Decolonizing youth participatory action research practices: A case study of a girl-centered, anti-racist, feminist PAR with Indigenous and racialized girls in Victoria, BC

• Main Author: Khanna, Nishad
• Other Authors: Lee, Jo-Anne
• Language: English; en
• Published: 2011
• Subjects: Decolonizing; Participatory Action Research; feminist; anti-racist; girl-centered; youth; girls; Indigenous girls; racialized girls; arts-based methods; whiteness; Victoria; colonialism; critical practices; intergenerational; participation; colonial time; postcolonialism; critical race theory; white noise
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1828/3256

This study focuses on a girl-centered, anti-racist, feminist PAR program with Indigenous and racialized girls in Victoria, a smaller, predominantly white city in British Columbia, Canada. As a partnership among antidote: Multiracial and Indigenous Girls and Women’s Network, and an interdisciplinary team of academic researchers who are also members of antidote, this project defies typical insider-outsider dynamics. In this thesis, I intend to speak back to mainstream Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) literature, contesting the notion that this methodology provides an easy escape from the research engine and underlying colonial formations. Practices of YPAR are continuously (re)colonized, producing new forms of colonialism and imperialism. Our process can be described as an ongoing rhythm of disruptions and recolonizations that are not simple opposites, but are mutually reliant and constitutive within neocolonial formations. In other words, our practice involved creatively disrupting new forms of colonialism and imperialism as they emerged, while recognizing that our responses were not outside of these formations. I seek to make our roles as researchers visible, rather than hidden by hegemonic equalizing claims of PAR, and will explore some of the ways that white noise infiltrated our ongoing efforts of decolonizing YPAR practices. === Graduate