Thomas Albright – författare

This book draws together insights on the past, present, and future of youth participatory action research (YPAR) through interviews with ten scholars whose work has been central to the field. In this critical moment, it allows readers to hear from scholars who have been foundational to the visioning and enacting of YPAR projects, as they reflect on the fundamental tenets and boundaries of their work.By engaging directly with leaders in the field, the book allows readers to explore many of the nuances, roots, and tensions of youth participatory action research. Throughout their conversations with scholars, Albright and Brion-Meisels pose three questions: What is the purpose of YPAR, and how does it get defined? What makes for authentic participation, both on the research team itself and in the process of the research? And how, if at all, does YPAR investigate and seek to dismantle existing power structures within schools and communities? In taking an intentionally dialectical approach, this volume builds on the centrality of dialogue in PAR/YPAR processes, both in terms of pedagogy/mode and in terms of content/matter. By sharing direct excerpts of conversations, readers can participate in the co-construction of knowledge, and gain more nuanced understandings of how purpose, participation, and power have shaped the foundations of YPAR, and how they might shape future collaborations.Elucidating the knowledge and perspective of leading YPAR practitioners, this timely book will be crucial reading on Research Methods and Education for Participatory Action Research programs and related courses.

This book draws together insights on the past, present, and future of youth participatory action research (YPAR) through interviews with ten scholars whose work has been central to the field. In this critical moment, it allows readers to hear from scholars who have been foundational to the visioning and enacting of YPAR projects, as they reflect on the fundamental tenets and boundaries of their work.By engaging directly with leaders in the field, the book allows readers to explore many of the nuances, roots, and tensions of youth participatory action research. Throughout their conversations with scholars, Albright and Brion-Meisels pose three questions: What is the purpose of YPAR, and how does it get defined? What makes for authentic participation, both on the research team itself and in the process of the research? And how, if at all, does YPAR investigate and seek to dismantle existing power structures within schools and communities? In taking an intentionally dialectical approach, this volume builds on the centrality of dialogue in PAR/YPAR processes, both in terms of pedagogy/mode and in terms of content/matter. By sharing direct excerpts of conversations, readers can participate in the co-construction of knowledge, and gain more nuanced understandings of how purpose, participation, and power have shaped the foundations of YPAR, and how they might shape future collaborations.Elucidating the knowledge and perspective of leading YPAR practitioners, this timely book will be crucial reading on Research Methods and Education for Participatory Action Research programs and related courses.

Winner of the 2026 Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book award, this book examines how schooling—the restrictive, oppressive, and disciplinary force in much U.S. education—is protean and has the agency to change in response to challenges. Posthumanist theories were engaged with to better understand the intra‑actions between human, nonhuman, and discursive actors.Utilizing participant observations, interviews, cognitive maps, diffraction, and theory, it argues that traditional humanistic approaches to oppression in U.S. education are inadequate to understanding the ongoing power of schooling. In conversation with these paradigms, this book lays out an agential realist (Barad, 2007) view of schooling and argues in favor of examining schooling itself as an agent, sustained and bolstered by a wide range of other agents acting in and around schools—from clipboards and handouts to adultism and racism. This approach offers a new perspective on how oppressive forces like racism, sexism, and adultism adapt and continue to operate in spaces deliberately designed to oppose them, including Ethnic Studies programs and YPAR projects. At the same time, this book rejects totalizing arguments about schooling’s hegemony and shows how a wider recognition of nonhuman agency can help us not only understand but also work to resist such oppressions.It will appeal to scholars, faculty, and upper‑level students with interests in critical youth studies, educational equity, Ethnic Studies, youth participatory action research, and posthumanism.

This book asks whose histories, knowledges, struggles, sorrows, joys, dreams, and expertise matter in teacher education and teacher residencies. It conceives of teacher residencies as a space for the multiplicity of voices and experiences needed to create opportunities for more democratic education and explores how this might be achieved despite the ways in which schools have become both more politicized and standardized in recent years. It argues that this work will not happen in silos but in community. As such, it showcases residency programs and program providers that have embraced a critical turn in residency work, as well as the voices and perspectives of critical community co-conspirators and the youth being served. Chapters examine geo-socio-historical and political contexts, the democratic and participatory nature of residency work, critical theoretical frameworks, and learning as liberation.Advocating for a critical turn in teacher residency programming and research, this book provides research interventions, practical tools, and residency models that emphasize criticality in teacher preparation. It offers valuable insights for researchers interested in democratizing teacher education.