Movement V
METHODOLOGY AS RITUAL, REFUSAL & RELATIONAL ETHICS
Educational research has often repplicated anti-Black discourses using extraction, deficit narratives, and forms of inquiry that treat Black communities as data rather than as knowledge-holders. Eve Tuck (2009) warns that damage-centred research fixates on community harm in ways that ultimately benefit institutions rather than the people being studied.
As a result of the bias towards deficit framing, the Jane–Finch Community Research Principles require that research with racialized communities be accountable, relational, reciprocal, and protective of community sovereignty. These principles position Black youth as co-researchers whose cultural knowledge, lived experience, and creative practice guide the process.
These discourses shape the methodology I have chosen:
Design-Based Research + Youth Participatory Action Research (DBR–YPAR), framed through Afro-diasporic epistemologies and relational ethics.
Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) as Refusal
This Design-Based + Youth Participatory Action Research (DBR–YPAR) study engages high-school youth (ages 16–18) in the YRAACC Sankofa program as co-researchers. Youth explore Afro-diasporic stories, ecological themes, and cultural motifs, translating them into XR prototypes and developing multimodal literacies (narrative, spatial design, digital making).
YPAR becomes a method of refusal because it rejects deficit narratives and the pathologizing of black youth while acknowledging their complexity.
Data Collection as Cultural and Epistemic Production
Observations, short surveys, reflective journals, audio-storytelling, and youth-created XR environments and game artifacts will be collected and analyzed as cultural and epistemic productions. In addition, thematic and narrative analysis will examine belonging, cultural knowledge, maker-agency, and how ancestral and ecological knowledges appear in digital worlds.