that, given who is sharing and what their interest in the process may be.

The university co-PI—a longtime collaborator with the residents—confirmed that the resident advisors were all familiar and experienced with using the discussed technology. He further shared that given his longtime relationships with them, it would be reasonable for him to follow up with each of them to make sure that any uneven participation in the written feedback reflected their desired level of responsiveness versus any barriers our coordinating team inadvertently imposed that restricted their responses.

Soon after adjusting ways to invite feedback, our RPP’s research coordinator drafted a scoring sheet for the RPP coordinating team and the resident advisors to use in evaluating the 10 mini-grant applications. The scoresheet also had space for reviewers to share open-ended comments. The Justice Now PIs proposed a formula that upweighted the scores of the residents so their preferences would have a greater chance of being prioritized. The plan was for the resident advisors’ responses to be weighted at 1.25 times the weight of non-residents’ responses. We would then consider applicants in ranked order during a meeting with everyone to determine the awardees. As it turned out, none of the resident advisors shared their score sheets with the PIs before the decision-making meeting, and not everyone was able to finish reviewing all the applicants. Some shared their constraints, and we associated the delay with the challenges and stressors of “pandemic living” and agreed to reconvene the next day to give them more time to finish their reviews. When we commenced the second meeting, it was clear the residents had used their own way of notetaking rather than using the scoresheet, while still being well prepared to have an engaged conversation. Our coordinating team deferred to their deliberative style rather than continuing to impose ours. Based on the recommendation of one of the resident advisors, we agreed to start our application evaluation process by having each resident state their favorite application and why; our coordinating team members then did the same, and we ended up coming to consensus in less than 2 hours about the four mini-grant awardees.

One of the four applications selected was not initially in the PIs’ top four, yet the community residents highly regarded and advocated for it. Consequently, the PIs deferred to their confidence that the proposed research could be valuable to their neighborhood community. In a conversation about the selection process, the Community co-PI reflected on comments from the resident advisors, noting that if “the application process is about getting to know people [and] their expertise,” and if we know that “there are groups out there that don’t have a lot of experience writing applications,” then we need to ask: “Is it equitable to not consider our knowledge of those operating from the community space? . . . If we’re not intentional about them having an equitable shot, then ultimately a completely ‘objective’ selection process could [result in us awarding to only community outsiders].” Practicing our value for centering community expertise meant decentering the typical hierarchy of university-linked research teams and PI decision-making.

Challenging White Institutional Intellectual Property Norms

Another way the Justice Now leadership disrupted Whiteness was challenging institutional norms around contracts, particularly regarding intellectual property. In early winter 2020, when Justice Now leadership initiated the process for their home university to issue subcontracts to the RPP’s four action research teams, the contracts came back with standard proprietary language:

Notwithstanding the foregoing, Vendor and [the University] hereby agree that the copyrights and any other intellectual property rights in and to the deliverables described in Article 1 (the “Curriculum IP Rights”) shall be held by [the University], and that [the University] hereby grants back to Vendor a perpetual, royalty-free, worldwide, nonexclusive license to such Curriculum IP Rights, with full rights to use, exploit, or license the Curriculum IP Rights in any manner, including by making any derivative works.

These texts—especially the language about curriculum rights—inscribe the White imaginary, where knowledge is property that can be purchased by an institution and then resold. The Justice Now PI corresponded with university staff members in March 2021, asking “Why [would] [University] need to own any invention and products the other teams generate with their own labor?” Co-PIs agreed that research teams may feel the contract language was extractive. After an email exchange, authorizing university staff members were responsive to the concerns raised. In turn, they proposed revised language:

Each party to this Agreement retains—and does not transfer—its copyright and any other intellectual property rights in works it holds, whether these works were created prior to, during, or subsequent to this Agreement and any works created jointly by the parties under this Agreement shall be jointly held. Each party authorizes the other party to use works it makes available under this Agreement in ways that are consistent with the purposes of this Agreement.”

This language was accepted and included in the subaward contracts in order to honor that the RPP’s four action research teams should “own” their collected data and the school community resources or curriculum they generated from their research design and labor. This countered the norms, policies, and infrastructure of most universities—which are designed to receive grant monies (not disburse them externally) and to profit from the intellectual creations of their faculty members and research staff rather than support those linked to other universities in advancing justice and innovation. This shift, prompted by Justice Now, aligned with liberatory and anti-racist principles of critical collaborative inquiry (Tanksley & Estrada, 2022). It was also needed to help our coordinating team lay a respectful, trustworthy foundation on which to co-construct and prefigure the partnership relationships we desired as we launched the RPP.

Spanning Researcher-Staff Roles

A final example of our effort to disrupt the Whiteness norms of university-led research was by training our community coordinator—initially hired as a non-researcher staff member—to design and conduct oral histories to both gather the stories of our community resident advisors and empower the coordinator to have a larger role in the team’s research efforts. This step challenged typical university research norms that strictly delineate researcher roles and restrict access to certain knowledge based on one’s formal education and degrees. While our community coordinator—a Black woman—had a college degree, she did not have a research background or experiences with oral histories. She did have caring relationships with our resident advisors that predated the RPP, and expressed interest in taking on this role. In spring 2021, the research coordinator, a White female doctoral student, trained the community coordinator in facilitating oral histories with additional mentoring and consultation from a Black female postdoctoral fellow who was an education historian. Our community coordinator then conducted online oral history interviews, asking our resident advisors to reflect on their life in the city and their neighborhood community, their relationship with the STPP, and share stories of how they came to community leadership and advocacy.

Incorporating oral histories and expanding our community coordinator’s role to include conducting this strand of qualitative research reaped numerous benefits. These steps invited more of the community residents’ voice and wisdom into the RPP, an affirming move which they said they appreciated. This enabled our coordinating team to learn from them and be further inspired and accountable to their sense of purpose in the early stages of the RPP. Our community coordinator also gained valuable and transferable skills she could build upon as a young professional, and we further realized the importance of including the residents in planning Year 2 events as they wished. Ultimately, these steps also allowed Justice Now to further center Black women as conduits and shapers of knowledge in the RPP.

In summary, with our third theme, the Justice Now coalition worked towards the disruption of Whiteness by honoring Black residents’ preferences in the selection of four action research teams, challenging institutional Whiteness by decentering extractive intellectual property norms, and empowering a Black community staff member to conduct research on Black community members’ lived experiences and STPP-related concerns. These acts prefigured the future disruption of Whiteness by upholding our commitment to centering Black ontologies, axiologies, and epistemologies in our RPP’s co-creation of knowledge.

Theme 4: Revisiting and Negotiating RPP Expectations

Our final theme—revisiting and negotiating RPP expectations—emerged from data demonstrating how our Justice Now leadership worked across our intersectional identities and institutional positions. This involved reflecting on and adjusting our goals, priorities, constraints, and opportunities to advance anti-racist practices. Examples of this pertain to reconsidering expectations of partners’ participation, in terms of time and forms of engagement, and responding to tensions linked to the intersectionality of raced and gendered labor.

Determining the Scope of “Action” Research

A conversation that illustrates revisiting and negotiating expectations involved considering what expectations, if any, we wanted to convey about the action research teams also participating in coordinated political advocacy as we were planning the teams’ orientation.

The community co-PI of the Justice Now Coalition had a primary role as an advocate for his partnering civil rights organization. His work team was tasked with developing a community engagement and advocacy plan. He saw potential in building the momentum of the RPP work into a broader “Justice Now: The Movement,” stating,

The opportunities I see are around elevating potential solutions for the STPP and part of that is going to come from potentially a series of publications, organization-submitted pubs from [us] and university folks that can be backed by the research we’ve gathered, but also in our conversations with lawmakers on the state level and decision-makers in the school systems, so we can influence future practices.

This led to the following exchange about the role of advocacy in the RPP.

University PI

: I think ideally, it’s great if everyone could do this work, but I’m concerned that that’s not the expectation of the teams coming on board. We haven’t framed this as policy advocacy work so specifically as you’ve described, so I sense a need for information sharing and buy-in to make sure that this is what folks want to do.

Community co-PI:

Lemme make sure I hear you. It seems like you’re concerned that we would be asking more of these research teams than what had been expected or communicated by asking them to be social justice advocates.

University PI:

Well, I don’t think they are not already social justice advocates, and they’re doing this research as a part of their ongoing efforts. Some might be up and excited for [policy advocacy], but I don’t want to assume.

The outcome of this conversation was to postpone the launch of the advocacy campaign to the summer collaborative inquiry workshop, and instead use the time during the orientation to begin the community-building needed to encourage a sense of connection to the RPP and lay a foundation for later advocacy. However, the summer collaborative inquiry workshop was postponed, then canceled, due to scheduling challenges and our sense of shifting team needs. Rather than planning an advocacy campaign, we engaged the action research teams in team-based conversations, troubleshooting, and budget adjustments, so that they would have an action-oriented resource by the end of the academic year and grant period. These changes were also motivated by gendered labor considerations.

Gendered Labor Considerations

Finally, while the following data comes from a later stage of our RPP in 2022, it relates to our foundational prefiguring for anti-racist RPP implementation, and how we also tried to prefigure enduring positive relations of care and respect. This included (although was not limited to) our Black female RPP PI amplifying issues of gendered labor in the context of the pandemic and heightened sociopolitical stressors. For instance, in a February 2021 coordinating team meeting, she amplified the message of an article about women “bearing the brunt” of the dominant disregard for domestic work. This instance is one example of ongoing attention to issues of race and gender—a practice that presaged adjustments made later in the RPP (2022) to lighten the load and labor expectations as much as possible for our majority Black female group of action research team PIs and co-PIs. In later stages of implementation, the team was actively struggling with decisions about timing, location, activities, and how to strike a balance between demonstrating care and sensitivity while also fostering a sense of collective accountability for sharing our research at a symposium. After raising several concerns and questions for the (by then majority male) coordinating team to consider, the PI emphasized in an email:

I also come back to the gender contexts and dynamics of our RPP and our coordinating team. The majority of us are women across the RPP (+ all the PIs) disproportionately carrying extra weight of family caregiving—always, and more intensely now, on top of everything else.

She added, “I'd hate for folks to feel like we're operating in a business-as-usual way when things are still so hard for so many.”

Our RPP coordinating team eventually reached consensus about how to structure and communicate about the symposium plans from a shared desire to tend to what our PI named as the importance of exuding “conscientiousness and care given the continued complexities of pandemic living” for all of us working within our majority female and predominantly Black RPP. From a critical perspective, these adjustments synchronized with Black feminist caring traditions that combine honoring Black women’s political resistance and communal advocacy—which they demonstrated through their research team leadership—while being protective of their holistic well-being (Cooper, 2009).

Discussion

In all, data pertaining to our four themes show several examples of how we consciously and collaboratively worked to prefigure a RPP that could promote racial justice, combat carceral schooling, and embody critical care. In light of our anti-racist commitments, our first research question prompts us to consider if and how we co-constructed a research process that was equitable, empowering of marginalized Black partners, collaborative, and solution oriented. Given that research processes and goal achievement go hand-in-hand, our second question leads us to consider if our early implementation process did or did not help us in embodying our racial justice aims.

A key step in launching an equitable, empowering research process was deferring to Black community residents’ funding priorities and preferences to support research teams they envisioned helping their families and neighbors. Another was our anticipation of the potential contributions and the needed protection and mentoring of Black youth. We made strides toward equitable collaboration in designing a unique and safe “meet & match” partner recruitment process during the COVID-19 pandemic, through which we sought to demystify the research process and be community-rooted. Upon launching the full RPP with our selected action research teams, we also prepared and empowered our community coordinator to invite our resident advisors’ oral histories, affirming their knowledge and skills as well as her own. Advocating for the intellectual property and labor of our teams to be fully honored without being usurped by university norms was significantly prefigurative of our equitable aims.

From Black emancipatory and critical race perspectives, our choice to privilege community partners’ preferences and center the needs of Black youth throughout our RPP design and implementation also reflects the need to “demonstrate a commitment to privileging—rather than ‘equally including’—the voices and experiences” of those most impacted by injustices (Tanksley & Estrada, 2022, p. 11). Furthermore, our attention to the sociopolitical contexts of Detroit, along with our sensitivities to the pressures and pain of the COVID-19 pandemic and plagues of racial brutality and injustice, speak to the importance of RPPs—and research processes in general—for honoring how history, power, and persistent systems of inequity affect research partners (Doucet, 2021; Farrell et al., 2021). This all requires research coordinators’ critical care. Indeed, our work is firmly anchored in transformative approaches dedicated to “challenging and reimagining systems of power that are oppressive and unjust, including past and current manifestations of racism and intersecting oppressions” (Farrell et al., 2021, p. 208).

Our most tangible, solution-oriented intent was reflected in us requiring each team to collaboratively design a research-informed product to benefit Black youth and/or their schools. Our efforts to avoid the problems of exacerbating gendered labor inequities and quickly adjusting to be more inclusive of community advisors in evaluating applications and meeting with a Detroit-based initiative were also solution oriented and reflected care.

Exuding critical care—thereby identifying the linkages between our interpersonal interactions and collaboration and the exigency of dismantling anti-Black carceral systems—was key to our process. It helped us prefigure an anti-racist RPP that sought to normalize compassionate collaboration, community engagement, and youth empowerment through an inclusive research process (Campanella et al., 2022) aimed at countering a “racial hierarchy that both elevates and centers Whiteness while simultaneously reducing and criminalizing Blackness” (Kirkland, 2019, p. 1).

Consistent with the prefigurative intersectionality of Ishkanian and Peña Saavedra (2019), our analysis further revealed patterns of confrontation, acknowledgement, and adjustment in our work. We continuously reconsidered how our anti-racist commitments needed to be operationalized through agentic decision-making and collaboration. Moreover, the compassion we extended to one another during conflict or difficulty was predicated on our understanding that the prefigurative nature of our work called on us to “find ways to liberate ourselves so that we are free to pursue change in the areas that we care about,” as our community co-PI asserted. We found that liberatory research work requires being pragmatic along with visionary and radical. This meant us continually assessing and adapting partner expectations, research timelines, resource allocation, and approaches to affirming community and youth researchers in ways that exemplify the iterative nature of qualitative research and collaborative inquiry (Hesse-Biber & Leavy, 2011).

Disseminating mini grants across three different universities further required us to confront bureaucratic and hierarchical norms, while being mindful of the entrenched and unfair power dynamics that universities have long perpetuated, and then persuade university staff to change practices related to contractual language and ownership.

paperson (2017) explains how the modern university can function as a settler-colonial technology, through which the alienation of land from life extends into the alienation of the mind from the body—of human dignity from raced and classed educational credentials. In coordinating the RPP, we understood that we would continually feel pulled by the institutional gravity of coloniality. Hence, we agreed that resources should be “marshalled in decolonizing ways by leveraging RPP funding, academic personnel, and university status and space in ways that affirm and empower marginalized community members and people of color on their terms” (Wilson, 2021, p. 2). Using and adapting tools and processes, such as weighted scoring that privileged resident advisors’ responses to applications and the youth partner engagement agreement, supported our efforts to consciously operationalize our anti-racist commitments via specific research processes.

With our successes, we also made mistakes. In hindsight, our process would have been more equitable and empowering if we had also invited high school-aged Black youth to be part of our advisory team, thereby consulting them during our RFP development and team selection processes too. This would have allowed youths’ voices to inform our mentoring plans and other coordinating steps. Additionally, restructuring our weekly coordinating team meetings to more regularly involve the community advisors would have helped build mutual trust and confidence sooner as we were all getting to know each other, and it would have further affirmed their voice and wisdom while making them a larger part of our feedback loop.

The 2-year nature of our project, and limited funding, prevented us from establishing a long-term approach to power and capacity building. Indeed, from the start, the community co-PI—a dedicated nonprofit executive with lived experience as a formerly incarcerated person—expressed concerns about being out-of-depth with academic research processes and unsure how to measure the success of his involvement. The university PIs characterized his community-orientation and non-academic role as strengths. Nevertheless, the project would have benefited from a third-party resource such as an experienced community-side researcher skilled in the shortfalls of RPPs, like the challenges of maintaining engagement in community-based studies, to aid the development of partnership agreements, community-side capacity building, and long-term engagement. Justice Now benefited from joining the National Network of Educational Research-Practice Partnerships (NNERPP)—an organization we were unfamiliar with when we began—in the latter stages of our RPP. NNERPP offers an array of resources like workshops, consultations, publications, and an annual conference to support RPPs. Engaging with NNERPP much earlier could have helped.

Recommendations and Implications

Along with gleaning insights from our reflections above, we recommend incorporating the following practices to help ensure the long-term success of RPPs: (1) Resist taking dominant academic norms and implicit rankings of PI versus co-PIs for granted because they can undermine intentions to promote equal voice and leadership on RPPs. Designing PIs’ roles and responsibilities to balance the input and influence of a lead university PI and a lead community (or district) co-PI is worthwhile. In addition to equitable and generous community-side budgeting, fostering balance among multiple PI roles can help nurture sustainability after RPP funding ends. (2) Center youth by consulting with them as advisory board members and co-RPP designers in ways that invite them to co-construct youth mentorship and accountability plans and coordinating decisions, while structuring processes for direct, accessible communication. (3) Plan for cross-institutional orientations that help familiarize community-side researchers with research methods and academic/university culture and political contexts (e.g. promotion and tenure pressures). Similarly, university researchers need training to better understand how RPP work fits into a community organization’s broader work scope and organizational agenda. (4) Funders should also allocate larger grants across lengthier time spans to help long-term RPPs achieve greater impact. (5) RPP teams should build consensus regarding continued engagement goals and research-based advocacy with the community stakeholders and then incorporate these into their original timeline and proposal, and budget accordingly. Early investment into these types of mechanisms are prefigurative steps, too. They enhance RPPs’ abilities to advance racial justice and healing.

Persistent inequities and instantiations of racial injustice in education, like the school-to-prison pipeline, warrant the increased use of RPPs as justice-driven vehicles for educational change. Our findings show that, despite some missteps, Black emancipatory goals (Akom, 2011) have been at the heart of our RPP coordination efforts. Data illustrate that our RPP design and implementation process aligned with our justice-driven and anti-racist objectives during our first year, while also requiring more logistical deftness, relational complexity, and structural design elements than we expected. Consequent power sharing and cross-institutional learning challenges were heightened by the unprecedented experience of launching and coordinating a RPP during a global pandemic.

We help meet what Coburn and Penuel (2016) describe as the need for more RPP research that offers “insight into how partnership designs and strategies used by participants can address these (inequitable educational) challenges” (p. 48). Yet, we go further by integrating attention to race throughout our work in ways that align with the BEAR framework (Akom, 2011) and heavily involve prefiguring (Campanella et al., 2022). Adopting our community-engaged and anti-racist RPP approach enabled us to invite and honor the localized knowledge of youth, educators, and other practitioners most closely connected to the implementation and harm of the STPP. Indeed, while our 29-person RPP is not fully networked as it once was, the four research teams continue their work, and Justice Now sparked new justice-driven collaborations (e.g., grants, publication, presentations, mentoring, etc.) amongst members that endure.

Our prefiguring work shows the significance of qualitatively studying and capturing the voices, stories, behaviors, and sociocultural contexts of the research process itself rather than exclusively focusing on research outcomes. More specifically, it offers an example of an intergenerational, community-engaged RPP devoted to advancing education and racial justice that supports Black emancipation and intersectional solidarity.