The whyPAR Podcast The Youth Research Lab @ OISE, U of T

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.  

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.

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.

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/

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 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 Naima Raza and Oliver Thompson.

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.