









































Lozenski. Global Journal of  
Transformative Education (2019) 1:1, 26-37. 
DOI  10.14434/gjte.v1i1.26142

Open Access

Published by the Global Insitutute of Transformative Education (http://www.gite.education)
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Constructing a Dual-Subjectivity: Understanding the 
Intersection of Ethnic Studies and YPAR

Brian David Lozenski1

Abstract

This article explores the outcomes of using Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) as an entry point 
into Africana Studies. The author draws from empirical research and anecdotal narratives to document a pro-
gram where youth of African descent in the United States engage in Ethnic Studies through the lens of action 
research. Beginning with a tracing of the development of Ethnic Studies in the United States, the author shows 
how combining Ethnic Studies and YPAR builds a dual-subjectivity within youth where they are subjects of 
their own curricular exploration and simultaneously developing a subjectivity as researchers and knowledge 
producers. The article highlights three major implications of this dual-subjectivity for the political agency of 
youth of African descent living in a midsized U.S. city.

Keywords: Dual-subjectivity, Ethnic studies, YPAR

Full listing of authors and contacts can be 
found at the end of this article.

Philosophers have long conceded, however, that every 
man has two educations: ‘that which is given to him, and 
the other that which he gives himself. Of the two kinds 
the latter is by far the more desirable. Indeed all that is 
worthy in man he must work out and conquer for himself. 
It is that which constitutes our real and best nourish-
ment. What we are merely taught seldom nourishes the 
mind like that which we teach ourselves.’ 

– Carter G. Woodson, The Mis-education of the Negro

With his explanatory assertion, Carter G. Woodson, 
who many recognize as the founder of the field of Afri-
can American Studies (Grant, Brown & Brown, 2016), 
refuses to allow for the conflation of education and 
schooling. Through a Woodsonian framing, education is 
about cultural sustenance, survivance, and human liber-
ation. It is a vehicle that pumps the historical lifeblood 
of a people to their collective hearts and minds. Any 
educational endeavor, whether taking place inside of a 
school or not, must foreground the self-determining ca-
pacities of the people who constitute it and participate 
in its function. As an ideal, educational self-determin-

ation is conceptually sound, yet, it becomes infinitely 
more complex in application.

This task of educational self-determination is even 
more fraught for communities who have been histor-
ically marginalized and dispossessed of their educa-
tional rights (Espinoza & Vossoughi, 2014; Lozenski, 
2017a). In exploring the construct of dignity in relation 
to education and schooling, Espinoza and Vossoughi 
argue that despite systems of schooling that have come 
into existence through the denial of educational rights 
to negatively racialized groups, communities faced with 
an attack on their humanity have found ways to assert 
their human dignity through manifestations of self-ed-
ucation. For instance, the authors explore how despite 
anti-literacy legislation and state-sanctioned violence 
(Williams, 2005), enslaved Africans in the United States 
found ways to teach themselves to write their own 
humanity into existence for others to know through the 
genre of (en)slave(d)1  narratives. 

1  I use the term “(en)slave(d)” rather than “slave” to assert that 
African people were never slaves in an ontological sense. The 
shift in terminology focuses on the action of the enslavement 
rather than constructing the people who were acted upon as less 
than human.



Lozenski, Constructing a Dual-Subjectivity  27

Cradled—sometimes buried—within these bodies 
of information (narratives) are brief, luminous 
first-person accounts of intellectual activity in 
the shadow of sanction, vigorous endeavors to 
learn that were suppressed, and fertile brushes 
with the acquisition of knowledge that, on occa-
sion, resulted in harrowing forms of punishment. 
These reports are the remnants of learning—ev-
idence of its cultivation, proof of its liquidation, 
and enduring witness regarding what partici-
pation in educational endeavors meant to the 
people involved (Espinoza & Vossoughi, 2014, p. 
287).

Although no longer legally denied access to for-
mal education, the African American descendants of 
these enslaved African authors continue to face forms 
of educational dispossession. The State has traded in 
its anti-literacy laws for a compulsory form of educa-
tion designed to adhere the descendants of enslaved 
Africans to its settler colonial logics based in white 
supremacy through a Eurocentric curricular standard. 
While “multicultural education” is a common buzz-
word in contemporary K-12 education systems in the 
U.S., a myriad of scholars (Casey, 2010; Royal & Gibson, 
2017; Spring, 2016) have documented how classrooms 
remain centered on the subjectivity of those who have 
been socially constructed as “white”. Often, implemen-
tations of “multicultural education” continue to place 
all other communities of color in relation to the white 
settler subject. Thus, African American history often be-
gins with enslavement, Native American history begins 
with European contact, etc.

Ethnic Studies as a discipline constituted by subfields 
(e.g. Africana Studies, Chicanx Studies) seeks to decenter 
the non-ethnic white subject2 from the educational imagi-
nation. By constructing educational space and curriculum 
around the subjectivity of historically constructed ethnic 
groups, youth are able to come to understandings of them-
selves and their communities on their own terms, and not 
as background actors in a human history of those who have 
come to be called “white”. This article explores an instance 
of the praxis of Ethnic Studies with youth of African

descent in a midsized city in the Midwestern United States. 
The article describes an approach to Ethnic Studies that 
further seeks to build on the subjectivity of youth of 
African descent by positioning them not only as learn-
ers, but as researchers and community documentarians 
(Kinloch, 2010; Stovall & Delgado, 2009). The youth de-
scribed in this article worked to grapple with their own 
lived experiences by historicizing themselves (Lozenski, 
2017b) within an intellectual tradition, and by becom-
ing producers of knowledge using participatory action 
research (Cammarota & Fine, 2008; Caraballo, Lozens-
ki, Lyiscott, & Morrell, 2017). The article outlines the 
context and curriculum of a program called the Uhuru 
Youth Scholars (Lozenski, 2017b), and demonstrates 
outcomes of the intersection of Ethnic Studies and 
Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR). I argue 
this intersection constructs a dual-subjectivity where 
youth of African descent are simultaneously subjects 
of their own curricular explorations and of their own 
research practices. I suggest this dual-subjectivity 
constructs an agentive identity for engaging with Ethnic 
Studies. 

Tracing the Development of Ethnic Studies  
in the United States

It is hard to know where to begin when trying to 
define the contours of Ethnic Studies as an academic 
field in the United States. Here I am exploring Ethnic 
Studies as an umbrella term for multiple sub-fields that 
explore the histories and cultural practices of peoples, 
foregrounding ethnic heritage as the emphasis of study. 
Ethnic Studies are interdisciplinary and although they 
are typically focused on the Social Sciences and Human-
ities, they can be applied to the Fine Arts, and Natural 
Sciences (Cuauhtin, Zavala, Sleeter, & Au, 2019). There 
has been plenty of recent scholarship about the appli-
cation and role of Ethnic Studies in K-12 schools (de 
los Ríos, López, & Morrell, 2015; Sleeter, 2011; Tin-
tiangco-Cubales et al, 2015), and we know that Ethnic 
Studies in these institutions has had to be fought for in 
political battles and even court cases, such as the recent 
trials in the state of Arizona3 (Zehr, 2010; Palos, 
2011). In its current manifestation, Ethnic Studies 
stands as a direct challenge to the historical project of

Global Journal of Transformative Education (2019) 1:1

2 I use the phrase “non-ethnic white” to underscore the notion 
that “white” does not refer to a specific ethnic heritage; rather, 
multiple ethnic groups, typically of European origin have 
become “white” in the United States (Painter, 2010). There 
are myriad instances of European ethnic groups in the US 
creating educational environments around their own ethnic 
subjectivity. For instance, there is a long history of bilingual 
German, Polish, and Finnish schools (Iyengar, 2014); Hebrew 
schools; and Irish/Catholic parochial schools.

3 In 2010 the State Legislature of Arizona passed House Bill 
2281, effectively banning Ethnic Studies courses throughout the 
state. The bill targeted popular Chicanx/Latinx Studies courses 
being taught in Tucson, AZ. The bill was overturned in 2018 
because it was found to have been “motivated by racial animus”.



Lozenski, Constructing a Dual-Subjectivity  28

Global Journal of Transformative Education (2019) 1:1

U.S. schooling, which has been designed to culturally 
castrate youth of color, and inculcate their thinking 
with Eurocentric ideation, and rationalizations for 
race, gender, and class hierarchy in order to subsume 
the potential for social unrest. As Woodson asserted, 
“If you can control a man’s thinking you do not have 
to worry about his action” (Woodson, 1990, p. 60). So 
it is no wonder why State-mandated education does 
not want Ethnic Studies to become a prevalent feature 
in its schools. Conceptually, Ethnic Studies is bigger 
than schooling, and school has never been the primary 
location for this work. Ethnic studies, perhaps, suffers 
from its own nomenclature. The difficulty in framing 
the field stems from the fact that Ethnic Studies has al-
ways been here. All peoples have found ways to educate 
generations and socialize them into a worldview that 
centers their own historical subjectivity. As Simpson 
(2017) describes in As We Have Always Done, referring 
to Nishnaabeg tribal knowledge systems, “These stories 
relied upon a return to self-determination and change 
from within rather than recognition from the outside” 
(p. 22). In this way, even the idea that people should be 
contextualized in these “ethnic” categorizations can be 
problematic. However, in a vulgar attempt to trace the 
modern manifestation of the field in the United States, I 
look to African Americans, who were at the forefront of 
broad-based movements to reaffirm their subjectivity 
through education.

The descendants of enslaved Africans in the U.S. 
have always had a precarious relationship to State-man-
dated, State-administered schooling, and thus, have 
been forced to deconstruct and reconstruct what 
notions of education mean. In the aftermath of legalized 
slavery and its adherence to educational dispossession 
through white terror and de jure anti-literacy laws, 
African Americans fought intently for access to print lit-
eracy by any means. Williams (2005) documents the at-
tempts of the formerly enslaved to build schools, read-
ing collectives, intergenerational knowledge sharing 
communities, and even militarized educational spaces. 
The desire for print literacy, that had been denied to so 
many, was palpable. An early connection made along 
with print literacy was the importance of the content 
of texts. For many, religious motivations to read the 
Bible drove desires for literacy. Yet, leaders like Martin 
Delaney and David Walker argued that literacy should 
primarily be used to know the histories of African 
people. In other words, print literacy was only a tool for 
reclaiming educational subjectivity. Literacy was not 
education in and of itself. These ideas continued

to build as public schooling in the U.S. was developed. 
Early proponents of educational self-determination in 
public education were people like Anna Julia Cooper 
and W.E.B. DuBois, who argued that black youth should 
not only be taught classical European history, which 
was the central focus of elite education in U.S. schools. 

Still, much of the focus on the education of black 
youth was about print literacy, rote memorization, and 
vocational skills. Ironically, this approach was not much 
different than what occurred for working class white 
communities as public education was still being formed 
to indoctrinate ethnically diverse European immigrants 
into a culturally homogenous “American” ideal, which 
included the notion of becoming “white” (Painter, 2010; 
Spring, 2016). Yet, for people of color who had little to 
no access to whiteness, this technical approach to edu-
cation was part of the process of cultural erasure, and 
relegation to the bottom of the social strata. It was not 
until the liberatory transnationalist movement led by 
Marcus Garvey (Blaisdell, 2012; Chapman, 2004) that 
educational subjectivity gained more traction within 
black communities. Garvey’s organization, the Univer-
sal Negro Improvement Association , argued in its “Dec-
laration of Rights” that the education of black people 
should center their history and fundamental humanity: 
“We demand that instructions given Negro children in 
schools include the subject of ‘Negro History’ to their 
benefit” (Vincent, 1977, p. 261-265).  

 Absent the black nationalist fervor of Garvey 
and the Universal Negro Improvement Association4, 
Carter G. Woodson was developing curriculum and a 
network for the dissemination of African American 
history across the country to black educators through 
his organization, The Association for the Study of Negro 
Life and History (Grant, Brown & Brown, 2016). Build-
ing his theory of “mis-education”, Woodson argued that 
traditional education models were rendering “edu-
cated” black people useless to the liberation of their 
communities.  In his classic text, The Mis-education of 
the Negro, Woodson wrote, “From literature the African 
was excluded altogether. He was not supposed to have 
expressed any thought worth knowing. The philosophy 
in the African proverbs and in the rich folklore of that 
continent was ignored to give preference to that devel-
oped on the distant shores of the Mediterranean (p. 18).

4 The Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) came 
to prominence in the 1920s and was one of the largest Pan-Af-
rican, Black Nationalist organizations in history, spanning 
several countries in North America, South America, and the 
Caribbean.



Lozenski, Constructing a Dual-Subjectivity  29

Like Garvey, Woodson’s hope was that black youth, 
largely, would become the subjects of their own educa-
tional thinking and learning. 

Yet, this conception of education, which has come to 
be the core of Africana Studies, did not gain mainstream 
appeal. With the passing of the Brown v. Board of Ed-
ucation Supreme Court decision5, a lackluster process 
of racial desegregation began, where black youth were 
slowly phased into formerly all white schools, often fac-
ing violent resistance and hostility. Black teachers were 
fired en mass, further reducing the chances that black 
youth would be at the center of their own educational 
endeavors (Bell, 2004; Siddle Walker, 2009). 

It was not until the movements on desegregat-
ed college campuses for Ethnic Studies departments 
toward the end of the Civil Rights Movement, that these 
desires for subjectivity became popular again (Kelley, 
2016). Campuses like San Francisco State, Berkeley, 
Cornell6, and the University of Minnesota, among nu-
merous others, saw massive protests and occupations 
demanding Africana Studies, Chicano Studies, Asian 
American Studies, and Indigenous Studies departments. 
Combined with postcolonial nationalist movements 
and calls for Third World Solidarity (Olesen, 2004), a 
global movement to displace colonial rule paralleled a 
movement for decolonial education. On college cam-
puses today, it is not unusual to see Ethnic Studies 
programs, concentrations, majors, departments, and 
even some academic centers. In the 1970s a number of 
community-based and independent schools (Rickford, 
2016) began, which focused on specific communities of 
color. Freedom Schools and political organizations like 
the Black Panthers and Nation of Islam modeled Afri-
can-centered education (Perlstein, 2011). Still, as men-
tioned earlier, Ethnic Studies has not gained traction in 
the State-sanctioned elementary and secondary class-
rooms in across the US, despite perpetually growing 
numbers of youth of color in US Schools (Sleeter, 2011).

A Community Context for Ethnic Studies
Community-based educational spaces have at-

tempted to mitigate the resistance to Ethnic Studies 
in traditional schools. It is common to find commu-
nity-based organizations that provide Ethnic Studies 
programming across communities. The context for this 
article comes from one such organization called the 
Network for the Development of Children of African 
Descent (NdCAD) (Lozenski & Ford, 2014). NdCAD is 
located three blocks from one of the city’s main thor-
oughfares, yet it is unassuming as it sits tucked away 
from heavily trafficked areas. Upon entering the organi-
zation, visitors are immediately drawn to the shelves of 
books on the left and the couches on the right. African 
art adorns the walls, and most people seeing NdCAD 
for the first time spend several minutes silently walking 
and looking at the art and posters filled with informa-
tion about the global histories of peoples of African 
descent. In the main corridor, past the couches, is a 
meeting area with chairs seated around large tables 
pushed together. Beyond the large main room is a hall-
way connected to smaller rooms. The family resource 
room, which is reminiscent of a combined living and 
dining room with a fireplace, sofas, and large china 
cabinet, is filled with African ceramics made by Susan 
Martin, the assistant director of NdCAD. Large por-
traits of influential elders in the local African American 
community sit directly over the dining table, giving the 
room a homey feel, as though pictures of relatives were 
hanging on the wall. Down the hallway, around a corner, 
sits the Sankofa reading room, with a small table, child-
size chairs, and books with a rainbow of black faces on 
the covers. There is also the Elder Kwame McDonald7 
Memorial Library, which has several bookcases filled 
with the personal library of the distinguished activist, 
writer, and elder who left his accumulated lifetime 
collection to NdCAD, after his passing in 2011. The 
collection contains volumes of rare materials from the 
past half-century, such as originals of local black news-
papers, journals, and magazines collected during the 
Civil Rights era. 

NdCAD itself is the manifestation of a community 
vision developed from a series of community conversa-
tions in the mid-1990s called “Cultural Beginnings.” The 
idea of Cultural Beginnings was to engage in a system-
atic inquiry of the assets that local people and commu-
nities of African descent could draw from to promote

Global Journal of Transformative Education (2019) 1:1

5 The Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Kansas was a Su-
preme Court decision in 1954 making racial segregation in US 
schools illegal. The decision spurred a wave of policies outlaw-
ing racial segregation in all public accommodations.
6 In 1969 the Willard Straight Hall takeover by African Amer-
ican students at Cornell University was the impetus for the 
development of the first ever Africana Studies and Research 
Center. The protest gained notoriety as the first armed building 
takeover when students procured weapons after being attacked 
by a white fraternity. 

7 Elder Kwame McDonald was a local educator and journalist, 
influential in founding NdCAD.



Lozenski, Constructing a Dual-Subjectivity  30

social change. This asset-based framework of collective 
inquiry was already a departure from the deficit-based 
approaches that have become predictable in attempts 
to “fix” black communities, absent of any discussion 
of structural white supremacy. NdCAD’s vision and 
mission statements are displayed prominently at the 
entrance of the organization.

Our Vision
We envision a place where the African spirit 

is nurtured and renewed
We envision a place where African people 

come together to learn of and from ourselves
We envision a place where we come to learn 

from our elders and our children
We envision a place where we affirm our 

global family
We envision a place where we take care of 

family business

Our Mission
We exist to strengthen the cultural 

connections within communities of African 
descent that promote, sustain, and enhance 

the healthy development of our children.

NdCAD uses several programmatic strategies to 
achieve this vision and mission within its community. 
Among these strategies is the Sankofa Reading 
Program, which is an 8-week reading intervention 
for children in grades K–8 that uses a sociocultural 
approach to learning connecting literacy with 
African identity. Parent Power is 4- to 8-week series 
of workshops that recognizes that parents have the 
ultimate power to help their children become lifelong 
independent readers. Parent Power helps parents 
mobilize this power to work with their children to build 
literacy skills and become literacy advocates for their 
children when working with educators. Through its 
Think Different, Do Different affiliate network, NdCAD 
facilitates professional development for educators, 
helping teachers, youth workers, administrators, and 
others gain a deeper understanding of how culture 
is implicit in how children learn. The Uhuru Youth 
Scholars program is the fourth programmatic strategy 
developed by NdCAD.

The Uhuru Youth Scholars
Caraballo et al. (2017) describe Youth Participatory 

Action Research (YPAR) in their comprehensive review 
as:

a critical research methodology that carries 
specific epistemological commitments toward 
reframing who is “allowed” to conduct and dis-
seminate education research with/about youth in 
actionable ways. Its origins in critical pedagogy 
inform its role as a pedagogical approach based 
on a conception of teaching and learning through 
collaborative and transformative inquiry (p. 
313). 
Situated in critical theory, YPAR positions youth 

as researchers and documentarians of their own lived 
contexts. Caraballo et al suggest that there are four 
major entry points for youth into this work including, 
academic learning and literacy, youth development and 
leadership, youth organizing and civic engagement, 
and cultural and critical epistemologies. The Uhuru 
Youth Scholars (Uhuru) program emerges from the last 
of these entry points. Uhuru was imagined, designed, 
and implemented by a collective of high school youth, 
parents, faculty from a local university, and staff from 
NdCAD. Uhuru is a year-long course where high school-
aged youth gain high school and college credit through 
an Ethnic Studies course. The hybrid course combines 
exploration of classical and contemporary Africana 
studies with research methods in YPAR.  Uhuru holds 
steadfast to its goals of positioning youth as research-
ers who use historical constructions of African thought 
to make sense of contemporary issues related to their 
lives.  

The constant features of Uhuru are an initial scaf-
folding of critical educational theory connected to their 
schooling experiences, practice in traditional qualita-
tive research methods, and exposure to community 
educators and elders (Lozenski, 2017b).  For instance, 
Uhuru youth read excerpts from critical texts like Peda-
gogy of the Oppressed (Freire, 1970), The Mis-education 
of the Negro (Woodson, 1990), and The Souls of Black 
Folk (DuBois, 1986).  They explore the educational lives 
of the youth from a macro level and ask them to inter-
pret the purpose, curricular breadth (or lack thereof), 
teaching techniques, and learning outcomes of their 
time in school.  This is often the first time these youth 
have had the opportunity to openly discuss the “why’s” 
and “how’s” of school.  They make connections between 
disparate pedagogies.  They describe specific teachers 
as culturally relevant, and specific types of pedagogy as

Global Journal of Transformative Education (2019) 1:1



Lozenski, Constructing a Dual-Subjectivity  31

“banking” (Freire, 1970).  This allows the educators to 
situate the pedagogical philosophy of Uhuru in “prob-
lem-posing” and collective inquiry (Freire, 1970).  Uhu-
ru’s work is metacognitive and transparent.  The youth 
are informed by the political goals of black liberation 
and use African American scholars to construct them-
selves alongside black intellectual traditions, situating 
research as a form of literacy.   

Another staple of the Uhuru Youth Scholars pro-
gram is to spend time connecting African knowledge 
systems to African language systems. Pedagogically, 
language provides a unique avenue to make tangible 
connections between Diasporic and continental African 
peoples. Using the writings of raciolinguists like Smith 
(1998) and Smitherman and Smitherman-Donald-
son (1986), the youth explore how language contains 
something like the DNA of a people and can be helpful 
in tracing movement and transformation over time. 
Typically, the short stint with African language systems 
is one of the more eye-opening periods for the youth 
researchers who have usually been told since they were 
of school age that their and their families’ black linguis-
tic codes were deficient and “broken.”  The youth often 
return with stories of how they showed the readings 
to their parents and grandparents who would respond 
with reserved interest, or their English teachers who 
would skeptically look at the readings and then com-
mence with their narrow curriculum.  

As Uhuru youth connect the pieces of their deep 
dive into the construction of their own belief systems, 
the educators help them organize their thinking by ex-
ploring how African knowledge systems are defined by 
interconnectedness rather than distinct disciplines of 
thought (Lozenski & Ford, 2014).  Through this fram-
ing black language is connected to spirituality, which 
is connected with aesthetics, which is connected with 
science and math, which is connected to photography, 
which is connected to history, and so on. 

As the youth circle a research topic, they develop 
what is known as an “issue tree”.  The issue tree is 
made up of leaves (research questions about issues/
topics that interest the youth), branches (categories 
connecting each of the leaves by topic), limbs (under-
lying structures that connect multiple categories), and 
finally the trunk and roots (final research questions 
that explore the most pertinent limbs and go “below the 
surface”).  Not only is the tree a way to help excavate 
the underlying ideas that connect many of our interests, 
it is a teaching tool that helps them learn how to design 
researchable questions, provoke dialogue that requires

depth of thought, and acts as a visual for presentations 
of the research design process. At this point the work of 
Uhuru becomes largely unique from cohort to cohort as 
their research questions dictate their modes of inquiry, 
methods of data generation, and action-oriented activ-
ities. In the remainder of this article I highlight three 
important implications for pedagogy in Ethnic Studies 
work when mediated by YPAR.

A Critical Research Methodology
I have studied Uhuru for several years as a partic-

ipant ethnographer (Madison, 2005), facilitator, and 
co-researcher with the youth in the program. Each of 
these positions impacts my understandings of the ped-
agogical and methodological implications in nuanced 
ways, as does my social location and racial construc-
tion as an African American, cisgender, man. Yet, as I 
explored in previous writing specifically focusing on 
methodology (Lozenski, 2016), it is impossible for 
me to disaggregate these positionalities into distinct 
identities. I have described my role as being engaged in 
an “irreversible methodology”, which I liken to an irre-
versible chemical reaction, such as baking a cake. When 
baking a cake, the constituent parts (e.g. flour, eggs, 
sugar, milk) cannot be retrieved once the chemical re-
action takes place. In similar ways, being an ethnogra-
pher, an educator, and a co-researcher cannot be easily 
disjoined. I explored how my research was impacted by 
my teaching, which was impacted by my collaborative 
relationship with the youth in Uhuru. 

Methodologically, I situate my work amidst pre-
vious critical ethnographers engaged with youth in 
PAR (Morrell, 2004; Kinloch,2010). Drawing from this 
critical research tradition, I see my role as both criti-
cal pedagogue and critical researcher as an attempt to 
enact what Kincheloe, McLaren, and Steinberg (2011) 
have referred to as “bricolage”. Kincheloe (2008) writes, 
“Appreciating research as a power-driven act, the 
critical researcher-as-bricoleur abandons the quest for 
some naïve concept of realism, focusing instead on the 
clarification of his or her position in the web of reality 
and the social locations of other researchers and how 
they shape the production and interpretation of knowl-
edge” (p. 131). Bricolage refers to the hyper-awareness 
of social location amidst a field of power such that 
researchers are forced to imagine new ways of making 
interdisciplinary meaning about their social world. My 
theorization of my own “irreversible methodology” is 
an attempt to describe the complexity of educating and 
being educated within a context of inquiry. More 

Global Journal of Transformative Education (2019) 1:1



Lozenski, Constructing a Dual-Subjectivity  32

importantly, the Uhuru youth, as described below, 
enacted this conceptualization of research more pro-
ficiently because they were unbounded by years of 
disciplinary limitations. 

The findings explored in this article come from 
both empirical and anecdotal evidence. Uhuru has been 
in existence since 2012, and I completed an empirical 
study of the 2012-13 academic year. I then co-facili-
tated the program until 2017. Some of my empirical 
findings have become more nuanced in the subsequent 
years of teaching and co-researching with Uhuru youth. 
The methods that inform these findings are both formal 
and informal. My ethnographic study of the 2012-13 
cohort consisted of six high school seniors of African 
descent (ages 17-20), including youth who had recently 
immigrated to the US from Liberia, African American 
youth, and youth who identified as having mixed ethnic 
and racial heritage. All of the youth who participated 
in Uhuru agreed to take part in the ethnography as 
research participants. Empirically, I conducted multiple 
semi-structured interviews with participants, video-re-
corded class sessions, took ethnographic field notes, 
and collected cultural documents such as data from the 
youths’ research (Lozenski, 2014; 2016; 2017b). These 
data consisted of the youths’ metacognitive research 
journals, semi-structured interviews and focus groups 
they conducted with community members, iterative 
concept maps of their findings, and video recordings 
of the youth disseminating their research in multiple 
forums. Analytically, I engaged in mediated discourse 
analysis (Lozenski, 2014) of the Uhuru program, in-
cluding iterative qualitative coding (Strauss & Corbin, 
1998). 

Informally, I have engaged in discussions with in-
dividuals and groups about their experience, analyzed 
video resulting from their community-based research, 
video-recorded disseminations of their research at 
local and national academic conferences, video-record-
ed artistic performances based on their research, and 
collected cultural documents from their work together 
(Lozenski, 2016).  The findings here come from years 
of contemplating this work from multiple perspectives 
and positions. The entirety of the Uhuru program, in-
cluding its implementation, operation, and the research 
described in this analysis are embedded in critical the-
ory, which is inherently attuned to the flows of power. 
Uhuru was constructed out of a space of resistance to 
the dominant educational power structures. This anal-
ysis assumes these asymmetrical power dynamics are 
always in place and seeks to serve as a disruptive force,

refusing notions of objectivity and neutrality that up-
hold the status quo of educational research. 

Findings
Black youth in the United States embody particular 

explanatory forms of contradiction. They stand as tes-
taments of survivance—sheer and utter determination 
of generations to simply resist erasure. They inhabit a 
liminal space between rhetoric and practice, enslave-
ment and emancipation, and colonial subjectivity and 
citizenship. Their construction as youth situates them 
uniquely within their communities as well. They experi-
ence the world differently, inhabit underground spaces, 
and fight to maintain some semblance of innocence, 
though that often dissipates early in their lives. The 
precarious positionality of black youth situates them 
powerfully as community researchers and documentar-
ians (Payne, Starks, & Gibson, 2009; Stovall & Delgado, 
2009). Understanding this positionality has important 
implications for enacting critical forms of research, de-
veloping curriculum, and rethinking teaching practices 
and the functions of schooling. Positioning black youth 
as community researchers builds a Deweyan (Dewey, 
2011, 2013; Kurth-Schai, 2014) sense of educative 
meaning, and “psychologizes the curriculum” of their 
lived environment. 

In our current historical moment of videotaped 
police brutality and murder, the reification of colonial 
curricula in schools (Calderon, 2014), mass media de-
monization of black youth, and the continuance of mass 
incarceration, positioning black youth as community 
documentarians is a radical act. Yet, this is precisely 
the goal of the Uhuru. Through their use of YPAR, I saw 
how Uhuru’s constructions as both black and youth 
produced important researcher dispositions such as 
skepticism, cultural hybridity (Gonzalez, 2005), and 
historicity. Although Dewey was, at best, passive and, at 
worst, complicit (Fallace, 2015) with regard to racism 
and structural white supremacy in the United States, 
the youth in my study inadvertently buttressed his 
treatment of democracy as an ongoing practice, which 
is constantly threatened by the status quo.

Kurth-Schai (2014) writes, “For Dewey, democracy, 
as a radical process of living in dynamic relationship, is 
always vulnerable. Among democracy’s greatest threats 
is complacency—an unreflective passivity that renders 
processes of communal decision-making and civic 
action irrelevant and ineffective” (p. 428). This re-envi-
sioning of democratic practice that moves away from an 
adherence to State-governmentality, realized only

Global Journal of Transformative Education (2019) 1:1



Lozenski, Constructing a Dual-Subjectivity  33

through participation in electoral politics and voting, 
prioritizes the agency of community-based processes of 
self-governance and active citizenship. In this framing, 
citizenship is less about membership to a nation-state 
and more about local efforts to draw from community 
cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005) to impact the lived reali-
ties of families and close-knit communities. Drawing on 
this notion of “democracy as a radical process of living”, 
black youth are situated as researchers in three import-
ant ways:

1. The precarious nature of citizenship for black 
youth provides a healthy skepticism of ubiqui-
tous claims of the United States being an egal-
itarian, democratic society. The distance be-
tween rhetoric and reality can push black youth 
toward a Deweyan construction of radical lived 
democracy.

2. Due to the constant threat of state-enacted and 
state-sanctioned violence against black youth, 
often through schooling, they are more apt to 
resist the complacency that Dewey suggests 
is a constant threat to lived democratic prac-
tice. Thus, these youth should be positioned as 
holders of particularly insightful capacities (e.g. 
oppositional consciousness) (Sandoval, 2000) 
for action-oriented research.

3. Critical participatory action research with youth 
provides the conditions for radical democracy 
to be practiced and allows curriculum to be 
“psychologized”, or have intrinsic meaning with-
in the lived experiences of youth.

Enacting Democratic Praxis
Typically, democratic participation in the US is 

narrowly conceived around electoral politics. Voting 
stands as the epitome of what it means to be a par-
ticipatory democratic citizen. Historically, the right to 
vote has been denied to most subgroups in the United 
States at one time, including women, people who did 
not own property, people of color, felons, the disabled, 
and youth. Today in most states, people convicted of a 
felony still face some form of disenfranchisement, even 
if they have served their sentence (Fortin, 2018). Youth 
under eighteen have always been disenfranchised, 
limiting their capacity to practice the perceived mech-
anisms of democratic practice. Black youth are particu-
larly vulnerable as pseudo citizens because they experi-
ence the historical accumulation of civic discrimination, 
and do not have access to the levers of power that many 
tell them are the only legitimate way to change their

circumstance. As Vaught (2017) writes, “Children have 
no vested rights. They do not own property. They are 
not enfranchised. Attached to White propertied guard-
ians, youth are private citizens-in-the-making or citi-
zens-in-waiting. If they are not, they are a threat… They 
are foremost a threat to the exclusivity and authority 
of… the state” (p. 113). Faced with this limited notion 
of democratic practice, all youth, and particularly black 
youth must conceive of democracy in alternative ways. 
They must either completely depend on the adults in 
their life to be their vicarious democratic conduits, or 
they need to find ways to assemble this practice us-
ing the means available to them. In this way, similar 
to the methodological bricolage (Kincheloe, McLaren, 
Steinberg, 2011) described above, these youth become 
bricoleurs of democracy, thus enacting this Deweyan 
approach. 

Across each of the Uhuru cohorts, they have found 
creative and critical ways of engaging in an active 
democratic process to influence the political contexts 
that impact their lives. This is due to a combination of 
the developing political agency that attracts youth to 
a program like Uhuru, and the pedagogy mediated by 
YPAR and its active approach to influencing the social 
worlds of the youth. From this perspective, the political 
realm need not be reduced to electoral politics. Elected 
officials are not the only policymakers in the lives of 
these youth. Often, Uhuru youth are impacted by more 
intimate policies happening at the school level, or by 
contact with local law enforcement. For instance, Uhuru 
youth in the 2015-16 cohort engaged in research ex-
ploring the role of “school resource officers” (SROs) in 
their high school. SROs are police officers designated to 
public schools based on a contract between the police 
department and the school district (Boarini, 2017). 
The youth surveyed their peers about contact with 
SROs, engaged in a discourse analysis of district policy 
regarding the presence and role of SROs, presented 
their findings at school board meetings, and engaged 
in protest around the presence of SROs, and the dispro-
portionate contact they have with students of color in 
the district. 

Uhuru’s interest in this issue came after one of their 
classmates was assaulted by an SRO, which came on 
the heels of several similar incidents. Interestingly, the 
youth organized themselves outside of the context of 
Uhuru, but used many of the methodologies they adopt-
ed through the program to inform their activism. They 
recognized that in order to challenge the power struc-
ture of the district that they would need to employ

Global Journal of Transformative Education (2019) 1:1



Lozenski, Constructing a Dual-Subjectivity  34

multiple methods beyond the franchise. Understanding 
the practices of these youth as democratic broadens 
how we conceive of democracy in action. Once youth 
see themselves as political agents, the methodological 
bricolage of democratic practice opens up to them, only 
being limited by their imagination.

The Praxis of Ethnic Studies in Understanding  
State-violence

The 2014-15 cohort of the Uhuru Youth Scholars 
consisted of twelve high school youth from across St. 
Paul. This particular year of Uhuru was rife with emo-
tion and frustration as the non-indictments of police 
in the slayings of Michael Brown (Ferguson, Missouri) 
and Eric Garner (Staten Island, New York) seemed to 
pile on top of each other each week.  Much of our early 
class time was spent giving the youth space to vent, 
yell, question, and voice desires for what justice could 
look like.  Our role as pedagogues was to help our youth 
develop the practice of historicity (Lozenski, 2017b), 
by exploring how these seemingly modern instances of 
injustice were cyclical manifestations of white suprem-
acy.  We examined past accounts of police injustice and 
asked the youth to draw parallels between the rela-
tionship between police and black communities over 
time.  We examined the role that research could play in 
documenting police brutality (Eisen, 2014) and how, 
as researchers, we could develop a skill set to more 
effectively mobilize the resistance that was palpable in 
our community. 

Some Uhuru Youth Scholars became part of out-
side organized efforts to protest and resist through 
participation in the Minnesota contingent of #Black-
LivesMatter and the local National Association for the 
Advancement of Colored People’s (NAACP) efforts to 
bring awareness to disparities in the criminal justice 
system. We were careful to make distinctions, however, 
between our roles as researchers and our participation 
in direct action, which allowed us to explore the mul-
tifaceted aspects of historical social movements that 
required the intellectual renderings of historical mo-
ments combined with the willingness to place bodies 
on the line in the face of oppression. Martin Luther 
King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail (1963/1992), en-
abled us to engage with dualism between thought and 
action, exploring how they constitute each other.

Still, our work was not only about being im-
mersed in the current events of our time, although they 
provided us with usable evidence that we had much to 
learn and do as scholars and activists.  Thus we took a

step back and began to explore media accounts of how 
current events were being covered using critical me-
dia studies (Morrell, Duenas, Garcia, Lopez, 2013). We 
investigated language, bias, media production, con-
sumption, and ownership, asking “who benefits from 
this coverage and who suffers?” Simultaneously, we 
explored methods of qualitative and mixed-methods 
data generation such as field observations, semi-struc-
tured interviewing, survey development, and photog-
raphy. Youth saw the process of research from multiple 
angles and perspectives, generating and deconstructing 
data simultaneously. They were exploring their own 
purposes for conducting research while contemplating 
why other researchers and journalists were not being 
transparent about their relationship to the issue. They 
were questioning why what they were observing was 
being defended as “objective” while they could see obvi-
ous bias in the study. All the while they were immersed 
in classical African epistemologies (Martin, 2008; 
McDougal, 2014), which stood in stark contrast to the 
ways in which they were used to thinking about social 
inquiry. The resulting framework of their own research 
illuminated how all of these elements came together to 
provide a powerful lens through which to begin their 
own inquiry.

YPAR as Bricolage
An undertheorized aspect of youth research is 

creativity and improvisation in the research process.  
Like other collectives of youth researchers, the Uhuru 
Scholars were unafraid to explore alternative methods 
of data generation.  For instance, one Uhuru cohort was 
interested in researching perceptions of beauty among 
black youth. They hypothesized that black youths’ un-
derstandings of beauty were tied to anti-black market-
ing and exposure to demands for hyper-consumption 
from the beauty industry. On a larger level, they were 
also attempting to historicize their work within the 
context of European colonization and the psychological 
impacts of domination on black communities. After 
doing interviews at a local beauty salon, the team found 
out that a group of people got together each week to 
watch the popular TV show Empire at the salon.  The 
group called up members of a different cohort explor-
ing media conditioning to join them for the gathering 
to interview attendees.  After the show finished mem-
bers of each team held an impromptu focus group with 
everyone in the salon, which they video recorded, to get 
their perspectives about how media impacted the ways 
in which they saw the world and also defined beauty.

Global Journal of Transformative Education (2019) 1:1



Lozenski, Constructing a Dual-Subjectivity  35

Whether it was due to the youths’ boldness, intuition, 
or naiveté, they generated some of the most rich, in-
sightful data of their project. 

The focus group allowed for generative discussions 
about data analysis, coding, and alternative methods of 
collective meaning making.  At the same time, it allowed 
us to discuss more abstract ideas like research ethics 
and the responsibility of collecting sacred stories from 
our community that we may not want to share with ev-
eryone.  The notion of collecting sacred stories became 
an idea that the Uhuru scholars continued to develop 
and presented at a national conference over the sum-
mer.  It is experiences like these that give substance to 
the Uhuru Youth Scholars program.  The combination of 
the structured and the unscripted, the jazz-like flow of a 
solid foundation infused with improvisation provided a 
rhythmic heartbeat to our work, which allowed them to 
live out their heritage. 

Conclusion
As educators, researchers, and activists continue 

to demand Ethnic Studies in K-12 contexts, it becomes 
more imperative to be vigilant about how Ethnic Stud-
ies are implemented. Just as important as the existence 
of spaces for the exploration of the ethnicized subject 
are the curricular, instructional, and monetary struc-
tures that constitute its capacity. In this article, I used a 
particular context for Africana Studies to illustrate how 
the capacity of black youth to engage in this work re-
quires our expansive methodological and spatial imag-
inations. The intersection of YPAR and Ethnic Studies 
positions youth to be subjects of their own analysis at 
the curricular level, and it positions them to be subjects 
of their own instructional practice at the research level. 
This dual subjectivity has important implications with 
regard to how the Uhuru youth were able to understand 
the work of Africana Studies. Ethnic studies are larger 
than the container of school. They require contexts 
that are not about technical approaches to teaching 
and learning. Understanding the Ethnic Studies stu-
dent-as-bricoleur enables educators to see that youth 
in these contexts are working to cobble together their 
freedom through self-determination.

Through this framing, the purpose of Ethnic 
Studies becomes entirely different. As Kelley (2016) 
describes, referring to institutions of higher education.

Black studies was conceived not just outside the 
university but in opposition to a Eurocentric uni-
versity culture with ties to corporate and military 
power. Having emerged from mass revolt, insurg-

ent black studies scholars developed institution-
al models based in, but largely independent of, 
the academy. In later decades, these institutions 
were—with varying degrees of eagerness—in-
corporated into the university proper in response 
to pressure to embrace multiculturalism (p. 157).
If we are true to the inception of these educational 

spaces, as Kelley describes, then their purpose cannot 
purely be academic, or for some credential. Rather, we 
should understand Ethnic Studies spaces as prepara-
tion for, and an attempt to engage in liberatory praxis. 
Thus, Kelley argues, we cannot separate our activist 
and intellectual capacities. Ethnic Studies is activism. 
The two cannot be disaggregated. 

As explored in the examples from the Uhuru Youth 
Scholars program, if we see Africana Studies as an ac-
tive space for liberation of the ethnicized subject, then 
there needs to be a concomitant pedagogy. YPAR holds 
this capacity. YPAR, as a pedagogical and methodologi-
cal practice, provides the necessary fluidity for both the 
intellectual and action-based entities needed to engage 
in this work. I am not arguing that Ethnic Studies can-
not be conceived of absent YPAR. I am suggesting that 
the merging of the two creates a dynamic environment 
where the reciprocation of their ideals live in tact. Eth-
nic Studies cannot simply be taught using disconnected, 
technical, and mainstream methods in similar ways that 
YPAR cannot take up issues absent of critical theory. 
The Uhuru Youth Scholars demonstrate that liberato-
ry democratic praxis needs a diverse theoretical and 
methodological environment. Kincheloe (2008) writes, 
“The bricolage exists out of respect for the complexi-
ty of the lived world…. The task of the bricoleur is to 
attack this multicultural complexity, uncovering both 
the visible and invisible artifacts of multiple forms of 
power, and documenting the nature of its influence on 
not only their own but on scholarship and knowledge 
production in general” (p. 131-132). The ethnic subject 
is within this bricolage. The Ethnic Studies student 
must become bricoleur to describe the complexity of 
this experience in order to know the ethnicized sub-
ject’s liberated pathways.

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Lozenski, Constructing a Dual-Subjectivity  36

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1 Brian David Lozenski (blozensk@macalester.edu) is an 
Assistant Professor of Urban and Multicultural Education 
at Macalester College, St. Paul, Minnesota, USA.

Author


