Episode 18: Facilitator Archetypes: Navigating Institutions as Community Engaged Facilitators

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  Facilitator Archetypes: Navigating institutions as community engaged facilitators, a conversation with Muna Mohamed, Stuart Poyntz, and Ammarah Syed with the Pedagogies of Community Engagement Collective. Hosted by Sherry Ostapovitch.

  Sherry Ostapovitch: [00:00:13] Welcome to the WhyPAR Podcast, a project of the youth research lab at OISE - the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. My name is Sherry Ostapovitch and this episode of The WhyPAR podcast is the third and last in a special series produced by the Pedagogies of Community Engagement Collective. The PeCEP project was created to explore, generate, and share knowledge about facilitation practices that support community-engaged work across different sectors. In this special series of three podcasts, members of PeCEC reflect on their experiences as community-engaged facilitators, confronting some of the dilemmas and tensions, as well as the opportunities and joys of working with, in, and for communities.  

  Sherry Ostapovitch: [00:00:13] This podcast episode entitled, Facilitator Archetypes: Navigating institutions as community engaged facilitators is a conversation with Muna Mohamed, Stuart Poyntz, and Ammarah Syed. They discuss how facilitators can use the archetypes of the doula, the smuggler and translator to better understand their work with communities and institutions. Learn how facilitators can leverage their power to work towards justice and safety for the communities they are accountable to.

  Muna Mohamed: [00:01:24] My name is Muna and I'm joined here today with Stuart and Ammarah, and we're going to be chatting a little bit about how, as facilitators, we occupy spaces within institutions and how that presents some really unique challenges for us. And so before we begin, I thought it would be great to just introduce ourselves and talk about who we are and how we've landed in this work. So my name is Muna Mohamed. My pronouns are she/her. I am a community facilitator with roots in social justice and social movement facilitation, specifically around state sanctioned violence and its impacts on Black communities in Ottawa. And I'm also a ceramic artist, and I'll pass it to Ammarah.

  Ammarah Syed: [00:02:05] All right. Thank you, Muna. Yeah. So my name is Ammarah. My background is in harm reduction, community work, uh, grassroots organizing and arts-based wellness. Uh, I facilitate and create workshops around arts-based wellness as radical self-care.

  Stuart Poyntz: [00:02:22] Thanks, Ammarah. It's great to be here with you all. My name is Stuart Poyntz, and I wear a number of hats. I am the director of a community-engaged research initiative at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. I spent a long time working with young people, mostly in art organizations and art centers in cities across Canada, um, other places around the world, and very interested in how facilitators help to bring institutions and communities into relationships with each other. Thanks.

  Muna Mohamed: [00:02:55] Awesome. So we've been exploring together just this idea and this relationship that facilitators have with institutional spaces. And these relationships vary depending on the facilitator and the kind of role they occupy. So sometimes, as facilitators, as people that are hosting um, sessions, workshops, as people that are being containers for a group conversation or for getting to a very specific purpose, we either are sometimes parachuting into these institutions to host something or to hold some kind of space, or we're really deeply embedded in them. And we come from a number of different institutions. We come from, at least in this research project, we come from academic institutions, community-based contexts, really client support, harm reduction based contexts, education and adult education and community contexts. So it's really vast. And what's really been a key point, or that's resonated for many of us in this work, is that there are so many possibilities and limitations that exist in navigating institutional spaces. And often as facilitators, we're balancing this tension that exists between community and institutional needs. And then, of course, there's financial constraints and dynamics of facilitation. So as facilitators, we're often navigating our roles in the kind of work that we take up and that creates implications in our relationship between community and the institutions that fund us and resource what we do. And then also, we carry this role in helping communities manage those financial constraints and resourcing the communities that we work with. I wanted to ask Ammarah, as we think about these institutions and the dynamics that we hold with them, what are some challenges that arise? What are some challenges that exist within this relationship that a facilitator holds with institutions?

  Ammarah Syed: [00:04:46] So when we talk about institutional dynamics, financial concerns are a huge issue that our communities deal with. We often come across a lot of tension between institutions and communities, due to very little leeway between the rigid structures and policies that institutions mandate for the funds being allocated, and the unforgiving nature of any discourse from this status quo, which is very rooted in colonial structures and capitalist systems that we are essentially trying to push against. There's also irresolvable tensions that become created in navigating these relationships, and facilitators are often having to deal with the crux of this because they are playing different roles, navigating between the institutions and the communities. And so as such, they take on a lot of different kinds of labour, and the labour that people have named seem to have common archetypes.

  Muna Mohamed: [00:05:58] Yeah, Stuart, did you want to share a little bit about how we got to this concept of archetypes? When we were thinking about the roles that folks occupy in institutions?

  Stuart Poyntz: [00:06:08] Yeah, I think that many folks who are listening to the podcast will recognize that facilitators face a whole number of different challenges. Being the in-between figures between institutions and communities. And so what we wanted to try to do in this conversation was set up archetypes that capture some of the work that facilitators do, the really specific and unique work that facilitators do, the power that they have in their hands when they do this work, how that helps and works at negotiating relationships between institutions and communities. And our idea about archetypes was to capture the sense that there are common patterns across fields. Archetypes help us to name those patterns, help to recognize our roles and our power in our place as facilitators. And also as I think we're going to talk about near the end is some of the cautionary notes we might want to keep in mind in doing facilitation work.

  Muna Mohamed: [00:07:09] Awesome. So we have these three archetypes that we're going to move through and just chat about a little bit. The first is the doula. The second is the smuggler. And the final one is the translator. And stay with us. We'll unpack these terms a little bit more and talk about how they connect to facilitation, even though they don't sound like it immediately. So I wanted to first start with Ammarah. Could you talk to us about the doula archetype and how we arrived there? Like who is the doula and what's their power?

  Ammarah Syed: [00:07:40] The doula is often the connector, and it's a very intimate space to be in. Other terms that are more accessible could be like the midwife or the mediator. The doula is the person who values and puts energy and time into the people who are being harmed. So the people who there is very little protection for, there are very little resources allocated towards. This is like the most front facing work that our archetype can do. It's often a role laid onto the intersectional people of our society, and more often than not, femme of color that are automatically often assigned these roles. They're in spaces where emotional labour is required. Often this labor is invisible but essential. So there is labour being done and not acknowledged, however, it is integral. So basically what doulas do is the care work. It's the work of humanizing intimate relations. It's tapping into the unnamed, whether it's the emotional labour that is invisibilized or micro-aggressions, or a whole range of things in between that we often don't notice palpably, but the effects are very real. These things have been systematically erased to serve the function of the institutions. What the doula does is often operationalize and name these intangible pieces in order to prevent harm. We have the roles of negotiating with different parties and showing up in authenticity around conflict that often happens, this unnamed labour that's happening. So naming it, negotiating with it, the cautions that we might extend to that role is where we're not being acknowledged as a doula, we burn out. There's powerlessness. You have a lot of circumstances where you can't do anything from the bureaucracy above you, and you can't do anything for the client and so it's just this kind of standstill where there's not much that can happen. A more fundamental thing that often does come into this role with is being socialized into this role. So the idea that they don't have a choice, which is so integral to name as a caution, because when you name that you're socialized into a role, you can then step out of it to see your power over your situation and your agency over that role.

  Muna Mohamed: [00:10:08] Yeah. I feel like we kind of arrived at this archetype of the doula when we were talking about how facilitators are these vessels for bringing about change or being vessels of support. And this doula role can be so powerful because in institutions and systems that treat people like they're numbers, like really treat people, not like humans, the doula archetype is the person or the facilitator that does the work of moving past that, to build an intimacy with each client that they have, or to build an intimacy with people directly, which requires so much of yourself. And there is actually such a strength and almost courage in that to be like, I'm going to make the room to see your humanity and acknowledge your humanity and try to figure out how to navigate the system to give you what you need. And in our research project, when we were talking with those that facilitate in the context of harm reduction work or client support work at a very grassroots level, many of them are playing this doula function that is so radical in some ways. But as you named, there's like this layer of socialization and of it being challenging to remove yourself from that role because it requires so much of you.

  Stuart Poyntz: [00:11:20] I would only add on that facilitation involves care, and it involves a kind of care in moments, sometimes of crisis. That's not unlike a doula who's taking care of somebody in the midst of birth, in the days and weeks that follow birth, when support and structures of care are really essential to making the route forward possible. And likewise in context of facilitation thinking of the facilitator as a doula is somebody who, as both of you have commented, they do things that are often invisible but are essential to how facilitation work empowers and enables communities to negotiate institutional dynamics and sometimes to confront institutions when they're not listening. I think what Ammarah had said about the cautionary notes are that this role, the facilitator, can become deeply exhausting, because carrying care is also a kind of burden that is hard to hold on to without times to recuperate, to reset, to revitalize oneself. And so the doula is both a space of real power and of real need in facilitation, but also one that needs itself to be... we need to be aware that when we're calling on facilitators to do more than seems reasonable. That's about the cautionary notes of being a doula at a time when too much is being asked and care of the facilitator is required as well.

  Muna Mohamed: [00:12:47] For folks who are listening, both Ammarah and I are women of colour, and what feels really big about this doula role that we can't fully unpack here is that we're socialized to this extent of, like, we carry the doula role in everything that we do. Like in our families, in our friend groups, that the work of being, like, does this situation actually require doula in me? Is that what this facilitated situation needs, or have I been socialized to think that this is the only way I can operate of giving so much of myself to this space as a facilitator? And that question, I think, can be very liberating for us to do this distancing between our roles and the institutions and to also just take care of ourselves.

  Ammarah Syed: [00:13:28] Yeah. And so the critical nature of asking ourselves that question is power, it is control. Because even in public, often, people will read us as that role. And it's like, I never met you, like, I don't know you, and yet you're still archetype-ing me in that role. So where do we find that control? So a quote that speaks into this is the different layers of accountability and who we're accountable to. Our accountability is to the community that we're working for and with but there's all these other outside factors that, you know, play an influential role. You know, you can get uninvited from certain tables, which limits your ability to do that work. You could lose your job. You can lose funding. So there's all these other things. So it's very easy to say, yeah, my accountability is to community first and foremost. But the reality is that there's all these other factors.

  Stuart Poyntz: [00:14:29] What's so interesting about that quote is it really captures the tensions that facilitators in their role as doulas have to negotiate between facing the institution and wanting to support and bring forward the needs of the community. And being in that place puts them in a kind of divided role of helping and assisting. That's an awkward place to be. It's a straining and demanding place to be. And I think with the archetype of the doula, we wanted to draw attention to the real demand that's put on the body of the facilitator. Muna, you were saying earlier, with the way that that corresponds with the larger social demands that are put on certain people, that are read on to certain people's bodies.

  Ammarah Syed: [00:15:16] Speaking directly to the bodies, just to paraphrase another quote, there's specifically a lot of talk about how our facilitators bodies are being affected by this. One of our interviewees said, my last job had a huge physical and emotional impact on me. It was an organization that does a lot of brilliant disability justice work and yet I was, you know, burnt out and not feeling supported in that space. It was very ableist, white and Zionist. But I had to discover that after months of hard work. So all this subtext that is contributing to the wear on our bodies.

  Sherry Ostapovitch: [00:16:06] Stay tuned for the next part of Facilitator archetypes: Navigating institutions as community engaged facilitators where Muna Mohamed, Stuart Poyntz, and Ammarah Syed discuss how the smuggler facilitator can get resources from institutions into communities.

  Muna Mohamed: [00:16:23] I wonder if we talk about our next archetype, which is the smuggler.

  Stuart Poyntz: [00:16:28] That's you Muna.

  Muna Mohamed: [00:16:29] That's me. I'm the smuggler. I'm the smuggler.

  Stuart Poyntz: [00:16:31] What's that about?

  Muna Mohamed: [00:16:32] Maybe actually, I'll read the quote, because I think the quote that we have from one of our team members, Casey, as we were doing this research, really captures the role of the smuggler, especially when it comes to financial dynamics and resources, how that connects with institutions, clearly. So Casey says, my facilitation practice, which speaks to my values in terms of resourcing communities, is about taking funds from granting streams and putting them into community members hands and households. And also about a DIY ethos, taking something small and making it bigger and making it more communal. And this is really the essence of the smuggler. The smuggler has such a deep accountability and responsibility to the community that they're working with and that they're serving, and that they care about. So that accountability is there across all the archetypes, but in the smugglers context they have this responsibility and they're, like, how can I finesse and sometimes manipulate the system to get the resources that are needed in communities hands? And sometimes this smuggler is finessing a granting system, using the right language to get grants into the hands of community members or money into the hands of community members. They think about resources so creatively, like they are not only thinking about tangible, like, money that goes into community, but they're thinking about what can be donated in kind. They're thinking about people and the power of volunteers. So the smuggler is really, really scrappy. That's the word we kept returning to when we talked about the smuggler is that they're super resourceful, they're really creative, and they really embody this DIY ethos that Casey named, which is that they are capable of caring for their communities. They are capable of finding the resources in order to support those that often don't get paid in the work that we're doing, especially with equity seeking communities.

  Muna Mohamed: [00:18:26] So that's facilitators, that's grassroots organizations, that's communities directly through mutual aid. One thing though, and I'd love to hear what you guys think about some of the cautions around the smuggler, because what they're operating within is a lot of risk. So they have to evaluate frequently. They always have to evaluate the risk that they're holding, or that they're maybe navigating as they work with these institutions. And because some of the work is around manipulating or finessing these systems, sometimes depending on the position that you hold, that does pose a risk. Like Ammarah, you were naming how unforgiving some of these institutions are and that sometimes can harm the person who's occupying this role of the smuggler. And, you know, I think a lot of smugglers are okay with that. That's part of the smugglers nature, is that they're like, yeah, you know, I'll carry the risk of whatever comes with doing this work because it's so important. And that's their strength. There is courage in that as well. But it is important for anyone who is carrying that smuggler role to really consider. Is this a risk I'm comfortable taking? Just to know that within themselves because when you're trying to finesse these systems, there's that question of, is this role pulling me out of my integrity? Is that comfortable for me in this space? How is occupying this role of the smuggler really aligned with my own integrity and authenticity? And am I able to separate that role from who I am as a person, which is maybe someone who carries that integrity and that authenticity?

  Stuart Poyntz: [00:19:54] I think it's fascinating the way you talk about the smuggler as negotiating risk, because there are times when we really do want to take on risk for the communities we're working with, and we see the need to play off institutions, work institutions, reset institutional relationships so that communities receive the resources, the support they legitimately deserve. And there's a beauty in taking those risks, but it's really important to hear you talk about the delicate dance that puts the facilitator in, because there's things at stake for them. There's a job, there's their own personal integrity. There are things that deeply matter and power relationships they've got to identify and know how to work with. At the same time, the sense of being able to make things happen is what the smuggler seems to highlight for us. And if the doula is the agent of care that makes things happen through care, the smuggler is the agent of happening by resetting and recalibrating relationships, which I think is a powerful place for facilitators to see themselves.

  Muna Mohamed: [00:21:03] I think that's a brilliant framing, because you're kind of seeing the pieces of the puzzle come together. Like the doula facilitates this really important role of care, and the smuggler pushes us to just, like, think of resources differently as well.

  Sherry Ostapovitch: [00:21:27] You’re listening to the last part of Facilitator Archetypes: Navigating institutions as community-engaged facilitators where Muna Mohamed, Stuart Poyntz, and Ammarah Syed talk about how translator facilitators negotiate and build bridges between institutions and communities.

  Stuart Poyntz: [00:21:45] The facilitator is translator. It's like the third piece of the puzzle for us. We thought of a facilitator as a translator because facilitators are in-between agents. They're go-betweens. They negotiate, they build bridges between communities and institutions and they do this role in ways that move ideas and perspectives across community and institutional spaces, especially to help institutions to hear communities, when those institutions aren't listening. I think many communities find themselves in places where facilitators are helpful for taking their meaning and embedding them in institutions and helping them to come alive. Institutions aren't always ready to be active listeners. And I think some of our interviewees in the research, they told us about this. Rubén, one of our team members, talks about community-engaged means doing facilitation with people who are outside of dominant institutions, like schools or universities or the government. When the community thinks of itself as outside of institutions, facilitators translate those community needs so that they're heard and acted on by institutions. They make institutions understandable to communities sometimes as well. There's an immense power in this, we thought, because facilitators support communities to get their perspectives heard by those in power. Facilitators have the capacity to open up and make sense of institutional practices and protocols so they're not confusing. They can be, in this way, code switchers with the ability really to dance with the two partners that they're working with, this back and forthing, this give and taking.

  Stuart Poyntz: [00:23:25] This role is supported by the power of deep listening, something that's absolutely essential. Another piece that one of our interviewees told us about, talking about the role of working with an Indigenous advisory circle. The job of the interviewee, she says, my job was just to listen, to provide information when asked. I wasn't there to dictate. I was really there to listen and present the work of the department and in response to the advisory circle doing the internal work of building buy-in, finding additional resources or other required resources to actualize what the community told us. There's a modesty that's part of this work. Sometimes being a translator is disruptive work. You're translating ideas and perspectives that institutions don't always want to hear. And in this way, it puts a facilitator in a role of being a disruptor of how institutions work. Some people love that role. For others, that's a tricky place to be, Because the truth is, structural power is hard to change. And I think facilitators know that most of all. So there's a delicate dance at stake here, but the facilitator is translator is agile and able in that dance with the two partners they're working with.

  Muna Mohamed: [00:24:37] You know, I think sometimes what can be so valuable about people who occupy the translator role is that they actually have a deep understanding of both, like they deeply understand the institution and they deeply understand community and understand why they function. And they have to have that in order to do the translation work well. And I think they're also often people who internally are very open, are very adaptable. And I think maybe the caution, because in all of these, we're talking about how to separate maybe the self from the role. For the translator, it's saying between these two worlds, where do I find myself like stepping away from the dance to be like, okay, who am I? What are my beliefs? What is the truth without a filter? Without like a translation filter, you know. And I think sometimes that's what can feel hard is the moments where you're not thinking about how to communicate. You're just like feeling that it's hard and and honoring that truth. Sometimes it's hard to create room as a translator.

  Ammarah Syed: [00:25:36] Speaking into that. You both spoke into the idea that you have to step into these roles and to know about each of these roles. That's why it is an archetype, right? It's because there's common threads, common code-switching, common ways of showing up.

  Muna Mohamed: [00:25:55] I think that transitions us really nicely into, like, how do we maybe even bring these archetypes together to understand how to show up as facilitators and institutions?

  Stuart Poyntz: [00:26:06] I think different facilitation projects require more of some archetype than the other, a movement between archetypes. I think what's true in facilitation is that we're often using these archetypes at strategically helpful moments. There are times, as Ammarah shared with us, that it's very clear that care and embedding structures of care is fundamental to allow communities to make sense of the situation they're trying to address and figure out and change often. But sometimes they need a facilitator who's going to be a smuggler, who's going to be like a pirate, who's going to go in and going to launch onto the ship of the institution and, and take some gold and bring it back. Sometimes it's a negotiator and it's a translator who's moving ideas back and forth to try to set new common ground or to find ways of making the ideas of communities that are hard to hear by institutions to make them hearable. I don't think these are exclusive roles. These are roles that we take on and use at different moments, as needed as required, by the job.

  Muna Mohamed: [00:27:14] I think what helps with the archetypes as a way to think about our roles is that it brings that agency back. We can acknowledge that it's not easy, like there's there's always going to be this pressure. But we do have this agency to just think about, even as I'm going to have to, to tackle and be within these tensions of myself, the institutions that I'm in and the communities that I care about. I do have choice in how I operate, and I do have the ability to distance myself from these roles. This can be a hat I put on. I can wake up one day and go into a space and be like, I think this space as a facilitator, especially if you're a facilitator that takes on, like, different kinds of jobs, this community organization needs me to smuggle. Like, that's what they need and I'm going to wear that hat. And especially as someone who's connected with or been the doula in so many of my facilitation spaces, it's been empowering to think about the archetypes of something that bring agency back into my work.

  Ammarah Syed: [00:28:09] I think even bringing in the archetypes and us being able to step in and out of them creates autonomy; it creates control. Autonomy and control is the number one way to combat trauma.

  Stuart Poyntz: [00:28:23] Building on that, Ammarah, facilitators don't always control the situation they're in, so having multiple archetypes gives them the flexibility to mobilize robust agency.

  Muna Mohamed: [00:28:33] Yes. That's it!

  Stuart Poyntz: [00:28:35] And and that's important in response to trauma. That's important in response to immovable institutions. That's important in response to well-being and self-care.

  Ammarah Syed: [00:28:47] I do want to say a quote that Rubén said, and it applies so perfectly. I think it was the revolution is going to be slow, and we have to find ways to care for each other during it. Creating something like archetypes off these systems of financial abuse is one way we can care.

  Muna Mohamed: [00:29:08] You know what? I think that wraps it up beautifully. Thank you all for listening. We hope that these archetypes serve as a way for you to understand your work and your role in facilitation.

  Ammarah Syed: [00:29:18] And the autonomy for you to remove yourself from that when you need to. 

  Muna Mohamed: [00:29:23] Whenever you need to. Exactly.

  Sherry Ostapovitch: [00:29:25] You’ve just listened to Facilitator Archetypes: Navigating institutions as community-engaged facilitators, part of the Pedagogies of Community Engagement Collective special podcast series on The WhyPAR Podcast. Make sure you catch the other two episodes such as Saving or Engaging? Rethinking Community Facilitation where you can listen to facilitators reflecting on their own experiences of saviourism. Or listen to the episode, From “Oh shit!” to “Oh shift” where you can find out how facilitators navigate when things don’t quite go according to plan.  

Details

This podcast episode uses 3 archetypes: the doula, the smuggler and translator to explore the role that many community engaged facilitators take in navigating the institutions that they work within and for. Through the lens of these archetypes, we expand on the ways that community engaged facilitators  leverage their power or position to work towards justice and safety for the communities they are accountable to. Embodying these archetypes as a facilitator is often either a deliberate choice or a reflection of the unique gifts each facilitator carries with them.

Music and production by Sherry Ostapovitch

References and Further Reading

Ostapovitch, S. (2025) Facilitator archetypes: Navigating institutions as community engaged facilitators, a conversation with Muna Mohamed, Stuart Poyntz, and Ammarah Syed with the Pedagogies of Community Engagement Collective. (No 1.) [Audio podcast episode]. In The whyPAR Podcast. https://www.communityfacilitation.ca/resources/facilitator-archetypes

Episode 17: From "oh sh*t!" to "oh shift", a conversation with Leila Angod, Jessica Bleuer, Rose Gutierrez, and Ruben Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández

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  From “oh shit!” to “oh shift”, a conversation with Leila Angod, Jessica Bleuer, Rose Gutierrez, and Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández and the Pedagogies of Community Engagement Collective. Hosted by Sherry Ostapovitch.

  Sherry Ostapovitch: [00:00:13] Welcome to the WhyPAR Podcast, a podcast of the Youth Research Lab at OISE - the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. 

  My name is Sherry Ostapovitch, and this episode of the WhyPAR Podcast is the second in a special series produced by the Pedagogies of Community Engagement Collective. The PeCEP project was created to explore, generate and share knowledge about facilitation practices that support community-engaged work across different sectors. In this special series of three podcasts, members of the PeCEC reflect on their experiences as community-engaged facilitators, confronting some of the dilemmas and tensions, as well as the opportunities and joys of working with, in, and for communities. 

  This podcast episode entitled, From "oh shit!" to "oh shift" is a conversation with Leila Angod, Jessica Bleuer, Rose Gutierrez, and Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández. They share moments when their facilitation plans were ruptured by unexpected challenges. Stay tuned to the "shift" to find out how to think differently about these moments, and what facilitators can learn and do, when things fall apart.

  Rose Gutierrez: [00:01:22] Hi folks, my name is Rose Gutierrez. I'm a community-engaged facilitator. I've been facilitating from the 1990s, started around doing a lot of work in terms of equity, moved into community arts, and it's a pleasure to be in this conversation.

  Jessica Bleuer: [00:01:38] Hi, my name is Jessica Bleuer and I'm also a community-engaged facilitator. I use a lot of theater of the oppressed and dramatherapy in my work, and I'm also now teaching at Concordia University. My work really focuses on equity-addressing spaces and dignity-promoting spaces.

  Leila Angod: [00:01:56] Hi, my name is Leila Angod. I do school-based youth participatory action research. I'm an Assistant Professor at Carleton University in Ottawa, and I teach in the Childhood and Youth Studies program, focusing on youth activism and anti-racism.

  Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández: [00:02:12] Hi everyone, I'm Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández. I'm a community-engaged researcher whose primary work is in the context of classrooms, also doing school based WhyPAR. And I am a Professor and Chair of the Department of Social Justice Education at the University of Toronto.

  Leila Angod: [00:02:44] This is a podcast episode about those oh shit moments.

  Leila Angod: [00:02:47] Those moments that come up and break the intention of where you're wanting to go as a facilitator in the group. So this is a tension. Like, I feel like I should move things, like this is part of what I wanted to talk about with the "oh shit" moments, because I feel like, you know, the desire for forward momentum, right, to get where we're going.

  Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández: [00:03:11] And we've all had those moments, right. We've all had those moments where, you know, we thought things are going to go a certain way and then something happens and you're like, oh shit, now what?

  Rose Gutierrez: [00:03:19] Well, absolutely. I think, oh shit, moments are just part of the landscape. We'll all experience that as a facilitator. We have to kind of also decide and figure out, in terms of our skills and experience, what to do in those moments. Sometimes they're really helpful, you know, and sometimes they're very scary. Right. And we have to kind of assess, you know, depending on what it is that we're doing, what to do in those "oh shit" moments. So this podcast is a really great conversation amongst us as community facilitators to just kind of share our knowledge, right, share our knowledge and our experiences. So hopefully other folks who will be in that same position as a facilitator can maybe learn from some of those things.

  Leila Angod: [00:03:59] Yeah. And I think to normalize those "oh shit" moments too, that, yes, it's going to happen.

  Jessica Bleuer: [00:04:05] It's happened to all of us. 

  Leila Angod: [00:04:05] Yeah.

  Jessica Bleuer: [00:04:07] What are some of those moments from your own practice? Like I'm thinking about I'm teaching this classroom, I have this very carefully planned class, and then a student, completely not on topic, starts reflecting on how much he appreciates this very controversial figure. Um, you know, he brings up Jordan Peterson being, like, a mentor to him, and something changes in the classroom. And I look around and I'm noticing the reactions of women in the classroom, of trans folk in the classroom, and there's an oh shit moment for me. Okay. What am I going to do now with this?

  Rose Gutierrez: [00:04:51] Yeah.

  Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández: [00:04:52] Yeah. So how did you navigate it? What were some of the things that were going through your mind?

  Jessica Bleuer: [00:04:57] The first thing that was going through my mind was group cohesion. And what was happening to the group cohesion in this class that needed to stay together for two years to finish their program? Um, the second thing I was thinking about was emotional safety. And how had this introduction to this very controversial figure interrupted any small kind of trust building that had already happened in the class? We were three weeks in. And I was thinking about, you know, violence in the classroom and how we were going to move through this revelation together and what it meant. I didn't have any assumptions, but what did it mean for the people in the classroom, and what was it going to mean for the relationships? And so the reason why I said, "Oh shit, what do I do?" is because I was thinking about so many things and it was like, which strand of that do I pick up? Is this the right moment? I also had something that I had planned on teaching. So do I push that aside? Do I really recognize and help unpack? Do I actually not help unpack because I don't want to highlight or amplify this? But can I get away with not, you know, I'm not sure. It's funny because that was a classroom, but if I was a therapist and someone said to me, I love Jordan Peterson, I would literally say, "tell me more".

  Jessica Bleuer: [00:06:14] Right, right, right. Because they're trying to communicate something, and my job is there to listen. But then there's something about when we're in a group, our responsibility is not only to one person, but it is to the group. And so that completely changes how I'm going to respond. Because now I'm, I actually have no idea what he's going to say about Jordan Peterson. Jordan Peterson wrote some, like, self-help books that many people still find very helpful, that are not controversial at all. Like they tell you to clean your room, for example. But I feared that what he was going to say could be misogynistic, transphobic, racist, you know, and it's possible that somebody wanted to be like, wait a minute, now I need to know if I can trust you. What exactly is it that you appreciate about Jordan Peterson? And I definitely didn't go that way. I got very nervous, and I said, we're not talking about Jordan Peterson right now. We're talking about... And I brought it back to the classroom environment. But what I did in that moment is I completely ignored all the emotional things that were happening, that then in future classes, I ended up needing to address because there had been such a rupture in that moment.

  Rose Gutierrez: [00:07:26] So do you think that there are other tips or like steps to take when you have an "oh shit" moment?

  Jessica Bleuer: [00:07:34] I imagine that the way that we can respond to an "oh shit" moment is as diverse as the people in the room, including the facilitators and the participants. But I would say that, out of some research, some participatory action research that came out of Concordia University, I was working with a group of professors that were trying to find ways to address racial and ethnic microaggressions in higher education. And one of the things that this group of professors came up with was this acronym called PRR, which stands for pause, reflect, respond. And the idea is that when a microaggression happens in a classroom, that, it can be really important for us to pause and take some time to think about what's happening to our nervous systems in this moment. Like, how has the harm entered our bodies? Are our hearts beating fast? How has our breathing changed? Are people noticing tension in their body? Are people even in their bodies? Are people kind of to protect themselves, dissociating a little bit from the moment? Um, and to kind of engage in some co-regulation exercises to really recognize and validate that these moments can be very scary, they can be very harmful, and they can bring us back to other moments in our lives where we've experienced harm. And so that's the pause of that acronym.

  Jessica Bleuer: [00:08:56] And then the next thing is when there's a little bit more co-regulation. And this is very important, the goal is not to regulate the harm away okay. It's just about building a bit of capacity to really address what has just happened, the "oh shit" moment in the classroom. And so when there's a little bit more capacity because the classroom has either decided to take a break, go for a walk, do some breathing exercises together, something. A little bit more co-regulation. Then the idea is to really reflect about what is happening in the classroom between the people in the classroom and of course, like what other systems, systemic issues are entering the classroom in that moment. And that reflection can happen in discussion, that reflection can happen with a prepared kind of survey that the professor kind of says, okay, go onto your phones or your laptops, and let's just answer some questions about what's happening here. So it's like an internal reflection before it becomes an interactive reflection. And so that after you've paused, you've co-regulated a little bit and then you've reflected on the larger systemic issues that are happening and the interrelational issues that are happening in the classroom. Now, we might have a little more capacity to respond. So that's the second R respond.

  Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández: [00:10:08] I was thinking about the specific example that you were giving, Jessica, and just kind of building on this idea that there's probably lots of responses, lots of possible ways of addressing an "oh shit" moment. None of which are probably perfect, because in a group context, everybody has different needs, and there's no way that as a facilitator you can meet everybody's needs. So somebody needs are going to go are going to go unmet in some way or another. Maybe you're wrong, you can even address your own needs. And I was even thinking about the person, the person who's making the comment, right. Like one question that, in the reflection process that would come up for me would be like, what is the need that is being expressed when this person clearly, deliberately is introducing the name of a person or an idea that is going to be disruptive. Like, do they realize how disruptive it is? Is it intentional? What are they looking for? What's the need that's going on that is provoking this person to do that? And then I think, yes, there are lots of responses and there are probably some definite "no" responses like definitely things that you should not do, like probably putting all your attention on that person. Why don't you spend the next ten minutes talking about Jordan Peterson? That would probably be the wrong thing to do. So there are some clearly things that you should not do, but there's no clear answer as to what you should, right, because at the end of the day, the needs in front of you are...

  Jessica Bleuer: [00:11:35] Are so diverse.

  Rose Gutierrez: [00:11:36] And there's so many factors, right? It's like your relationship to this group, your history to this group, how long it is that you are able or have the capacity to work with this group. So many factors that there's a checklist that happens, you know, when you're like, okay, is it a pause? Is it a direct, you know, response? Is it a break? Like what is it? But I think it's there's that kind of intuitiveness to the response. I think that's really important. And, and I do think it's also important to really like to set up a space where people are, um, are committed to the process because that response might not work. But then you work through another response that can maybe be better for like to address whatever harm is happening in the group.

  Leila Angod: [00:12:20] So I love what you said, Rose, about intuitiveness, because when something comes up for me, the "oh shit" moments are, it's that moment when something that's present in the space bubbles to the surface and makes itself visible and apparent, and you have to then decide which of the multitude of pathways are you going to take to address it? And for me, it comes back to feel. And I need to feel the way forward first. The example that I wanted to share and just to say that, you know, we had a we had some really rich conversations about which stories to share and the ethics of sharing them and the risks of sharing them as well. The one that I wanted to share was about when a group of young people that I was working with, some of the challenges in the relationships within that group that had occurred outside of the research project, entered into the space. Um, and so the violence that had occurred outside really fractured the relationships in the group, and the project was derailed. It was really a struggle, um, to move forward on the day when we came together and some folks were missing and we knew why, and the young people wanted to talk about it. And it was a very fractured group. Emotions were running really high. I was afraid in that moment for things to spiral even further out of control.

  Leila Angod: [00:13:44] And I'm saying the word control while critiquing myself for saying that. But for things to escalate on an emotional level, on a reactivity level, that would then further harm the group. And so it was hard to feel the way forward there, because now I'm dysregulated from a nervous system standpoint. Now I'm frazzled. Now I'm worried. Now I'm anxious. And so thinking about how the desire that was coming up for me was to have forward movement towards the goals of the project and wrapping up what we had agreed to do as a group. I would love to tell myself in that moment, to just extend some generosity to myself and kindness to myself, to take a pause and take a minute and regroup with the facilitator team, who's also really struggling. And I might have then had that intuitive insight at that moment to say, you know, we could do individual self-reflection here. We don't have to debate this and unravel all of this as a group. There are other things we can do to come together. But while still acknowledging that this is present in the room and this is happening. I think what guided me in that decision, where I had to make that decision between the multitude of options, was to reduce harm and to move forward towards the goals we had agreed on.

  Rose Gutierrez: [00:15:05] I love that you're sharing that story for the second time, that I'm hearing it deeper. When I hear it, there is so much that is required of us as community-engaged facilitators. That is so unfair, actually. You know, we have to be the host, right, to make sure that we're creating a space that feels welcoming, accessible, you know, where there's like multiple voices at play. We're doing all that. We're planning the agendas. We're also teachers. Like we're not therapists, but there's, what do you call it? Like social personal history that comes into the space. And I don't know about you guys, but besides going to teachers' college, who trained you to do this work? Like, it's your lived experience, it's community development, it's sitting with your family and like navigating conversations with like, your siblings. I know that academically, there's probably more courses than when I was younger to kind of do this work, but it's like life, work. And it's hard, it's hard because you're put in a position with huge responsibilities. We, you know, we come to this work, you know, conscious, you know, and have kind of our own values and ethics in operation. And we want to care for the group. But the other thing that I think what we do when I feel like we professionalize this, this practice that we have is that we all of a sudden assume that we're, um, we're kind of like the leader of the group, like we're responsible. But if we think about it more, as in community liberation terms, how can we shift the balance of those "oh shit" moments? Because they're happening to all of us.

  Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández: [00:16:39] I actually think that it's funny that you feel that responsibility, and I'll speak for myself, because I don't want to project my own, my own traumas onto people. But and we've come up with, this word trauma has come up a few times. But I think that a lot of times the things that feel like intuitions, whether it's the intuition that drives how we go about planning, as well as the intuition that drives our reaction to those "oh shit" moments that break the plan that we had. Oftentimes, those intuitions are often to the result of trauma. And so I'll speak for myself like, you know, I grew up in an environment where as the oldest in the family, where there were these kind of moments of crisis as a child, I ended up having to navigate, facilitating conflict in my family. And in a lot of ways, that is where my intuitions come from. They come from the trauma of having had to be the facilitator. Having had to be the person who was reading the room in order to resolve conflict or in order to navigate, you know, a family member's alcoholism or something like that. And of course, that's true for everybody, right? Everybody in that room brings with them not just who they are politically in terms of positionality, but all the traumas that have informed their trajectory to that place. I wonder, like the piece about reflection is really important, but I also wonder about the limits of that sort of analysis in terms of our responsibility to this space we're in. You know, Jessica, you mentioned sort of having had the background from therapy, what you can or cannot do or what you're expected to do within a therapy environment versus a classroom environment or a community environment.

  Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández: [00:18:20] So that's one thing that's been sort of circulating in my head as I've been listening. And maybe this will break the flow a little bit. But the other, in response to your question, Rose, I think one thing I've learned, because most of my community-engaged work has been within the context of a classroom, a classroom that is usually not my own classroom. I go into a high school or a secondary school, and I'm inhabiting somebody else's classroom, is that the classroom is so laden with power and authority and roles, prescribed roles, that is really, really difficult to work against them. So I was sharing earlier a lot of my "oh shit" moments were moments when I realized that despite my best intentions, what I thought I was doing, was not what the people I was working with thought I was doing. And there was this complete mismatch. Right? And that story I shared was I was doing this facilitated, I want to use the word I thought I was using, which was I was facilitating a conversation about the knowledge. And then when the conversation was over, what the student said to me is that I was lecturing. I was just completely dumbfounded, you know, like, I have been doing all this work that I thought was wonderful facilitation, and as far as the students were concerned, I was lecturing. And this complete mismatch between what I thought I was doing oftentimes in the classroom because it is so laden with power. Those are the "oh shit" moments, right, you really think that you're doing this whole work to empower the students to take responsibility for this space, and low and behold, they're still acting like students in a classroom. And they don't believe anything that you just said.

  Jessica Bleuer: [00:19:47] It's so important what you're talking about power and all the power in the "oh shit" moment so that even if I have the "perfect" facilitation response, whatever that means, perfect in quotation marks, facilitation response to something. I cannot circumvent the power that I hold in my body with all my positionality. I cannot circumvent the power I bring into the space, or the power that I engage in relationship with someone else in the space, or even the institution that I'm in.

  Sherry Ostapovitch: [00:20:34] Stay tuned for the second half of From "oh shit!" to "oh shift" where Leila Angod, Jessica Bleuer, Rose Gutierrez and Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández discuss the "shift", describing how they moved through those "oh shit" moments and were able to adjust their practices.

  Rose Gutierrez: [00:20:50] It's interesting when you like, you have a huge kind of analysis in terms of what happens in an "oh shit" moment. So when you're designing a workshop for a group, I put in so much time, work, effort to kind of design it so that it could optimize or maximize, you know, the kind of conversation that can happen, learning that can happen. And in fact, I try to do everything that I can to not have an "oh shit" moment, right? But it's interesting now that we're talking about "oh shit" moment around, what is the value of those "oh shit" moments? And is it really a successful session or group or conversation if you don't have an "oh shit" moment? Right? And so there's that tension around, are you pushing enough? You know, are people comfortable enough to kind of be able to disclose what it is that will bring them the learning and the group forward? Um, or have you set it up so that the "oh shit" moment is really like, holy shit, like, this is going to go down and it's not going to go down well. I don't even know, as a facilitator, if I have the skills to actually move it in a way that people can come back together, you know, in a whole kind of way. So it's interesting, when I first thought about it, I thought, no, you never want an "oh shit" moment, but maybe you do.

  Rose Gutierrez: [00:22:00] And if you can create the condition, or if you can scale up as a facilitator to be able to navigate them a little bit better on some or most occasions, maybe those "oh shit" moments are really important to kind of like get people to think around whatever the topic is that you're facilitating around. The strategy of the conversation was shared with all of us, because we're all experiencing that "oh shit" moment in a different kind of way, even the person who is creating the "oh shit" moment. And that it's like there's more collective responsibility with the group and maybe the strategy or the healing of the harm of that act can be better. But those "oh shit" moments are really tough because in my experience, the root is around power, privilege, oppression. They're systemic. Right? And so, you know, you got to care for people collectively or not. You got to do some teaching at the same time because it's a teaching moment and you got to repair. You're like a juggler at that moment. It's spiritually taxing. Honestly. Some of us, you know, will just do a certain amount of equity workshops. And then I got to take a break.

  Jessica Bleuer: [00:23:13] You know Rose Just brought up this idea of the juggler, and then you were juggling so much in these moments. And it makes me think about, like, how do we conceptualize our role in those moments? And I love thinking about it as a juggler, because I am. I'm trying to juggle minimizing harm in a space where harm will inevitably happen just because of the power dynamics. Um, even if it's a small harm, sometimes it's a much larger harm. And I'm trying to juggle whatever the collective objective that we've all consented to do together, I'm trying to juggle trying to meet that collective objective. I guess I'm trying to juggle my own nervous system and like how activated I feel in the particular moment. But I'm also trying to juggle a bit of that therapist role. I want other people to be well in this space, whether I am or I'm not a therapist. And generally I'm not hired to be a therapist in these spaces, you know? And I'm an activist, too. Yeah. We juggle all these roles in these moments.

  Rose Gutierrez: [00:24:09] We just talked a little while earlier around multiple responses to these things. And I think, yeah, there's a huge diverse number of responses. Like these are not solutions, right? But it's probably good to think that we're in a moment, like we're in a process moment right now, in which it's going to take a bit of time. Right. Like, well we know colonization took, 500 years into colonization, it's taken some time to figure it out. It's going to take some time in this moment of harm. Right. To move to all the different layers of repair. Right. Or growth in that. But I just want to fix it at that moment. And it's probably, it's not possible. Like you have to pause. You know, you have to decrease the harm at the moment or provide some care like bandaid care at the moment. And then it's like, what is the healing that needs to happen with the group when something so violent has just happened in the group? You know, those "oh shit" moments ugh they're painful. Nobody wants to go through them, but they're really part of this world. They're kind of part of this world and the world that we're in anyway, irregardless of if we're facilitating a group.

  Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández: [00:25:17] And I was thinking in terms of people who are listening, who might want really concrete things to hang on to. Some of them have come up in the conversation so far. We've talked about this idea of pausing to reflect, to allow the moment to sit. You know, I think that's something that is worth thinking about, and that requires some facilitation too sometimes. To just basically actually say that explicitly of saying, okay, acknowledging something just happened, let's just take 30 seconds to sit with it for a moment and think about how we're feeling. I think that pause and reflect in the moment. You also mentioned, in terms of a concrete step, acknowledging and offering care, naming, naming, the thing that happened and what's occurring in the moment. But I'm also thinking, Rose, in terms of what you're thinking of the learning process, sort of some of the strategies we've used in terms of the long term addressing that. I can think, for example, of instances where the best approach was actually to bring an outside source, to bring somebody from the outside who is new and who might have expertise on the particularities. You know, I remember one time we had this breakdown in our group having to do with, there was a trans student who was Indigenous and an Indigenous person in the group who said some things that felt quite transphobic. And at the moment, I felt like it wasn't really my place to facilitate that as a non-Indigenous person. And so we brought an external facilitator to help us work through that. Other times, maybe caucusing is a good way to help different people in the group. Naming, here are the positionalities that are sort of implicated in this conversation. Let's caucus around the issue and think about what it means to live in this space from that particular perspective. What's going through your head? Leila?

  Leila Angod: [00:27:08] Yeah. A few things. One, the timepiece is so hard and it's so hard in schools. There are so many layers of the power relationships when working in schools, and time is at the heart of the pressures of the coloniality of schooling. I'm thinking about also then how you're embedded in policies and procedures, things that have to happen when harm occurs in a school setting, and how things are required to be addressed. And, Ruben, the idea that intuition is, um, almost a reaction based on history and experience. And I just wonder if there's room for just other wisdoms to come through that are just from elsewhere, that are just not that. That are just not from our experience, that are not from our traumas, that are not from our histories. But it's that like, insight. It's that moment that really comes from somewhere else. Where you feel, you feel it in a way that is totally different from analysis and totally different from the sum of your experiences. And how can we make space for that wisdom that I'm calling intuition and feel in facilitation? Because I do feel like so many of us are, are coming from, are bringing or weaving those things in in ways that we don't name and we don't talk about. And so part of the pause, and I love too, Jessica, about the PRR and the idea of like bringing in the animal kingdoms to resources to draw from wisdom, other kinds of wisdom, to draw from that knowledge.

  Jessica Bleuer: [00:28:51] And when you say the animal kingdom, you're referring to purr being like the sound that the cat makes to co-regulate?

  Leila Angod: [00:28:55] Yeah. Thanks. Because we didn't say that part. Exactly, exactly.

  Leila Angod: [00:28:59] Those moments where we pause, one of the most challenging things about facilitating and it's amplified in these moments is the doubleness of I'm listening to myself, I'm listening to my thoughts, I have an awareness of my feelings, but I'm also bringing that awareness to each individual in the group and bringing that awareness to the group dynamic as a whole. And it's like this, this consciousness that is really it has an intensity in how expansive it is. And to me, there is something very, very concretely spiritual about that work of observing. I'm interested in the tools that can bring us to those places of like responsiveness and observation and feeling and deep listening. Um. That still connect back to the structural and still connect back to the power dynamics and how we, Rose, you were talking about moving forward collectively, how we do that. But I'm trying to like wiggle some, a little bit more room and sort of just the idea of where we're drawing from when we're resourcing ourselves.

  Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández: [00:30:07] Thank you. I'm so glad you brought that up. And you're absolutely correct. I should have said that intuition sometimes draws on trauma, but also draws on many other things. But you reminded me, is that another strategy that I think is really good to draw upon when these "oh shit" moments happen. And I'm going to use this word conscious of the fact that it means something specific in the context of Indigenous work, as it's the word ceremony. Um, and maybe it's helpful to distinguish between ceremony sort of capital C in the sense of ceremonies that have a cultural trajectory and a cultural foundation that deserves respect and acknowledgment and oftentimes should only be done by those who have that history. But I'm also thinking ceremonies small c in the terms of protocol and ritual. So, for example, sometimes one way to address these "oh shit" moments is to establish a protocol for acknowledging how we're being impacted by them. So, you know, I think of the ritual that we often had in our group, the rose and the thorn, where every time we would open with a space for each member of the group to share something positive that was happening in their life and something that was being challenging, that was a constant ritual. It was a permanent sort of ritual that always often helped us come together. Sometimes one way to address these "oh shit" moments is to invoke ritual as a way to make yourself present, and to allow for those spiritual dimensions of intuition and ancestral notions of intuition to express themselves through the ritual.

  Rose Gutierrez: [00:31:36] So I'm wondering, in terms of reframing, "oh shit" now. After we've done 40 minutes, um, you know, because like, at first when I heard of "oh shit", I was like, my reaction was, "oh shit", actually and your body starts to sweat. Because that's the experience of "oh shit". But maybe that's a very like colonized reaction. And that is based on hundreds of years of systems of oppression where if there are "oh shit" moments like it really is "oh, shit" and it's actually detrimental to yourself and community and family. Whereas now, if we can unpack that a little bit in terms of looking at Indigenous practice, that "oh shit" moments are probably just ways of life and navigating them is not so punitive as what was taught to us by colonizers. That's very interesting for me to be learning here on this podcast.

  Leila Angod: [00:32:28] I love that! And I wonder if there's shift moments instead of shit moments, because Jessica was sharing something really beautiful... About shift breaks as a really lovely tool. I wonder if you would say something?

  Jessica Bleuer: [00:32:43] Yeah, well, we're just talking about how do we normalize collectively talking about times when our access hasn't been that accessible or times when harm has happened? And so we were talking earlier about this idea of having built into any facilitation structure these moments that we call shift moments, where we invite the people that we're working with to think about, what we actually ask this direct question, "is there anything that we could be doing, any shifts that we could be doing that would make this work more accessible to you?" And that everyone would know that there would be multiple times throughout the process that we would be asking this question and then really listening to the response from this question. So I love this instead of, "oh shit", it's "oh shift". And knowing that we need to continue shifting and responding to what's happening in the space, including harm that happens really in any space. Conflict and harm. Rubén, you were talking about ritual. And are there these structures like "oh shift" in place that can help us through these more messy moments that are very common in facilitation, and I just wanted to name that the pause, reflect, respond is a structure, like a ritual that people can be, you know, it doesn't have to be this one, but that we agree on. When these hard conversations happen, we do have these resources. We can pause and we can decide what that pause means. Does it mean we literally take a break for a bit and come back? Does it mean that we breathe together? Is it a co-regulation practice? And then we can reflect in many different ways with questions that we've come up with before the "oh shift" moment or the "oh shit moment". And in that structure of pause, reflect and respond, the response section was really just drawing from all the literature on microaggression strategies, because there is so much published about what to do when a microaggression occurs in a space, and some of it's really good.

  Rose Gutierrez: [00:34:45] So can I ask you a question about that? Like in all that literature, is there an approach that examines it in the way we've just been talking about? Does it look at these community facilitated processes as kind of more of like a spiritual process space?

  Jessica Bleuer: [00:35:02] In a sense, like Derald Sue who's, you know, a big microaggression scholar talks about like leaning into the process, like, try to move away from the content and try to listen to the process of what's happening between people. There's a lot of leaning in, which I think is a very spiritual concept, like avoiding, let's just move right in. There's a lot of looking at the metacommunication. So you said this, but what it feels like you were communicating was this racist idea, or this stereotypical idea or this misogynist idea. The literature has such diverse and vast microaggression strategies, but some of them do come from that, that aspect of like, yeah, this is normal, it happens all the time, let's lean in and understand what just happened here.

  Leila Angod: [00:35:47] And I love bringing ritual, the idea of ritual, something important is happening here and that we're not addressing it as something broken, something that has gone wrong. But we have a toolkit of things to draw from that nourish our community, that we enjoy putting into practice in this space. And leaning into me is just the fact of like, you know what, I'm not engaging with this from the past or the future, but like what is really, really present in the room right now. Because in these moments, it's so often a feeling of perceivably, a negative emotional response. You want to get away from that feeling and you want to get away from what's happening. But it's like, well, something really important is happening here. How can we go more deeply into it? How can we feel all the feelings and feel everything that is here? And I think the ritual piece is such a beautiful way of like, well, we have tools, we have tools, let's now put them into play in this space.

  Rose Gutierrez: [00:36:41] Isn't that really the meaning of when we say we want to decolonize our practice? We want to see it in a very different kind of way than we're actually than have been trained to see things. Even the original title of "oh shit" is really very much, of like, embedded in kind of a very colonized. Oh, there's so much work to do always. Right? Like its a colonized mind. Let's shift the framework.

  Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández: [00:37:03] Because you're right. If the definition is, "oh shit", are those moments where what we have planned breaks down. Then by saying, "oh shift", the definition shifts from, things change from what we had planned to what actually needs to happen.

  Jessica Bleuer: [00:37:17] Thinking about that, there has to be some decolonial literacy and some emotional literacy in order to embrace this new frame. Because just thinking about these moments, you know, and students and participants and teachers and facilitators, we feel a lot of very difficult feelings in those moments. And sometimes having those difficult feelings makes us think that something's wrong. As opposed to what is your body trying to tell you and teach you? And what is the wisdom of your body in this moment? That anger you feel. That anger is protective, that anger is resistant. Resistance in a resilient, resistant kind of way.

  Sherry Ostapovitch: [00:38:00] You've just listened to From "oh shit!" to "oh shift", part of the Pedagogies of Community Engagement Collective special podcast series on the WhyPAR Podcast. Make sure you catch the other two episodes, such as Saving or Engaging? Rethinking Community Facilitation, where you can find out how facilitators reflect on their own experiences of saviorism. Or learn about facilitation, doulas, smugglers, and translators in the episode, Facilitator Archetypes: Navigating institutions as community-engaged facilitators.

Details

In this podcast we share moments when our facilitation plans were ruptured by unexpected challenges or situations. We discuss how we moved from through those moments and the shifts we made to adjust our practice. 

Music and production by Sherry Ostapovitch

References and Further Reading

Ostapovitch, S. (2025) From “oh shit!” to “oh shift”, a conversation with Leila Angod, Jessica Bleuer, Rose Gutierrez, and Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández and the Pedagogies of Community Engagement Collective (No 2.) [Audio podcast episode]. In The whyPAR Podcast. https://www.communityfacilitation.ca/resources/oh-shift

Episode 16: Saving or Engaging? Rethinking Community Facilitation, a conversation with Ananya Bangerjee and Annie Chau

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  Saving or Engaging? Rethinking Community Facilitation, a conversation with Ananya Banerjee and Annie Chau with Pedagogies of Community Engagement Collective. Hosted by Sherry Ostapovitch and Hani Sadati.
  

  Sherry Ostapovitch: [00:00:13] Welcome to the WhyPAR Podcast, a podcast of the Youth Research Lab at OISE - the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. 

  My name is Sherry Ostapovitch and this episode of the WhyPAR Podcast is the first in a special series produced by Pedagogies of Community Engagement Collective. The PeCEP project was created to explore, generate and share knowledge about facilitation practices that support community-engaged work across different sectors. In this special series of three podcasts, members of the PeCEP collective reflect on their experiences as community-engaged facilitators, confronting some of the dilemmas and tensions, as well as the opportunities and joys of working with, in, and for communities. 

  In this first podcast episode entitled, Saving or Engaging? Rethinking Community Facilitation Hani Sadati speaks with Ananya Banerjee and Annie Chau about saviorism, where facilitators step in to ‘save’ or ‘fix’ people or communities that are marginalized. Get ready for some honest reflections from community-engaged researchers and facilitators who have questioned the very existence of their work.

  Hani Sadati: [00:01:22] Saving or engaging? This is the question. When we enter a community space, especially as facilitators, researchers or organizers, what are we really doing? Are we stepping in to save or are we showing up to support? For those of us new to this work, how do we even begin to recognize the difference between saviorism and solidarity? And for those who have been in this field for a while, where are we now in our journey of community engagement and facilitation? Are we still centering ourselves or are we learning how to pass the baton to communities to lead their own change? This podcast isn't here to preach or prescribe. Instead, it's a space for reflection, for sharing the personal stories, although uncomfortable at times, but authentic. And sharing missteps, lessons, and growth that come with doing this work. We are diving into the real and often messy work of combating the savior role of learning how to step back while still showing up, and of supporting grassroots leadership without taking the mic. So if you're wondering how to approach community engagement with humility, intention, and care, this conversation is for you. Welcome, listeners. My name is Hani Saadati. I'm supporting the Center for Community-Based Research in the role of senior Researcher, and I'm here with Dr. Ananya Tina Banerjee and Annie Chau as my guests today for this amazing conversation that we are going to have. Dr. Ananya Tina Banerjee is an. Assistant Professor and EDI lead at the School of Population and Global Health at McGill University. Her work bridges epidemiology, qualitative research and community-based participatory research with a focus on racial health equity, particularly in South Asian communities. And Annie Chau is a PhD candidate in Social Justice Education at the University of Toronto and a part-time lecturer at Sheridan College. With a background in adult education and over a decade of experience in community-based gender justice work, her research explores decolonial feminisms, refugee studies, and narrative inquiry. Okay, let's dive into this conversation. So welcome.

  Ananya Banerjee: [00:03:45] Thank you. We're excited to be here. Yeah.

  Hani Sadati: [00:03:48] Well, I'm going to start with reading a quote that comes out from the findings of the project Pedagogies of Community Engagement project. And this is from one of the participants of Neighborhood Arts Network focus group that we did. I'm going to read this quote, and then I'm going to ask one question about uh, related to this, uh, quote. So the participant says regarding the savior complex and saviors quote, they are here because they want to help you. I'm like, no, you're not helping. We are here for social responsibility. End of the quote. When you hear this quote, what comes to your mind? What do you make of it? Maybe I can start with Ananya.

  Ananya Banerjee: [00:04:34] You know, it really reminds me, um, reading this article that was published in The Atlantic by Teju Cole, who is an incredible Nigerian artist, photographer and literary writer. Um, he is at Harvard right now. And, you know, through his photography work in particular, you know, he talked about the concept of white saviorism. Actually, he coined it. And he also said that the white savior industrial complex, like it's a system in itself, is not about justice. It's about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege. And I remember when I read that, it really just struck me and I really started to reflect on, could I be part of this complex?

  Hani Sadati: [00:05:24] I saw that you have written a piece and I've taken note of that, the title of that, The Art of Medicine: Are we Training our Students to be White Saviors in Global Health? Um, how this is connected, I mean, to what you already shared right now?

  Ananya Banerjee: [00:05:40] Yeah. I think, you know, someone who's been doing a lot of community engagement work for, you know, over a decade now. And even as a person of color, even working with racialized communities, you know, I really had to step back many times and really question myself. Who is this work really benefiting, given that I am, you know, part of an elite institution like McGill University? And, you know, I started to also reflect on just community members questioning me and my role and my place in the research. And I think when we think of the term white saviorism like it's uncomfortable, and I think it's important to recognize it's not about shaming or blaming white people. That even for us as people of color, we can be white saviors because we work part of institutions that, you know, want to maintain white supremacy and whiteness. Um, and so that's something Teju Cole also, uh, really highlights. And so that really pushed me to, to write a piece, um, to really enable people to just really critically think about their role in community engagement and any type of facilitation work, where they hold a bit more privilege than the communities that they're working with.

  Hani Sadati: [00:07:01] Thank you so much. I want to come to you, Annie, and return to the quote that I read. So what do you make of that quote?

  Annie Chau: [00:07:09] I think, like Ananya was saying, that we can't, um, separate or put on a pedestal this idea of community engaged facilitation without looking at and addressing saviorism in that. As that quote that you so astutely mentioned, right. It's part of this industrial complex, um, so it's part of the ocean that we're swimming in is white supremacy. And as again, you've noticed, like we are two women of color participating in white supremacy in our work. And at the same time, you know, my background is in also a decade of work in gender based justice that I have always been called to, to try to make the world better for many people. And that's a real desire of mine to see positive change in the world. And how do we do that, though, with the, with the structures and the frames that we have and not replicate harm, not amplify the harm that is there? So to look at it critically and to look at it personally is a really important piece of this work that many of us don't center enough.

  Hani Sadati: [00:08:21] Next question I'm going to put to you both on the spot. But before that, I want to ask you if you can give one, you know, a short definition of saviorism from your own perspective, although you already talked about. But just to summarize, and if you want to give a definition, that's to set the tone for the rest of the conversation.

  Annie Chau: [00:08:44] Saviorism is white supremacy guised in the form of helping.

  Ananya Banerjee: [00:08:49] For me, saviorism is parachuting into a community and feeling it is our only responsibility to save them, help them fix the situation, and denying their rights and their full expertise and full capabilities to make things the way they want to. Like, I can't help questioning why are we always called to do the work by our institutions?

  Hani Sadati: [00:09:18] Okay, thanks. And this is the question I was going to ask. Do you see yourself as saviors?

  Annie Chau: [00:09:25] Yeah, yeah, I think this is about being honest. Right? Like I have been that savior. I continue to be that savior. It's problematic. And, um, this is sort of why, you know, earlier I was like, we need to center that really in our practice. There's no escaping it. No, there's no escaping it.

  Ananya Banerjee: [00:09:46] I don't know about you, Annie, but I still like every time I'm working with marginalized communities, I come home to the comforts that the system actually has offered me as a model minority. Being South Asian in Canada. And also just having this feeling of like I did something good. Like, why do I feel good every time I come back working with marginalized communities? I mean, obviously I'm struggling like a better systems and how our structures are designed to intentionally keep them out. And, you know, I'm part of an institution that permitted me to come in at this time, you know, of the world. You know, obviously these systems were not designed for us. Right, Annie? Yeah. Um, at the end of the day, I always benefit from this work. The institutions that I am part of are always going to benefit from this work. Like, I think we have to critically question, like, all this work we've done in community engagement, has it actually really overhauled and changed systems for them? It's not. Things are just continuing to get worse in this world, and we see it being played out right now with the USA funding being cut. And like just seeing how like imperialism and the global north, just has such a strong hold on the global south, for example.

  Hani Sadati: [00:10:58] Yeah. Thank you so much. Ananya. Um, Annie, does it resonate with you? Anything you want to add to that?

  Annie Chau: [00:11:06] I think that it's part of the work. This is the struggle, right? It's part of the work that the current context we're in, where institutions have money and they have these pet projects, or they want to seem this way with this community and all of this stuff. And that's so problematic. And you know what? While they're making other decisions, you know, in terms of their other, um, funding. And at the same time, okay, it is there the funding is there, at an individual local level there can be really transformative pieces. Not for structures and societies or institutions, but possibly for people. And you have to hold on to a little of that. Otherwise you just give up. Right? If we're saying white supremacy is everywhere, it's in these institutions. It's like hundreds of years old. Okay. But we need to, we are still called to do something.

  Ananya Banerjee: [00:12:11] Like, if we leave, the system wins.

  Annie Chau: [00:12:14] Yeah. And like now, now is not the time to leave.

  Hani Sadati: [00:12:19] That's powerful. Thank you. Yeah. I love this self-criticism that you are bringing to this conversation. And, you know, the thinking about the position and positionality and, you know, that's really great and powerful. Where are you now after these experiences that you just shared these stories, where are you now and what did you learn from those situations? Maybe I can start with Annie.

  Annie Chau: [00:12:50] Yeah. Um, as you shared in my bio, I had worked for a decade or so in gender justice, working for a women's organization, a feminist organization. Part of that work that I did at the Women's Center was working with a Mi'kmaq community, and I am not indigenous. And there were many times, while working in that community, where I was told that's not the right way. We don't want to be represented in this way. We don't want to have this, you know. And so a real lesson for me in that, a few lessons, but one of the big takeaways from that was, you know, just showing up and trying to build those relationships and taking the time to and just showing up and saying, where do you need me? And I remember the first few weeks in community, you know, it was Christmas time, December-time. And I was wrapping presents for a, like a toy drive in the community and certainly trying to explain that to the Women's Center. I was supposed to work on gender justice and talk about consent and all these sort of things. No, they just wanted me to wrap presents for their toy drive. Right. You know, I was humbled to know what I could do, and that was where I was needed at that time. And then after some time, we were able to do work, some work on gender justice. But it's not expecting that what you come in with right away is going to happen, is wanted, but to show up and really be present and follow and listen.

  Hani Sadati: [00:14:26] Thank you, Ananya. Yeah. How about you? What, uh, what did you what were your lessons learned? And where are you now?

  Ananya Banerjee: [00:14:37] Yeah. I mean, I just feel like I've been just constantly trying to figure things out. Like, what are the best practices, you know, when it comes to community engagement? And I realize I still don't know what that is, and it truly has to be guided by communities. You know, we are part of these institutions that feel like we are the only ones capable of doing the work. And I still remember, you know, during my PhD, I was asked to travel to India for a huge research project, and they had asked me because they needed someone who can speak Bengali, because that's the region where they were doing a series of qualitative interviews with parents who had children with cleft lip palate and needed surgery. But many of these families lived in rural areas and they didn't have access to surgical care. It was very delayed, actually. So when I went in, I still remember there was one interview I was about to start, and I asked the parent if they had any questions before I started, and he said, out of a billion people in India, could they not have found a qualitative researcher? Why you all the way from Canada? And I just remember that moment thinking, why me? Like why did they spend probably up to $10,000 flying me in, parachuting me in and doing these interviews? And the worst part was when I entered the region, I realized they spoke a different dialect than I did.

  Ananya Banerjee: [00:16:17] So, you know, it's these institutions, right? And I was a naive young PhD woman, you know, wanted to go in. And, you know, it's crazy where it's like I visit India so many times, my family, and this is the first time I entered as a researcher and I realized I do not belong here, as a researcher. They have plenty of qualitative researchers who can do this work on the ground, who have built trust with these communities, like, why would they want to talk to someone who has zero idea of growing up or living in a rural area, or any experience of being denied access to health care? So that was a huge awakening for me. And so I actually left any work related to community for many years that even includes locally, because I realized I really need to check in with myself and realize what the purpose of this work was. What was my purpose?

  Ananya Banerjee: [00:17:14] And so, you know, eventually, now I do a lot of community-engaged work, but I also realize the education system that I was part of at McMaster failed me. They didn't prepare me to do work with communities. Right. They prepared me to harm communities. And so for me now, as an educator that teaches a lot of courses on social justice and equity in public health, medicine, global health, and so forth. I make sure that students really question why they're entering any setting, particularly if they don't have the true lived experiences or the contexts of that place, and ensure they're not entering as a savior. Whether you're doing research, practice, work, health promotion, you know anything. And one thing I always tell them is like, learn about these communities, right? Like, don't just see them as a community that needs to be saved, that needs your help. Like, why do they need your help? Right. Um, but also don't enter these settings without knowing the historical, colonial, the current social political contexts, the languages, the traditions, the strengths that exist. Right? What does it mean to build relationships and trust and so forth. So right now, my biggest social responsibility is sharing my story of how I harmed communities, how I'm, you know, a savior, even to this day, in many ways. Um, and that they're also conscious of this? Yeah.

  Hani Sadati: [00:18:42] I appreciate that. I understand that these are hard conversations, but I appreciate your, you know, honest reflection on what you have done, what you've been, you know, in your relationship to institution that you are working in, we are all working in, Annie?

  Annie Chau: [00:18:59] And I think the struggle is still there for me. I need to own up to that label of being a savior too. I've stopped that work in the community and really called to, in my PhD studies now, is to understand who I am, my own background, my own positionality more. And that was because someone in the community prompted these questions of me, right? And so I feel like in many ways, they saved me in telling me and sharing with me, you know, to really build reconciliation, to really build on that, people need to learn about themselves and their own histories. And again, history is so important, right, to how we situate ourselves, what resources we have with us, all of this stuff that I learned from community. So that's why I embarked on my PhD studies, was upon the kind of encouragement of this community. And I want to say that this community over the six projects and like many years, I, um, have deep gratitude for how they have helped and supported my learning. And, um, I don't think I was able to give the same as they were to me, but I think maybe that's one way that I can own this savior label. Is that actually, yeah, I did get a lot, actually, and I learned a lot about myself, and it's taken me on a different path that is only better for my own understanding of the world and where I am in the world.

  Music

  Sherry Ostapovitch: [00:20:44] Stay tuned for the final installment of Saving or Engaging? Rethinking Community Facilitation, where Hani Sadati speaks to Ananya Banerjee and Annie Chau about how they steer clear of saviorism in their work today. There are some important takeaways for anyone who works with communities, whether you are new to the work or an experienced facilitator.

  Hani Sadati: [00:21:04] Among these reflections, how social responsibility plays a role and then how that can help us finding the path we are walking on in this journey? Anything related to that that would be helpful for this conversation, I would appreciate.

  Ananya Banerjee: [00:21:18] It's a lot of reflection, right? This work, you know, I'm at a stage in my career where, quote unquote, I'm known how to do really equitable community-based research, right? So I'm always called in to do work with communities, but what I want is communities to call on me, if they want me to do this research. And, you know, I'm not telling people to stop, especially those young students out there who want to fly to India or, you know, Kenya, Guatemala for the summer. I'm not stopping you to do that. I'm just asking you to take some time and to really reflect: what is the purpose? And if you are going to embark on an opportunity, talk to the community first and just ask them, how can I best support you this summer? Do you even need me this summer? Because we extract, extract, extract right when we are doing community engagement work. Like, let's not kid ourselves, right? And for me now, when often fellow academics come to me and like, we're doing this community engagement project, we'd love for you to come on as the expert. I sit with them for an hour and I'm like, what is the purpose? Why do you need me? Why isn't the community at these meetings right? Like, I want to make sure they want me. And I'm actually starting to have a lot of hard conversations with community. And, like, actually, it was one project that I was like, everyone's like, you need to apply for it. You're so close with the South Asian communities in Canada, like, let's do this. And you know, I was like, you know what? Okay, so I went to my community partners and I was like, look, you know, there's a whole new grant opportunity for diabetes prevention.

  Ananya Banerjee: [00:23:15] What are your thoughts? Do you want to collaborate together? And I remember the community leader looked at me and was like, we are going to get diabetes no matter what. If you have a project where we can really fight for anti-poverty in this neighborhood, if you can call and make sure the Quebec government starts addressing our health deserts, you know, our built environments, food insecurity, like you name it. He's like, if you're willing to do that, I will partner with you. But if you're coming in here to just do another diabetes prevention program, don't waste your time. I sat there and I was like, all right, we're not moving forward. And I went back and I told the team, I'm like, we're not doing this project because it's a waste of time, the community they will get zero benefit, you know. And I remember one colleague's like, oh my God, but you're perfect we can get like $500,000. I was like, nope, I don't need it. So those are some difficult moments, right? And again, you have to come to a stage of my career where I have that protection. Like, I'm not going to lose my job for not applying for that grant. But again, the concept of saviorism is also about extraction and just growing your recognition as the expert and just getting those publications, those grants out, building your CV and so forth. So just asking everyone out there just really question if you're the right person and if your institution is the right place to do this work in partnership with community.

  Hani Sadati: [00:24:46] Okay, thanks. Annie, any reflection on social responsibility in this context?

  Annie Chau: [00:24:52] Yeah. I think let's maybe reframe that as responsibility to relationships, to all of our relations. And I think if we center our relations more, we can understand what we bring, what we have as unique gifts to all of us, and also what others have to and to come to a point of agreement. Yes, of, you know, consent about projects. And that's how we can do this work better, I think. And yeah, your example, I think is a great one. And to say no when it doesn't work. Step back, step back. It's okay. And yeah, in your introduction, like when do you step in and step back? What does the community want us to do with, you know, stepping in and stepping back?

  Hani Sadati: [00:25:38] Great. Thank you. These are great thoughts and advices as my last question. We have this conversation. People might wonder what further advices you might have for those who want to engage meaningfully in community engagement activities.

  Annie Chau: [00:25:55] I think you have to own that savior shit like you have to like you can't separate that, honestly. Nonprofit, industrial complex, academia like facilitation all around the board that's funded in certain ways, right, is part of a savior complex. You know, this is why we are drawn to this topic, right? Because we're like, we need to just share our stories of these experiences because they are owning up to that shit.

  Ananya Banerjee: [00:26:25] Yeah, absolutely. And we need to stop romanticizing community engagement. Like it's so annoying. Like, even the way people talk about their work with communities, right? And, like, making them already further intellectually in a very vulnerable position. You know, I think what's really important is also is that there are many incredible grassroots organizations at the research practice policy level that are doing incredible work. The difference between them and us, they're doing this work quietly. They don't care for exposure, unlike us. Right. And we don't know if they're even existing. Right. And so often when we are called on as academics from these academic institutions that we have to go and do the work, we don't. We don't even need to build capacity. They can do it. What they need is resources. Like let's transfer our million-dollar funding from social science and humanities research to them and do the work. And I think we need to change the funding structures as well. Right? We can't apply anymore as like the lead, you know, principal investigators and so forth, right. We are always looking to partner with communities to get funding opportunities. Can we be at a stage now where communities can apply on their own? And then they ask if they want an academic to work with them, like we need to reverse the situation. And until we really start to change the funding mechanisms, structures, systems and seeing who are experts. We're just going to continue to just promote, as Teju Cole says, the white savior industrial complex.

  Hani Sadati: [00:28:12] Amazing. Thank you so much. Thank you. I would like to thank again, both of you for your time today. Again, my name is Hani Sadati And I would like to thank Dr. Ananya Tina Banerjee and Annie Chau for your time and sharing your thoughts and experiences with us today.

  Annie Chau: [00:28:32] Thank you.

  Ananya Banerjee: [00:28:33] Thank you.

  Sherry Ostapovitch: [00:28:34] You've just listened to Saving or Engaging? Rethinking Community Facilitation, part of the Pedagogies of Community Engagement Collective special podcast series on the WhyPAR Podcast. Make sure you catch the other two episodes, such as From “Oh shit!” to “Oh shift”, where you can find out how facilitators navigate when things don't quite go according to plan. Or learn about facilitation doulas, smugglers, and translators in the episode Facilitator Archetypes: Navigating Institutions as Community-Engaged Facilitators.

Details

This podcast explores the tension between “saving” and “engaging” when working with communities. Through personal stories and reflective conversations, Ananya Banerjee and Annie Chau discuss the risks of falling into saviourism and highlight the importance of shifting toward facilitation that empowers people and communities. The podcast poses critical questions: Are we acting as saviours or supporters? How can facilitators pass the baton to communities to lead their own change? Listeners will gain practical advice and reflections on redefining roles in community engagement to avoid reproducing the saviour industrial complex and to foster authentic, sustainable collaboration.

Music and production by Sherry Ostapovitch

References and Further Reading

Banerjee, A. T., Bandara, S., Senga, J., González-Domínguez, N., & Pai, M. (2023). Are we training our students to be white saviours in global health?. Lancet (London, England), 402(10401), 520–521. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(23)01629-X

Cole, T. The White-Saviour Industrial Complex. The Atlantic. March 21, 2012.

https://www. theatlantic.com/international/ archive/2012/03/the-whitesavior-industrialcomplex/254843/

Ostapovitch, S. & Sadati, S.M.H. (2025-11-30) Saving or Engaging? Rethinking Community Facilitation, a conversation with Ananya Banerjee and Annie Chau with Pedagogies of Community Engagement Collective (No 1.) [Audio podcast episode]. In The whyPAR Podcast. https://www.communityfacilitation.ca/resources/facilitator-archetypes

Episode 15: "Creating joyful resistance in communities": On Visual Participatory Methods with Casey Burkholder

Details

This episode features Dr. Casey Burkholder, with podcast host, Dr. Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández. In this conversation, Casey shares about her experience doing participatory visual research with queer and trans communities in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland. She also tells us about her work with teacher candidates in New Brunswick, where she thinks alongside classroom educators about sex education in schools. Casey shares valuable insights about the power of the visual, participatory archiving and dissemination practices, and research ethics when working with queer and trans participants.

Dr. Casey Burkholder is an Associate Professor at the University of New Brunswick, interested in critical teacher-education, and participatory visual research. In choosing a research path at the intersection of resistance&activism, gender, sexuality, DIY media-making, art production and participatory archiving, Casey engages in research for social change through participatory visual approaches to local issues with queer & trans youth, adults, elders, and pre-service teachers. She is the co-founder of the Fredericton Feminist Film Collective, and PI of Pride/Swell+.

Episode 14: “People who live in their neighbourhoods know it better”: On community-engaged and participatory urban planning research with Dr. Aditi Mehta

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  Citation:

  Gaztambide-Fernandez, Rubén. ““People who live in their neighbourhoods know it better”: On community-engaged and participatory urban planning research with Dr. Aditi Mehta.” Produced by Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández, Qichun Zhang, and Madeleine Ross at The Youth Research Lab. The WhyPAR Podcast. July 6, 2023. Podcast, MP3 audio, https://youthresearchlab.org/whypar

  Note on attribution:

  When citing the ideas and/or when quoting material from this podcast, please attribute the ideas to the speaker(s) and, whenever possible, note the timestamp or the line where the words quoted can be found. We recommend that you draw on the style conventions typically used for “secondary sources,” such as “quoted in” (Chicago Style) or “as cited in” (APA), and that you cite the source as listed above.

  Host: Welcome to The WhyPAR podcast, a project of the Youth Research Lab at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.

  Music

  Host: My name is Rubén Gaztambide-Fernandez, and I am the Director of the Youth Research Lab and a Professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. 

  In the WhyPAR podcast, youth participatory action research practitioners discuss the ethical dimensions of conducting YPAR.  In this podcast, we explore issues of co-leading YPAR projects, building relationships, power dynamics, and sharing our work together. The Youth Research Lab is located at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, in Toronto or Tkaronto, on the traditional territories of the Huron-Wendat, the Seneca, and most recently being cared for by the Mississaugas of the Credit River.  

  Aditi: “And the idea is that people who live in their neighbourhoods or see their neighbourhoods change know it better than any sort of developer or planner, or someone coming in from the outside…”

  Rubén: Welcome to the YPAR podcast. We are very excited today to host Dr. Aditi Mehta, who is a faculty member here at the University of Toronto. I have been following the work of Dr. Mehta now for a couple of years since she arrived at U of T, and I've been very excited about all the work that she has been doing with communities here in Toronto, and we're excited to be in conversation with her for this episode.

  Dr. Mehta has been an assistant professor here at the University of Toronto in Urban Studies, in the Urban Studies program since 2018. And she's a Community Engaged Learning Faculty Fellow at the University of Toronto Center for Community Partnerships. Dr. Mehta designs courses and research projects in collaboration with community partners for the purpose of social change and through pedagogy she reflects on the process of knowledge production. She was recently awarded the SSHRC Partnership Engagement Grant for her Participatory Action Research course in which undergraduate Urban Studies students at the University of Toronto and youth members of the nonprofit FOCUS Media Arts collaborated to conduct research about the Regent Park neighbourhood’s redevelopment. And Regent Park is a neighbourhood here in Toronto that has been undergoing a fairly major, probably one of the largest redevelopment projects in Toronto, if not, perhaps in Ontario and Canada. And during the pandemic Dr. Mehta, partnered with a low-income nursing home and students in the course paired with an elder resident to develop an oral history project about the lived experiences of the city. Dr. Mehta continued her PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning where she co-designed a Participatory Action Research Project with youth in Red Hook, Brooklyn, about the politics of local wifi network in their neighborhood. And she was awarded the Institute's highest public service award for co-designing and co-publishing about MIT's first course inside a prison project that I'm excited to hear about and to learn from Dr. Mehahta's experience. So welcome to the YPAR podcast. It is wonderful to have you with us.

  Aditi: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me, and inviting me to speak with you all.

  Rubén: Yeah, it's great to have you. I've been so looking forward to learning more about your background on the work that you've been doing–these really exciting work you've been doing with Regent Park here in Toronto. That's just really really wonderful. 

  Before we start to talk about your current projects, can you tell us and share with our listeners a bit about what brought you to this work? And particularly, where we would love to learn more about sort of what were the ethical commitments and sort of political commitments that you brought to this work, and the sort of drive your interest in this kind of work.

  Aditi: Absolutely. So the way that I got introduced to Participatory Action Research, and YPAR in particular is my previous work before I became an academic, working with cities and affordable housing developers. So in my previous life, I did a lot of work around community engagement and community organizing around redevelopment projects in various cities. Actually, my first job after undergrad was with an affordable housing developer called Telesis Corporation. They're based in Washington, DC. But the project that I was working on was in Inner City, Baltimore, just north of Penn Station. Actually, one of the neighbourhoods is where the Wire was filmed if anyone who's listening knows. So I was working in that neighbourhood, and my role or my first job was really to figure out how to incorporate resident feedback into the redevelopment plan. And it was through that work and meeting community organizers, youth groups, talking to residents about where they see their neighbourhood’s future going and what they would like being incorporated into various redevelopment and master plans that I kind of stumbled across and learned about Participatory Action Research, and it was one of the inspirations that got me back into academia. And then, as a doctoral student, master student, doctoral student, now as a faculty member, in that same vein, I continue to work with different community groups around issues of gentrification, neighbourhood change, affordable housing, and the idea is that people who live in their neighbourhoods or see their neighbourhoods change know it better than any sort of developer or planner, or someone coming in from the outside. And you asked about ethical commitments. So in terms of ethical commitments, I design projects in collaboration with different organizations. And at the beginning of that co-design process, I tried to figure out what it is that I can give back to the organization that can be useful to their work. So, you know, you know, as the different tenets of Participatory Action Research, there's always a co-design, co-analysis, co-production, co-distribution process. So I'm very committed to those, and the idea is that whatever comes out at the end is some sort of workable knowledge, and the partnerships I form are meant to be long-term. So very rarely do I just hop in somewhere and do a project and leave. You've brought up my work in Regent Park. I've been doing it for 4 years now, and we keep iterating. We keep reiterating, and we figure out, “Okay, what is it that the organization needs? Now, what is it that the community needs now?” And keep kind of changing what we're doing at that moment.

  Rubén: Thank you for sharing all of those commitments and all that experience. So one thing that we think about a lot in our work is about how these ethical commitments oftentimes run against the context and the institutions within which we're working. For us, specifically, we think a lot about how doing this work within schools is a bit of a paradox–it's a bit of a contradiction, right? Because you have this institution that's very hierarchical and then you're trying to do this non-hierarchical work inside of them. And I'm really curious what that looks like in the current context of housing and urban development. Because it's a very different context than the one that we usually think about in terms of schools, or even in terms of doing participatory research in the context of nonprofits or community-based contexts. Can you tell us a little bit about what it looks like? What does it look like to do this kind of work? And what are some of the tensions that arise when interacting with another very hierarchical institution which is urban planning and urban health. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

  Aditi: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's so many different tensions. So if we just step out of the university for a minute and I think about some of the more participatory planning community engagement redevelopment projects I've worked on. So many issues. So first of all, oftentimes, when outside developers come in, or even if city governments are running the project, there's usually some sort of funding to hire residents. The residents that then get those jobs tend to be the residents that are most active and already out-and-about in the community, and often community organizers. But then what happens is when they're hired by these organizations that are overseeing the project, their role gets a little bit complicated. Because are they an organizer for the community? Are they representing the organization? How can they do both? And it makes sense that they would be the people in the role that the organizations hire because they know the community best, they’re organizers, they know what's going on, they have an institutional history of being there. But then as an individual, that can be really complicated. And not even just as an individual, even when cities or developers are partnering with local community development corporations or other types of community-based organizations, you see these tensions with goals and trying to create some sort of plan for moving forward. And then, if we step into a university, where, then, someone like me is going and partnering with these organizers or community-based organizations and trying to design these projects, you bring in yet another stakeholder, another complication. And you're trying to co-design with many different organizations at the same time, because that one organization or that one person that is your partner is actually wearing many different hats, and has many different goals.

  Rubén: Yeah, these tensions around… I'm also curious, because I know that in your case, another group that is involved are the U of T students that come with you and who are, in essence, participating in this to gain experience, but also to gain credit, and who bring their own expectations. And I wonder what that is like and what sorts of tensions or issues arise for you when you're integrating also university students in the project.

  Aditi: Yeah, absolutely. I'll tell you a little bit about the philosophy of the course design, and then I can answer some of those questions. So we're talking about Regent Park–so Regent Park, historically, is Canada's first all-social housing neighbourhood, and by the 90s, the infrastructure, and the properties in that neighborhood were really not doing well, and the city was having a hard time managing them. So borrowing from models in the United States, the idea was, let's redevelop this neighborhood into a mixed-income neighborhood. So when I moved here in 2018, in my field, this neighbourhood, and this redevelopment project was very, very trendy. Everybody who works in urban health and redevelopment was talking about Regent Park, coming up with indicators to measure effectiveness of the project. So many different engagement projects to get residents involved. And a lot of times when I was reading about Regent Park, or talking to other scholars about it, it was compared to the American context. So then I decided, because it's my field, and I wanted to get up to speed on Canada, I decided to go visit and learn about it more by walking around and just observing for myself. And one of the things I noticed right away that no one spoke about, none of the academic articles talked about, is how heavily immigrant the neighbourhood was, and how it was a predominantly Muslim neighbourhood. And I thought, this is really interesting, it's being compared to the American context. But residents in public housing neighbourhoods in America are a very, very different demographic. And before I moved to Canada I was already working with youth media organizations. So I started doing some research to see if any such organization existed in Regent Park, and I learned about FOCUS Media Arts and Adonis’s organization. And I thought, you know, this would be a really great organization to collaborate with because they are a hyper-local news media organization. They're the ones generating local knowledge about the neighbourhood. I wanted to learn more about the neighbourhood from the resident perspective, and I just felt that all of the coursework or academic readings that students are exposed to about Regent Park kind of missed this immigrant, Muslim, and youth perspective about the redevelopment. So I contacted Adonis and asked him, “Should we do some sort of collaboration, or course together? U of T students would learn about the redevelopment from the perspective of youth and immigrants and really get a different reality than what they're reading about in academic articles and in most Urban Studies classes, especially at U of T, learn about Regent Park. And any of your young constituents or members would then have access to a university course, and also be able to develop their skills and repertoire. What do you think?” And Adonis was on board and thought it was a great idea, and they happened to have a program already called the Diva Girls. And the Diva Girls was a program specifically for young Muslim women that were growing up in the area between the ages of 12 and 17. And this demographic is especially interesting because these young women have been living in a rapidly changing neighbourhood their whole lives. So every single year their neighborhood looks different. Something's going on. They've completely lived through redevelopment. And that's their existence. So the philosophy behind the course was really to bring a new, fresh, hidden perspective, in truth, about the redevelopment project, because very little academic scholarship or media representation was talking about the immigrant, Muslim or youth perspective behind redevelopment.

  Rubén: Another really interesting sort of dimension of your work that comes up as you're describing it is the multi-directionality of how knowledge moves. Right? So not only are you sort of, in a sense, interrupting how knowledge moves in the academy, right? In terms of whose knowledge counts for thinking about urban development, by paying attention to the knowledge that the young–in this case, it’s the young women–are creating about their own experience, and how that knowledge moves, right? And then how U of T students or university students are then acquiring that knowledge, and presumably how they're mobilizing that knowledge. So this really interesting and multi-directionality of how knowledge moves when we're doing participatory research that I think is really fascinating and so interesting. And I'm curious if you can tell us maybe at least just a little bit about previous projects. I'm really curious about the project that you did, working with prisons and perhaps maybe you can contrast a bit how these projects were different from each other, and how particularly this phenomenon of how knowledge moves. What's different? 

  Aditi: So many of the projects that you spoke about from my bio are kind of along a spectrum of participatory education to participatory research. So for example, the prison project, that was more of an educational intervention. So I wouldn't say that we conducted participatory research. The professor that I co-taught the class with and I published an article about the pedagogy of the class. But we weren't necessarily conducting research with participants of the class. It was a little bit different than some of the other projects. But the process of that class, and the way we learned and the way we produce knowledge is very, very similar to all of these various initiatives where you're bringing so many different types of people with their own situated knowledges, and lived experiences together to share and collaborate and come to new understandings about our urban world. 

  Rubén: Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. That is such a great insight. And I really like the distinction that you make, which I think oftentimes gets missed, particularly by newcomers to participatory research, between these tensions on the difference between participatory education versus participatory research. And I'm so glad that you brought that up. And this sort of leads us to another area of interest for us, which is you talk about the way in which the knowledge created is shared amongst the participants, and how that influences and shapes their understanding. One thing that often times comes up, and I know that you've struggled with this as well: Is it the question of, then, how does that knowledge get shared with another audience, right? The audience of academics or the audience of conference attendees who don't necessarily understand the context. And then what do you do right? With the layers of interpretation, and the risk of appropriation, and the misinterpretation? And I'd like to know a little bit about, sort of, how do you make some of those decisions about when and how to share the knowledge that arises from these projects with an outside audience?

  Aditi: Yeah, absolutely. So the first quick answer is that the best way to share knowledge and distribute is to have many different types of products for the various audiences and stakeholders involved. And for me. That's always been a collaborative process with my partners. So personally, given my career and where I am, I I hope to and try to publish about these experiences. Obviously, that's not very important to my partners, and it feels extractive for me to just be doing that. So then we think about: “Okay, what was the goal of this particular project? What's the message we're trying to get out? And who are we trying to get it to?” and design specific interventions. With the Regent Park course and collaboration, often it's an exhibition. And that way we can invite who we want to be there. So the very first iteration of the course, we actually invited the developer, and the president of Daniel's Corporation came to the exhibition, and he saw some of these critical pieces. One team, they did research about the design of the redevelopment, and they noted that the market rate housing and the subsidized housing had different colored doors. And they talked about: “Why do we have different colour doors? Why are we differentiating? Who lives where?” Another team created a Youtube mockumentary. And they discussed how the aquatic center, which was built by the developer as a community benefit, didn't really serve the needs of the people there, or at first it didn't serve the needs, the very Muslim neighbourhood. And Muslim women were like, “Well, I'm not going to go swimming in this public pool by myself.” And so they had to rearrange programming, or the fact that a lot of outsiders were coming into the neighbourhood to use it. And there was no real thought put in at first about how that aquatic center would function to serve needs. And so the developer came, and he saw all of this, and students were really excited about that. And that was the whole idea, to sort of get these messages out to people in power. And when the course ended, many of my students said, “Well, now what? What? So we did that? So what happens now? Is he gonna change anything?” He didn't say anything about it. He didn't answer so… And so then we have to sort of discuss like, “Well changes are incremental. And how do we take the work that you all did, and move it from year to year to year, and sort of keep pushing the message and getting it into the right hands?” And, in the class, I try to build in case studies about sort of city change, and how it happens, and how it takes a long time. So people don't feel defeated after a semester that they did all of this critical work and put it out through the exhibition or the website. But so that's one thing that we always do. We have this exhibition. We have a website where all of the work lives. Most of the students in the classes over the years are pretty active on social media, so they share their work, and they connect with each other in those realms, and it gets out that way. And then, of course, this particular collaboration, because it's with a community media organization, they already have the various outlets to put the projects out there, and so they do a lot of that work as well. But, this particular course again, because the collaboration is with the media organization, a lot of the products are about stories and messages and critical perspectives. It's not like an applied, deliverable, a redevelopment plan, or a policy proposal, or something that you can tangibly see implemented. And I have worked on projects like those, and I feel like sometimes, at the end, those feel a little bit more clear in terms of your impact, whereas this is more about alternative narratives and kind of understanding how alternative narratives can push change, and how change happens slowly, especially in cities and on redevelopment projects incrementally over time. 

  But another PAR project I worked on, which you mentioned in the bio, was with youth in Red Hook, Brooklyn. And that one was a much more applied, tangible outcome. So the story about Red Hook, Brooklyn is that another youth organization, they were building a wifi mesh network so young people in the neighbourhood could have an internet-based radio station to share some of their music creations. A lot of young people in Red Hook produce rap and hip hop, so that was the purpose of the network. And they started building this network shortly before Superstorm Sandy hit the neighbourhood, and then, when Superstorm Sandy hit the neighbourhood, it just so happened that this network was the only functioning communication infrastructure in the neighbourhood. And so, for months, people who live there would walk to the routers where the network had been installed to access wifi. And so the network got a lot of attention from the New York City government, from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, from funders. And all of a sudden the nonprofit accumulated so much money from all of these, you know, different players to expand and build this network, which now has been called a “resilient technology”. So what they did, is they created a formalized youth program called the Red Hook Digital Stewards in which young people living in Red Hook, many who were part of the initial creation of the network, would actually build and install this network and manage it and figure out what functions it could serve in the neighbourhood. So I learned about the network through a New York Times article, and my dissertation was about disaster, communication, and technologies. And I contacted the nonprofit, and I went to learn about their work, and I worked there for a summer, and the Participatory Action Research project that I design in collaboration with the nonprofit and the youth, was to really understand how the network was being used by residents throughout the neighbourhood, and how it could be improved. And so this is very tangible, very clear… it served the organization's goals to make this network stronger, and I should say that I was doing this work in 2016-17. The storm hit in 2012. So this is four or five years later. So the network had existed for a while, and many iterations of digital stewards, which was like a 9-month to one year program, had gone through. So for that PAR project, me, the nonprofit staff, as well as various digital stewards, sat down and actually created a survey to distribute throughout the neighbourhood to understand how the network functioned. And then we had a plan. All of us went out at different times, different events, different places in the neighbourhood, administered the survey. And then once we collected all the data, we co-analyzed it together to make sense of the information. And one of the most interesting findings from that PAR survey, that YPAR survey, was that the funders who fund the network, for them, the main goal of this network is, they saw it as a workforce development skill and tool. The youth that were participating in the program to build it should then be able to get jobs at local tech companies or have a credential that sort of helps them get a job. And when we were serving youth that use the network, and the youth themselves that were working with me and that helped to build it and maintain it. The main thing that they use the network for, it wasn't for education or work, it was for recreation. So they were using the network to go on Youtube, or to go on Facebook. But what funders didn't realize is that that, in itself, was a survival mechanism. So they were going on Facebook to upload videos of where the police were hanging out that day so people would avoid that corner, or they were going on Youtube to upload videos they created about their lived experience in Red Hook. And so it was really interesting finding, so how do you explain to the people that are allowing this project to thrive, that their goals for the project are a little bit misunderstood, and that actually, recreation is a very important part of youth life and survival in neighbourhoods like that. So we created a report based on the findings that the nonprofit could then use to continue fundraising and get different types of funders to fund the network. So that PAR project I feel like, has a much more tangible end and goal, whereas the PAR project in Regent Park, it's very, very long-lived, and, like I said, it's more about stories and putting different stories out there year after year, and addressing specific needs in the moment, year after year.

  Rubén: Wow! Thank you for sharing that. I love to hear these stories of the unexpected ways in which some of these projects end up evolving, and the kind of knowledge they produce, and what they shed light on. It's always to me, also one of the more powerful experiences of doing the work in schools. Also I love this story you shared, which sounds so familiar to me, of ending a project, and then the participants say: “Okay. So now what? What are we going to do now? We're going to do about this?” You know. That was very… I kind of resonated with some of that experience. And then and then using those moments as this sort of pivots to kind of rethink what can happen, right? And I wonder, just as kind of an extension of that, if you can also talk a little bit about your decision-making process when sharing the knowledge with academic audiences when writing articles or going to conferences. Because I know that's something that is always a bit of a tension. And maybe if you can share a little bit of that before we talk about your future projects. 

  Aditi: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I always am very open with who I am working with about my goals. And I always ask for permission, and I always share what I'm writing or presenting. And I even have talked to individuals that I work within the community about being co-authors with me. Obviously they wouldn't be writing the academic article, but it was their knowledge, their connections, their ideas that helped produce outcomes of the project. So really it's just being open and creating these understandings. I haven't gone to the point of having, like an official memorandum of understanding, or something like that. To me, that feels almost against the relationship that you worked so hard to build. It’s very transactional. So, to me, it's like building that deep relationship, and then being very open and honest about, “Hey, this is what I'm doing, there's this conference. I'm gonna talk about this. Can I share the presentation with you? Are you comfortable with this? If I write this article, do you want to co-author with me? Do you care if I share this?” And then again, with YPAR projects, I feel like there's always two partners. there's the youth that I'm working with, and then there's sort of the nonprofit staff. And it's a different process with both sides. In my experience, I feel like… again, I'm very open with the youth. I work with them as well and try to involve them in the same way. But, it's not a priority or of interest to them, which makes perfect sense. But I'm very open about it. And, in fact, when I was working in Red Hook, I did some fundraising at MIT, and I actually was able to bring three of the Red Hook youth to MIT to present our study. So I try really hard to make sure that any limelight or… what am I trying to say… and limelight or any sort of credit of the work is given to the partner. So three of the Red Hook youth, who had never left New York before, they came to Boston, came to MIT, they spoke in two classes and actually had their own event around the project. And that, I designed in collaboration and I ask them, “Would you be interested in doing this? Let's work on it together. Do you want to come?” And these three did, so we did that. But, yeah, I avoid any sort of very transactional documents or agreements, because I rely more on the relationships that I work to build. And then, of course, I share everything that I'm putting out there to make sure people are comfortable with the narrative or the message.

  Rubén: Yeah, I mean, I think oftentimes the tension comes out of the fact that universities have a very transactional view of research. And a very unidirectional and almost flat understanding, even in terms of ethics protocols and even in terms of consent, right? They have this very transactional, ”Here's what I'm doing. Please sign this form…” And that can oftentimes interrupt the very relationships, just like you said, because they're not transactional relationships. They're not flattened, these kinds of bidirectional relationships. They're multi-layered and complex. And so I think that you're right. And even funders sometimes, too. They have these requirements around MOUs and contracts that just really get in the way of their relationships in interesting ways. 

  Can you share a little bit with us about your future projects? What are you imagining? Where is the project in Regent Park going? Do you have new projects unfolding? We're just curious to know where your work is going?

  Aditi: Absolutely. So the work in Regent Park is a long-standing collaboration I hope for many, many years to come. And the idea is that every… I teach the course once a year. So once a year, one semester. And then, whatever happens in that course is part of sort of the knowledge bank for the next year, and everybody keeps building off of each other's work. So a couple of things happened during the pandemic. We missed one year of the course because of the pandemic. And then the Diva Girls program actually got cancelled because of the pandemic. So this year I'm teaching the course, but we tried it a little bit differently, and we're doing it with adult residents rather than youth, just to see how it goes. And it definitely has a completely different texture, feel, learning focus… And I really enjoyed it. But I really miss working with youth. And I think that the course has some room for graduate students. So now the next iteration of the course, and this may be overly ambitious, I'm opening it to graduate students. It'll be upper-year undergrads and graduate students. And I want it to be a mix of adults and youth. So I'm bringing even more different types of people together to do this learning. The first two years before the pandemic, when I taught the course with just youth, many of the youth repeated. So having that repetition was really helpful, and it also allowed the young people to take ownership of the space in the class. I really liked that, and I'm hoping that will happen again with some of the adults in the class around Regent Park. And so I also like to bring students that took the course before to be course assistants, or TAs, or research assistants. Having their repetition over the years, really creates like this long-standing project that keeps building on itself. In terms of the actual research and ideas that are coming from the collaboration. So, the first iteration of the course, as I told you when I went to Regent Park, I was really struck by the Muslim immigrant population, so I wanted the class to focus on that, but the class did not want to focus on that. The class really wanted to focus on the rapid change, the redevelopment of the built environment. So the first iteration of the course really focused on memorialization of important places in the neighbourhood that were being constantly destroyed and taken for granted, because developers weren't necessarily talking to youth enough. Then the second iteration of the course focused more on the Muslim youth experience. So what does it mean to be Muslim in Regent Park? And what does it mean to be Muslim in Toronto? And how should faith be incorporated into planning processes? Because planning tends to be a very secular field. But your religion and your faith definitely affects the way you navigate the built environment. And then this third iteration of the course is focusing more on the history of the neighbourhood. And that idea came from the fact that we just went through a pandemic. And this is an area that has had a long history of disease, as many public housing, lower income areas and cities do. But again, interestingly enough, people, while we focus on the history of the neighbourhood, people didn't quite take to the history of disease and public health as much as they took to the history of immigration and the cultural changes throughout the neighbourhood. So all of that to say, there's a lot to write and put out there that's come from these various iterations of the class. And now the next iteration, next year I'll have to talk more to Adonis about what he sees makes sense. I think that really focusing again on the multiculturalism in Regent Park, and the layers of immigration has stayed strong throughout the four years. And so, to me, that makes sense to keep going with that. But every year we change it a bit, based on what's going on. Currently, in current events: What makes sense for the organization? Who the participants are?

  Rubén: Yeah. Great. It's so interesting to hear Adonis's name, because he's such a figure, not just in Regent Park, but even here in University of Toronto on Media and Education. But the last question: you talked about integrating graduate students and the new iterations. And a large portion of our audience for the podcast are graduate students, students who are thinking about doing participatory research and interested in that, and the podcast oftentimes gets taken up by courses to sort of where people are learning. And I'm wondering if, just to sort of close, what kind of advice would you give to someone, whether it be a graduate student, or a faculty member, or even a community member who's thinking about doing participatory research or participatory education. What would be sort of some initial advice that you would give, and words of wisdom from your experience.

  Aditi: Yeah, that's a really great question. I think, being in a university or being a graduate student, you're very socialized to always have a plan. So we have syllabi. We have curriculum. We have a research proposal. But if you're going to embark on Participatory Action Research, or Participatory Education, you have to not be too attached to your plan. And you have to… it's always good to have a plan. So you have a roadmap. But be open to going off the roadmap at any point. And be open to improvising and improvisation at any point. Because I think that's really what makes these projects successful. And then also constantly be questioning your own assumptions about how the world works and about social realities. I think for me, these collaborations always teach me something new, or make me realize that I wasn't seeing something in its full picture. And I think it's good, after you have a really intense collaborative meeting, or if you've been working on the project for a few weeks, to kind of step back and think about: How has my thinking changed from this? So to do a reflection on your own. But even, in a lot of these projects, people build in reflection as a group, but I think, even before you get to the group to do that process, think about it for yourself, and think about how it's changed you, and how you're thinking. And also be prepared to have things not work out. Participatory projects are really difficult. Things fall through the crack all the time. People who are involved have so many different priorities and life circumstances. So you might have to try over and over again until something feels like, “Oh, yeah, this really, really gelled and made sense.”

  Rubén: Which is often why I try to discourage doctoral students from embarking. Because, like you said, that socialization is, and the expectations are that you're going to have a plan that's going to unfold, and you're going to finish. And you know, like you said, this kind of work is so unpredictable, and you have to be so flexible that sometimes there's that clashing of expectations, of programmatic expectations, and their reality of doing the work. So thank you. Thank you for doing that. And thank you so much for sharing all of this experience and all of these insights. I think our listeners are gonna really enjoy and learn a lot from, just as I have, from listening to that, and sharing all of that. Thank you for joining us in the podcast and participating in this, and I'm really looking forward to continuing to learn from you and learn from your projects.

  Host: Thank you for joining us for our conversation with Dr. Aditi Mehta from the University of Toronto. I hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as I enjoyed having it with her and getting to know her work. I was fascinated by the similarities and differences in how working with young people in different contexts shapes their work, whether it is in the context of housing, in the context of schools, in the context of other nonprofit sectors. I thought Dr. Mehta had some really wonderful ways of helping us think about the power dynamics and how these power dynamics shift as our work changes context, different settings, different institutional constraints. I look forward to listening more and following the work of Dr. Mehta, and I hope that you have learned something from our conversation. And we look forward to hearing from you, and getting your feedback and your comments. And please don’t hesitate to reach out to us if you would like to participate in the WhyPAR podcast, or if you have ideas about guests or projects that you would like to see featured in our podcast. Thanks again for joining us!

Details

This episode features Dr. Aditi Mehta, Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at the University of Toronto, and podcast host Dr. Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández, Professor and Director of the Youth Research Lab here at OISE. Drawing on her diverse experiences conducting PAR neighbourhoods in the USA and Canada, Dr. Mehta reflects on the politics of knowledge production and dissemination within contexts of urban community development and public health. Together, they discuss the dynamics of community collaboration and partnerships and the important distinction between participatory research and education.

Dr. Aditi Mehta is an Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at the University of Toronto and was a community-engaged learning faculty fellow at the Centre for Community Partnerships. She completed her PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, and was awarded the department’s most outstanding dissertation prize for her investigation of the politics of community media in post-disaster cities. Her research and pedagogy consider environmental justice, community development, technology, and how knowledge infrastructures influence policy. She was recently awarded the Social Science and Humanities Research Council Partnership Engagement Grant for her participatory action research course in which UofT students and youth living in Toronto's Regent Park neighbourhood collaborated to research local experiences of redevelopment and the COVID-19 pandemic.

This episode was hosted and directed by Ruben Gaztambide-Fernandez, produced by Qichun Zhang, and supported by Youth Research Lab assistant Madeleine Ross.

REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING

UofT and Regent Park PAR course:

Course site: FOCUS Media and Arts and UofT Participatory Action Research
U of T News: U of T and Regent Park teens team up to bust stereotypes, tell stories of a changing neighbourhood
Muslims in Canada Archives (MiCA) Community Collaborations Learning Series: Youth, Faith, & Gentrification: Multimedia Exploration into Regent Park

YPAR in Red Hook, Brooklyn:

https://aditimehta.info/portfoliocpt/participatory-action-research-with-the-red-hook-initiative/

Prison Education course:

MIT News: https://news.mit.edu/2016/prison-ideal-classroom-new-urban-studies-course-0531

Publication on Inside-Out Prison education pedagogy: https://journals-sagepub-com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/doi/10.1177/0739456X17734048

Instructor Insights on course: Urban Sociology in Theory and Practice

Episode 13: “There’s no one way to do this”: On youth-adult partnerships and embracing complexity, a conversation with Sharif Mahdy, Stoney McCart, Kwaku Agyemang, and Maddy Ross

Details

This episode features Sharif Mahdy, Stoney McCart, Kwaku Agyemang from the Students Commission of Canada (SCC) and podcast host Maddy Ross. In this conversation, they reflect on how the SCC’s origins at a national youth conference in 1991 helped to shape four core values, referred to as the Four Pillars, as a process for youth engagement. Drawing on these Four Pillars - Respect, Listen, Understand and Communicate™️ - as a research framework, they discuss the dynamics of producing knowledge through youth-adult partnerships and why addressing adult positionalities is a critical dimension of conducting YPAR.

 The Students Commission of Canada is a national charitable intergenerational organization that purposely works with others to ensure that young people’s voices are heard and valued so that their ideas for improving themselves, their peers and their communities can be put into action. In 2000, the SCC was named the lead organization for the Centre of Excellence for Youth Engagement (CEYE): a network of youth, youth-serving organizations, academics and policy-makers focused on identifying and sharing best practices on meaningful youth engagement and the impact of youth engagement initiatives.

Sharif Mahdy is the Executive Director of the Students Commission of Canada. He has worked in the youth sector for over two decades, and has been with the SCC since 2010. Sharif has an Honours Bachelor of Health Sciences from the University of Western Ontario and a Master of Arts in Leadership from Royal Roads University. Sharif volunteers for several non-profit Boards and currently serves as the Chair of the National Alliance for Children and Youth (NACY): a national charitable organization that brings organizations together in a collaborative network dedicated to enhancing the well-being of children and youth in Canada. Sharif also serves as volunteer Board member for Child Development Institute (CDI): a children’s mental health agency in Toronto, the Catalysts’ Circle and Mentor Canada.

Stoney McCart is a co-founder of the Students Commission of Canada and Director, Program Development. As publisher of Tiny Giant magazine, the precursor to the SCC, she converted an adult-written youth magazine into a youth-directed weekly publication with an editorial board of 100 students from across Canada, reaching every high school in the country. As the Executive Director of the SCC from 1992 to 2017, Stoney supported youth across Canada to turn their ideas into action. In 2000, Stoney helped establish the Centre of Excellence for Youth Engagement to develop an evidence base for youth-driven work in Canada.

Kwaku Agyemang is the Manager of Client Relationships and External Communications at the Students Commission of Canada, where he facilitates youth engagement in policy and decision-making through national programming. He has a passion for creative strategy, amplifying youth voice, and mentoring his peers. Kwaku has a degree in Media Production from Toronto Metropolitan University. You can find him @KwakuOnAir

References and further reading

Students Commission of Canada: https://www.studentscommission.ca/en
SCC Archives: https://www.studentscommission.ca/en/resources/archives
Youth Who Thrive: https://www.youthwhothrive.ca/

Episode 12:“Not everything can be fully participatory, right?”: On "True" PAR, A Conversation between Aurora Santiago-Ortiz and Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández

Details

This episode features conversation between Dr. Aurora Santiago-Ortiz, Assistant Professor of Gender and Women studies the University of Wisconsin, Madison, with podcast host Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández, a Professor here at OISE, the Director of the Youth Research Lab, and one of the Co-Producers of The WhyPAR podcast. In this episode, Aurora and Rubén discuss the principles that constitute “pure” PAR, and how principles of PAR can be adapted across diverse contexts. They discuss themes including challenges of conducting PAR during the COVID-19 pandemic, facilitating equitable participation in PAR, and the role of solidarity in community spaces. Aurora discusses her work both with the community organization Colectivo Casco Urbano de Cayey and with Latinx migrants in Lexington, Kentucky.

Aurora Santiago Ortiz, PhD, is 2020 Ford Dissertation Fellow and current Lyman T. Johnson Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Kentucky. She obtained her PhD from the Social Justice Education program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her work examines community based, participatory action research and critical methodologies; anticolonial, queer, feminist, and antiracist social movements; and decolonial feminisms.

This episode was hosted and directed by Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández, produced by Naima Raza and Ruben Gaztambide-Fernandez, and supported by Youth Research Lab assistants Oliver Thompson and Madeleine Ross.

References and further reading

Aurora’s website - https://www.aurorasantiago-ortiz.com/

Aurora’s Twitter - https://twitter.com/santiaaurora?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor

Aurora’s dissertation - Collaboration, Collective Agency, and Solidarity Through Participatory Action Research in Puerto Rico -  https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/2218/

Research in Progress: “La solidaridad no perece”: Community organizing, political agency, and mutual aid in Puerto Rico. Peer-reviewed journal article for Curriculum Inquiry.

Colectivo Casco Urbano de Cayey Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/ccucayey/

Colectivo Casco Urbano de Cayey webite

https://ccucayey.wixsite.com/website?fbclid=IwAR0D4rxArwyF3iGkNbea9ScHZDpANRBeTxZJdZ3vLfC4Lu0Zqr9f0shj13U

Colectivo Casco Urbano de Cayey instagram-  https://www.instagram.com/ccucayey2020/?hl=en

La Colectiva Feminista en Construcción https://www.facebook.com/Colectiva.Feminista.PR/

Episode 11: “What happens when you run onto the edges of progressivism?”: On Conducting YPAR in Elite Schools, A Conversation Between Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández and Leila Angod

Details

This episode features conversation between Dr. Leila Angod, Assistant Professor in the Childhood and Youth Studies Program at Carleton University, and a former postdoctoral fellow at the Youth Research Lab with podcast host Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández, a Professor here at OISE, the Director of the Youth Research Lab, and one of the Co-Producers of The Why PAR podcast. In this episode, Leila and Rubén discuss the challenges of doing YPAR within the context of elite institutions. They discuss themes including using YPAR to subvert schooling, the ethics of negotiating youth knowledge dissemination, elite institutions as mechanisms of erasure and forgetting, and YPAR’s impact as subjective rather than institutional change. 

Dr. Leila Angod (she/her) is Assistant Professor in the Childhood and Youth Studies Program at Carleton University’s Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies. Her research examines how schools invite young people to enact racial and colonial orders, and how youth engage, resist, and refuse these invitations. Leila examines the methodological, political, and ethical possibilities and constraints of using yPAR to create feminist, anti-racist communities for students of colour. She is the co-founder of the Youth Research Lab’s youth-led journal, in:cite. Her current yPAR project explores the making of Afro-Asian girls’ collectives as humanizing spaces that counter the violence of schooling and Canadian white supremacy. Leila is writing a young adult novel that mobilizes speculative fiction to explore themes of colonialism, race, and feminist community-making in the context of Canadian elite schools.

This episode was hosted and directed by Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández, produced by Naima Raza and Ruben Gaztambide-Fernandez, and supported by Youth Research Lab assistants Oliver Thompson and Madeleine Ross.

References and further reading

Gaztambide-Fernández, Rubén. 2014. “Elite entanglements and the demand for a radically un/ethical position: the case of Wienie Night.”, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 28(9): 1229-1147.

in:cite journal: https://incitejournal.org/index.php/incite 

Vijenthira, Shangi, Rifaa Ali, and Erin Manogaran. 2018. “Unaffirmative Actions: Lessons on Refusal, Racism, and Youth Research.” in:cite journal 1. https://incitejournal.org/index.php/incite/article/view/28880

Episode 10: On Knowledge from Identity and Place - A Conversation between Maddy Ross and Artist-Researchers Pree Rehal, Bert Whitecrow, Ayrah Taerb, Ammarah Syed, and Jahmal Nugent

Details

This episode features five artist-researchers from the Making With Place Research Project (MWP), a collaborative initiative in T’karonto between York University graduate students Charlotte Lombardo and Phyllis Novak and SKETCH, an award-winning community arts program. Pree Rehal, Bert Whitecrow, Ayrah Taerb, Ammarah Syed, and Jahmal Nugent are all established young artists who came together during the COVID-19 pandemic to explore and create placemaking art installations and activations. MWP recently launched an online journal-zine at makingwithplace.ca, and four exciting immersive and interactive public art projects taking place across T’karonto throughout fall 2021 and spring 2022. In this conversation, the artist-researchers discuss the epistemologies of identity and place that guide their creative practice, and their perspectives on whether art is or can be research. They also reflect on their initial skepticism of the MWP research and how they subvert colonial ways of knowing and knowledge production as artists, place-makers, and culture creators. 

 Priya “Pree” Rehal Pree is an artist educator currently based in Tkaronto, originally from Tiohtià:ke. They’re the children of immigrant settlers from Punjab. Pree’s work centres their identity as a queer, non-binary, trans, disabled, fat, and racialized individual. They have an interdisciplinary arts practice under the name: Sticky Mangos and co-founded the Non-Binary Colour Collective. You can follow their arts practice on Instagram: @StickyMangos or on Twitter (@preezilla).

 Roberta “Bert" Whitecrow Bert is a 2 Spirited, Anishinaabe multidisciplinary artist from Seine River First Nation. Their work explores themes of healing, preserving, and practicing ancestral knowledge. As a conceptual artist, Bert works with a variety of media, often combining traditional and unconventional materials. They are a founding member of the Weave and Mend collective, which is a mixed Indigenous collective that focuses on building relationships with Indigenous communities through art making workshops, facilitated conversation and permaculture. Bert is currently attending OCAD University in the Indigenous Visual Cultures program.

Ayrah Taerb Is The Founder Of Kundalini Kurrency Khansultancy; A Collective Of Creative Professionals & Administrators Who Seek To Spread The Values Of Self Determination & Co Operative Economics Among The Global Black Community. As An Executive Producer, Creative Consultant, and Embodiment Instructor; He Is Equipped With The Skills & Expertise Required To Develop Artists, Mentor Professionals, and Responsibly Condition Children & Youth To Exist Within The Context Of A Transcendental Society.

 Ammarah Syed is an interdisciplinary artist interested in documenting how modern day discourses such as capitalism, colonialism, and various power dynamics have developed to inform mental health, identity and sexuality. Ammarican explores how words among other factors, influence emotion, culture and politics. AmmariCan’t Even, Ammarah’s performance alter-ego, likes to deconstruct and explore the little boxes our society and our minds like to put us in. Both of their processes involve sitting on their ass for 8 weeks (contemplating of course) & then creating something all in one go. They aspire to use the arts as a means to transform oppression into change. www.ammarican.com (@ammarican)

 Jahmal Nugent (aka NINJAHMAL) Visual media artist Jahmal Nugent, born, raised and based in Toronto, primarily focuses on digital photography and videography to create, but sometimes experiments with physical mediums. Jahmal’s work explores seeing the ordinary as extraordinary, and reminding us of how beautiful and amazing elements we take for granted can be.

This episode was hosted and directed by Madeleine Ross, produced by Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández and Sarah Switzer, and supported by Youth Research Lab Assistants Naima Raza and Oliver Thompson.

Art and Further Reading

We encourage listeners to visit the Making With Place Digital Journal-Zine at https://www.makingwithplace.ca

Art by the Artist-Researchers: 

Acknowledge Place Honour Spirit, Bert Whitecrow

• Video Projection with Poetic Narrative: https://www.makingwithplace.ca/2021/06/18/acknowledge-place-honour-spirit/

 Grounding and Activating, Ammarah Syed (@ammarican)

• Photography and Poetry Mural Installation: https://www.makingwithplace.ca/2021/06/15/grounding-and-activating/

CRIP COLLAB, Pree Rehal (@stickymangos) 

• Curated zine featuring works of racialized disabled 2SLGBTQ artists: https://www.makingwithplace.ca/2021/06/09/crip-collab/

• Making With Place blog, https://prehal.com/blogs/blog/making-with-place

 Indica Omega, Ayrah Taerb

• Performance Piece, ‘Untitled’: https://www.makingwithplace.ca/2021/06/08/untitled/

• MWP Public Art Project Indica Omega: https://www.sketch.ca/publicart/indica/

 Elements, Chasing Fire, Animal Crossings, Jahmal Nugent (@ninjahmal)

• Three visual pieces designed to take you on a journey within our own city: https://www.makingwithplace.ca/2021/06/10/elements-catching-fire-and-animal-crossings/

Making With Place Podcast:

On November 16, the MWP project will also be launching their own podcast series! Check out the teaser here:

Episode 9: On Community-Engaged Programming with Lil Sis (Alma Ahmed, Suzanna Maharaj, Rayan Saied, Belul Kidane, and Kamilah Apong) and Naima Raza

Details

This episode features conversation between the Lil Sis team - Alma Ahmed, Suzanna Maharaj, Rayan Saied, Belul Kidane, and Kamilah Apong - and podcast host Naima Raza. 

In this episode, Lil Sis and Naima discuss community-engaged youth research and programming. They discuss the need for arts-based programming for queer and racialized youth in Regent Park; the importance of community-based research; and how Lil Sis branding challenges heternormativity in the Toronto Arts scene.

Alma Ahmed: From a spectator at the first open mic to participating in its current grant and research project, Alma has been involved with the hummingbird open mic and LIL SIS since 2015. she has been part of the hummingbird street team and has been a co-contributor of its current research project. aside from admiring how far the project has come, she is currently a nursing student and hopes to bring smiles to everyone’s faces; whether it be her future patients or spectators at the events she hosted with her co-emcee and co-contributor Suzanna.

Suzanna Maharaj: hummingbird and the LIL SIS  project has had a place in Suzanna’s heart for years. from performing spoken word at the first open mic, to being brought on as a host, to now being the admin and resources lead on the team that achieved this research grant. when Suzanna isn’t working on LIL SIS content, she can be found waving her flag in a fete or improving her one-woman business.

Rayan Saied: Rayan began her work with the hummingbird team in highschool working to help spread the word out about our first ever youth-centred open mic in Regent Park. as event host and outreach team member, she was closely involved with many of the open mics throughout the years. her role with hummingbird evolved into a research role as we began to focus our work on recording and understanding the experiences of racialized LGBTQI artists and their access to resources and spaces within Toronto.

Belul Kidane: Stop trying, it’s pronounced “Bae-Lou-l”. Belul Kidane is a new member of the Lil Sis team but has been engaged with hummingbird since 2018. She is a performing artist, song-writer, part-time social media comedian and also owns a “non-borrowable” library in her bedroom. If she could eat one thing forever, it would be Mac and cheese. Thank you for coming to this Ted Talk.

Kamilah Apong: kamilah (kah-MEE-lah) apong is  a queer 90’s babe, and is currently re-watching entire Sailor Moon series for the 49283742rd time. She has some cute tummy rolls and would like to mother a couple alpacas 🦙 🦙 🦙 🦙 🦙. She’s the lead singer for the disco project, Tush, and co founded the hummingbird open mic in 2015, and LIL SIS in 2020.

This episode was hosted and directed by Naima Raza, produced by Ruben Gaztambide-Fernandez and Sarah Switzer, and supported by Youth Research Lab assistant Madeleine Ross.

Episodes 7 and 8: A Conversation Between Maddy Ross and Jaden McGregor, Luisa Gonzalez, Annie Silva, Lainey Rios, and Valeria Pineda

DETAILS

These episodes are a two-part series featuring conversations between the WhyPAR Podcast’s new co-host, Maddy Ross and five youth researchers: Valeria Pineda, Lainey Rios, Luisa Gonzalez, Jaden McGregor, and Annie Silva.

In Part One, the five youth researchers reflect on their experiences in a school-based YPAR project, Youth Solidarities Across Boundaries (YSAB), a collaboration between the Urban Indigenous Education Centre (UIEC) of the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) and the Youth Research Lab to convene Latinx and Indigenous high school students in T’karonto to understand and address the challenges youth face in schools. 

In Part Two, the five youth researchers discuss their most recent YPAR project conducted in the summer of 2020 that explored the experiences of Indigenous and Latinx youth living in T’karonto during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Valeria Pineda (she/her)

I am 21 years old and I recently graduated from a Social Service Worker program for Immigrants and Refugees, and I am currently working as a Youth Support Worker at a non-profit organization. I was born in Mexico and migrated to Canada with my family at a young age and have grown up in Toronto ever since. My experience being raised as a Mexican immigrant has definitely influenced my choice to work with marginalized communities. I was able to use my desire to work in social justice, research and community with the YPAR group for Indigenous and Latinx students. 

Lainey Rios

My name is Lainey Rios. I am 18 years old and identify as Latinx as my family originates from Mexico. I love to learn, spend time with family, and enjoy being involved in my community or in other programs, like YPAR. I am in my second year of the biological science program at the University of Guelph. I am currently working towards achieving high grades, expanding my knowledge in the science field and completing my undergraduate degree. I enjoy studying the sciences because it relates to everyday life and helps build my understanding of the world we live in. I have been working with YPAR for 3 years now and have really enjoyed my time with the program. Through YPAR I have learned many things through the research projects I've participated in, such as how much I love being part of research.

 Luisa Gonzalez

My name is Luisa Karime Gonzalez, I am 19 years old, my pronouns are she/her. I identify with the LatinX community as my parents are both from Guatemala. Currently I am in my second year at Ryerson University obtaining a Bachelor of Social Work. I am very grateful for the opportunities of participating in multiple YPAR projects 

Jaden McGregor

Hello Aniin my English name is Jaden Mcgregor and my Spirit name is Wasseyaa giiwe nibin which translates to light of the late summer. I was born in Toronto but my ancestors come from Manitoulin Island which is a few hours north of Toronto in Lake Huron. I’m also from The Island Nation Of Jamaica and therefore identify as Afro-Indigenous. Currently, I study at the University of Waterloo in the Geography and Aviation program which combines pilot training and an environmental studies degree. In my free time, I am primarily a freelance photographer who focuses on portrait landscape and street photography. Working with YPAR has been an amazing opportunity that has strengthened my research skills as well as my curiosity. I want to thank everyone who I have worked with for their passion and their curiosity. Miigwech

 Annie Silva

My name is Annie Melisa Silva Borda, I am 19 years old. I identify as a Latinx, born in Colombia and then moved to Canada a couple years later. This past year I finished my first year at the University of Toronto in the Arts and Science Faculty. I enjoyed it very much, I learned a lot of new things and accomplished another goal of mine. I love playing sports, learning and being part of making a change. Having the chance to share our project and talk about it in depth has been an amazing experience and I’m glad we could shine a light on people's different experiences during COVID-19. 

This episode was hosted and directed by Madeleine Ross, produced by Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández and Sarah Switzer, and supported by Youth Research Lab Assistant Naima Raza.

REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING

Luisa Karime Gonzalez, Jaden McGregor, Lida Valeria Pineda Flores, Lainey Rios, Annie Silva, Kaitlind Peters, Rubén Gaztambide-Fernandez, Pedro Morán Bonilla, and Michael Carlson. “Indigenous and Latinx Youth Navigating the COVID-19 Pandemic.” in:cite journal 4 (2021): 64–97. https://doi.org/10.33137/incite.4.37162.

Michael Carlson. “Navigating COVID-19: A Story of Resilience. Youtube Video, 7:20. August 10, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r20B86CRm90

Episode 6: A Conversation Between Nicole Mirra, Antero Garcia and Melanie Bertrand

Details

This episode is the first featuring conversation between Mel Bertrand, Nicole Mirra, and Antero Garcia. In this episode, Mel, Nicole, and Antero discuss ethical commitments and dissemination of youth knowledge while conducting YPAR. They discuss the opportunities and tensions of conducting YPAR within schools; and how YPAR must both expand the definition of what counts as research and also serve purpose beyond academia; the tensions of conducting YPAR when its’ labour benefits adults.

Nicole Mirra is an assistant professor of urban teacher education in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. She previously taught high school English Language Arts in Brooklyn, New York and Los Angeles, California. Her research explores the intersections of critical literacy and civic engagement with youth and teachers across classroom, community, and digital learning environments.

Antero Garcia is an assistant professor in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University. His work explores how technology and gaming shape learning, literacy practices, and civic identities. Based on his research focused on equitable teaching and learning opportunities for urban youth through the use of participatory media and gameplay, Antero co-designed the Critical Design and Gaming School--a public high school in South Central Los Angeles.

Melanie Bertrand is an associate professor at Arizona State University. Her research explores the potential of youth and community leadership to improve schools and challenge systemic racism and other forms of oppression in education. She applies cultural-historical activity theory to better understand how youth and community members engage in roles of activism, governance, and leadership within education.

This episode was hosted and directed by Naima Raza, produced by Ruben Gaztambide-Fernandez and Sarah Switzer, and supported by Youth Research Lab Research Assistants, Andrea Vela Alarcon and Madeleine Ross.

References and Further Reading

Duncan-Andrade, J., & Morrell, E. (2008). The art of critical pedagogy: Possibilities for moving from theory to practice in urban schools. Peter Lang.

Lac, V. T., & Fine, M. (2018). The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: An Autoethnographic Journey on Doing Participatory Action Research as a Graduate Student. Urban Education, 53(4), 562–583. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042085918762491

Lac, V. T. (2019). The critical educators of color pipeline: Leveraging youth research to nurture future critical educators of color. The Urban Review. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-019-00507-4

Mirra, N., Filipiak, D., & Garcia, A. (2015). Revolutionizing inquiry in urban English classrooms: Pursuing voice and justice through Youth Participatory Action Research. English Journal, 105(2), 49–57.

Tuck, E., & Guishard, M. (2013). Uncollapsing ethics: Racialized sciencism, settler coloniality, and an ethical framework of decolonial participatory action research. In T. M. Kress, C. S. Malott, & B. J. Porfilio (Eds.),Challenging status quo retrenchment: New directions in critical qualitative research (pp. 3–27). Information Age Publishing, Inc.

Episode 5: How Youth Collectives Create Beauty, A Conversation Between Rangoato Hlasane and Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández

Details

This episode is the third in a three-part series featuring conversations between Rangoato Hlasane and Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández.

Rangoato Hlasane from the Keleketla! Library and Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández discuss how youth collectivities create beauty, and specifically, within Ra’s program, the Keleketla! Library in Johannesburg, South Africa. Keleketla is a library and media arts project co-founded by Ra that was formerly based at Johannesburg’s historic Drill Hall (2008-2015) and is now based at King Kong, also in Johannesburg. King Kong is a multidisciplinary arts space and concert venue. The Drill Hall is the site where Nelson Mandela and 156 prominent freedom fighters were tried for treason in 1956.

In this episode, they discuss what it means to make beautiful things within youth collectives and within contexts of material precarity, how youth collectives create and shift narratives, and how ethical commitments to anti-racism are challenged while facilitating collectives.

Rangoato Hlasane is a cultural worker, selector, educator and co-founder of Keleketla! Library in Johannesburg. He holds a Master’s degree in Visual Art from the University of Johannesburg and teaches at the University of the Witwatersrand, where he is a PhD candidate in African Literature. He 'selects' music to expand his research into the social, political, spiritual and economic significance of African oralities, sonic and musicking practices.

This episode was hosted and directed by Naima Raza, produced by Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández and Sarah Switzer, and supported by Youth Research Lab Research Assistants, Andrea Vela Alarcon and Madeleine Ross.

References and Further Reading

Hlasane, Rangoato. “Culture as Development of Voice and Selfarticulation: Keleketla! after-School Programme.” Focus 68, no. 1 (2013): 16–24. https://admin.hsf.org.za/publications/focus/focus-68/%283%29%20R.%20Hlasane.pdf. 

Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing Methodologies - Research and Indigenous Peoples. 2nd ed. Zed Scholar, 2012. 

Teen Talk: Fun but Not Funny (on Migration & Xenophobia in South Africa). YouTube. Keleketla! Library, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DasU6nq7ds. 

Episode 4: On Building Youth Collectivities, A Conversation Between Rangoato Hlasane and Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández

Details

This episode is the second in a three-part series featuring conversations between Rangoato Hlasane and  Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández.

Rangoato Hlasane from the Keleketla! Library and Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández discuss the process and importance of building youth collectivities, and specifically, within Ra’s program, the Keleketla! Library in Johannesburg, South Africa. Keleketla is a library and media arts project co-founded by Ra that was formerly based at Johannesburg’s historic Drill Hall (2008-2015) and is now based at King Kong, also in Johannesburg. King Kong is a multidisciplinary arts space and concert venue. The Drill Hall is the site where Nelson Mandela and 156 prominent freedom fighters were tried for treason in 1956.

In this episode, they discuss children and youth’s understandings of and commitment to the program and their learning, the importance of ephemeral moments between children and parents in building understanding about the program, and importance of the role of demonstrations and performance in maintaining the structure of a participatory program such as Keleketla! Library.

Rangoato Hlasane is a cultural worker, selector, educator and co-founder of Keleketla! Library in Johannesburg. He holds a Master’s degree in Visual Art from the University of Johannesburg and teaches at the University of the Witwatersrand, where he is a PhD candidate in African Literature. He 'selects' music to expand his research into the social, political, spiritual and economic significance of African oralities, sonic and musicking practices.

This episode was hosted and directed by Naima Raza, produced by Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández and Sarah Switzer, and supported by Youth Research Lab Research Assistants, Andrea Vela Alarcon and Madeleine Ross.

References and Further Reading

Hlasane, Rangoato, Fouad Asfour, Malose Malahlela, and Judith Reker. Creating Spaces: Non-Formal Art/s Education and Vocational Training for Artists in Africa between Cultural Policies and Cultural Funding. Edited by Nicola Lauré Al-Samarai, Katharina von Ruckteschell-Katte, and Henrike Grohs. Goethe-Institut South Africa, 2014. 

Moiloa, Molemo, ed. 58 Years to the Treason Trial: Inter-Generational Dialogue as a Method for Learning. 1st ed. Keleketla! Library, 2014. 

Episode 3: On The Geographies of YPAR, A Conversation Between Rangoato Hlasane and Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández

Details

This episode is the first in a three-part series featuring conversations between Rangoato Hlasane and Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández.

Rangoato Hlasane (Ra) from the Keleketla! Library and Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández discuss how YPAR plays out in marginalized geographies, and specifically, in Ra’s context of the Joubert Park neighbourhood in Johannesburg, South Africa. In this episode, they will discuss Keleketla!, a library and media arts project co-founded by Ra that was formerly based at Johannesburg’s historic Drill Hall (2008-2015) and is now based at King Kong, also in Johannesburg. King Kong is a multidisciplinary arts space and concert venue. The Drill Hall is the site where Nelson Mandela and 156 prominent freedom fighters were tried for treason in 1956.

Ra and Rubén discuss the role of place and identity in the emergence of resistant creative spaces, the ways that young people come together and create their own spaces to engage in the arts, and the significance of spaces like the historic Drill Hill as being the site where young people imagine and create programming for themselves.

Rangoato Hlasane is a cultural worker, selector, educator and co-founder of Keleketla! Library in Johannesburg. He holds a Master’s degree in Visual Art from the University of Johannesburg and teaches at the University of the Witwatersrand, where he is a PhD candidate in African Literature. He 'selects' music to expand his research into the social, political, spiritual and economic significance of African oralities, sonic and musicking practices.

This episode was hosted and directed by Naima Raza, produced by Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández and Sarah Switzer, and supported by Youth Research Lab Research Assistants, Andrea Vela Alarcon and Madeleine Ross.

References and Further Reading

“Keleketla Library - Keleketla Media Arts Project.” Keleketla Library, 2013. https://keleketla.org/about/. 

What Happened at the Treason Trial? Google Arts & Culture, 2021. https://artsandculture.google.com/exhibit/what-happened-at-the-treason-trial-africa-media-online/PwJS8md1REM3Iw?hl=en. 

Episode 2: On Ethical Commitments and the Politics of Dissemination, A Conversation Between Sarah Switzer and Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández (Part Two)

Details

Sarah Switzer and Rubén Gaztambide-Fernandez from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto discuss the dissemination of youth knowledge in YPAR. They discuss the opportunities and tensions around knowledge dissemination; honouring youth voices while navigating the politics of dissemination within academic spaces; the importance of relevant and meaningful products; and building collective capacity in youth and adult researchers through YPAR.

Sarah Switzer is a Toronto-based popular educator and community-based participatory researcher. Inspired by fifteen years of working at the intersections of community arts, peer/youth programming, and HIV and Harm Reduction, her larger program of research and teaching explores how to creatively and meaningfully engage communities who experience marginalization in programs, policy change, and collaborative knowledge translation efforts.  Her research interests include critical approaches to participation and engagement (including youth engagement), pedagogy in community-based settings and participatory visual methods.

Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández‘s research and scholarship are concerned with symbolic boundaries and the dynamics of cultural production and processes of identification in educational contexts. He is the Director of the Youth Research Lab at the Centre for Urban Schooling of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, where he is Principal Investigator of the Youth Solidarities Across Boundaries Project, a participatory action research project with Latinx and Indigenous youth in the city of Toronto. His theoretical work focuses on the relationship between creativity, decolonization, and solidarity.

This episode was hosted and directed by Naima Raza, produced by Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández and Sarah Switzer, and supported by Youth Research Lab Research Assistants, Andrea Vela Alarcon and Madeleine Ross.

References and Further Reading

Switzer, S., Lyrauu, T., Apong, K., Bell, O., Manuel-Smith, C., Hernandez, L., McWhinney, P.G., Pariah, S., Seidu, F., Bykes, A., Bykes, A. (2016). What's glitter got to do with it?: Re-imagining harm reduction, decision-making and the politics of youth engagement. In C. Smith & Z. Marshall (Eds.), Critical perspectives on harm reduction: Conflict, institutionalization, co-optation, depoliticization, and direct action. (pp. 113-133). New York: Nova Publishers.

Switzer, S. (2019). Working with photo installation and metaphor: Re-visioning photovoice research. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 18, 1609406919872395.

Guerrero, C. A., Gaztambide-Fernández, R., Rosas, M., & Guerrero, E. (2013). Proyecto Latin@ on stage and under the magnifying glass: The possibilities and limitations of a high-profile institutionally sponsored youth participatory action research project [Abstract]. The International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, 4(2).

Gaztambide-Fernández, R. & Guerrero, C. (w/ West-Burns, N., Larrabure, M., Velasquez, M., Granados-Ceja, L., Guerrero, E.) (2011). Proyecto Latino –– Year One. Report to the Toronto District School Board. [Technical Research Report]. Toronto, ON: Centre for Urban Schooling, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto.

Guerrero, C. A. (2014). Rethinking Latin@ Student Engagement: Identification, Community Engagement, and Transformative Learning through Youth Participatory Action Research. University of Toronto. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/1807/68130

Switzer S.; Flicker, S., McClelland, A., Chan Carusone, S., Ferguson, T.,B., Herelle, N., Yee, D., Guta, A., Strike, C., (2020) Journeying Together: A visual exploration of “engagement” as a journey in HIV programming and service delivery. Journal of Health and Place, 61, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthplace.2019.102247

Episode 1: On Ethical Commitments and the Politics of Dissemination, A Conversation Between Sarah Switzer and Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández (Part One)

Details

Sarah Switzer and Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto discuss ethical commitments while conducting YPAR. They reflect on the importance of relationships while conducting YPAR; the challenges and opportunities faced while conducting YPAR across different settings such as schools and community health centres; participants’ motivations for involvement, and the ethical commitments that guide their work.

Sarah Switzer is a Toronto-based popular educator and community-based participatory researcher. Inspired by fifteen years of working at the intersections of community arts, peer/youth programming, and HIV and Harm Reduction, her larger program of research and teaching explores how to creatively and meaningfully engage communities who experience marginalization in programs, policy change, and collaborative knowledge translation efforts. Her research interests include critical approaches to participation and engagement (including youth engagement), pedagogy in community-based settings and participatory visual methods.

Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández's research and scholarship are concerned with symbolic boundaries and the dynamics of cultural production and processes of identification in educational contexts. He is the Director of the Youth Research Lab at the Centre for Urban Schooling of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, where he is Principal Investigator of the Youth Solidarities Across Boundaries Project, a participatory action research project with Latinx and Indigenous youth in the city of Toronto. His theoretical work focuses on the relationship between creativity, decolonization, and solidarity.

This episode was hosted and directed by Naima Raza, produced by Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández and Sarah Switzer, and supported by Youth Research Lab Research Assistants, Andrea Vela Alarcon and Madeleine Ross.