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