Meagan Call-Cummings
Biographic Data
| ID | 243219 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Meagan Call-Cummings |
| GIVEN NAMES | Meagan |
| FAMILY NAME | Call-Cummings |
| SIGNATURE | CALL-CUMMINGS M |
| AFFILIATIONS | George Mason University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9952-0449 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 60 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Approaches to resisting linguistic hegemony in critical and participatory qualitative research: Community-based translation and translanguaging
In this methodological paper, we explore the interplay between language shift and research practice in critical and participatory qualitative inquiry. We begin by observing that performing qualitative research frequently requires a shift to English, the hegemonic academic lingua franca–a process often rooted in extractive colonial logics. We argue that critical and participatory qualitative methodologies can play an important role in resisting li…
Youth Perspectives on School Safety: A Study by the Youth Research Council
Critical Participatory Action Research
Critical participatory action research (CPAR), informed by theoretical developments that span time, geographies, and traditions, is characterized by strong ties to epistemology and is often referred to not as a research method but as an epistemological stance. CPAR suggests those who have experience with a phenomenon are experts on that phenomenon and should be the ones who lead inquiry about it. Three central concepts guide this stance: vivencia…
Misaligned expectations for youth-led research in direct policy change: A systematic review
Despite the promise of youth-led research initiatives for enacting transformative change, globally there are vast differences in how youth-led research is enacted by those in leadership. This systematic review asks three questions: (1) To what extent have youth-led research initiatives resulted in direct policy changes?, (2) What mechanisms are employed in youth-led research projects?, and (3) To what extent are youth who are leading research mot…
Community-Based Research as Civic Action: An Example From the Youth Research Council
Literature on civic engagement has long held an adult bias and is rooted in understandings of civic participation undertaken by adults, not youth. Youth are rarely treated as civic actors in their own right, but instead as would-be civic actors. We make a case for building social science research capacity as a critical tool for civic action, especially salient for groups working toward organizational, institutional, and/or legislative change and …
Filtering Out My Face: Rethinking Critical Narrative Analysis
Based on an 18-month narrative study of female middle managers at a large community college in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States, we examine current critical narrative analysis practices, emphasizing the structural nature of inequity and oppression. We illustrate how critical approaches to structural narrative analysis have missed intersectional aspects of the structures we analyze. We conclude that by explicitly analyzing for both int…
Decolonizing Relationality: Reflections From the Summer Institute in Anti-Racist and Decolonizing Research Methods
We are members of the Summer Institute in Anti-Racist and Decolonizing Research Methods, which attempts to shift social science research to be more inclusive and more explicitly connected to anti-racist and decolonizing principles. We tell a complicated, messy, often difficult story of what relationality could be in the context of work like ours. We hope that readers will consider the complications of relationality beyond the interpersonal questi…
Youth-Led Research and the Tensions Between Relational Methodologies and Fast Methods: Learning and Living in the In-Between
Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) has often been characterized as a meaningful way of including young people in research about and for them. Much has been written about the need to develop trusting relationships between adult and youth researchers in this process. These types of research relationships take time to develop authentically and we see a need for that relationship-building time to be built into research designs and timelines. …
The ‘Impact’ of Ypar: In their own words
The purpose of this paper is to present a conversation about how impact has been seen and felt by youth and adult co-researchers in a long-term, school-based youth participatory action research (YPAR) project, Courageous Conversations. To stay true to the epistemological commitments of YPAR, and in an effort to speak back to neocolonial and neoliberal definitions of impact, we have intentionally chosen to center the words of the school-based co-r…
Performance as transformation / transformative: Problematizing performance in PAR
In participatory action research (PAR), university-based researchers often take foundational concepts such as transformation, empowerment, critical consciousness, and mutual understanding for granted as desirable or necessary outcomes or achievements. We discuss the danger of this and suggest that researchers recognize these as processes that participants may or may not experience, achieve, or even desire. In this manuscript, four members of a lo…
Solidarity as methodological praxis
In this article, we explore the concept of solidarity in the context of empirical social inquiry, a concept that is underdeveloped in the research methodology literature. We do so by drawing connections and contrasts to other more established methodological concepts such as reflexivity and positionality. We draw upon existing literature as well as reflection and analyses of our personal experiences and research endeavors to illustrate the nature …
School-based Ypar: Negotiating productive tensions of participation and possibility
YPAR seeks to position youth as experts on their worlds, investigating issues that affect their lives and then taking action to create solutions. As such, one of the key epistemological principles underpinning YPAR is the robust participation of youth throughout the knowledge creation process. A growing body of literature examines what youth participation looks like in the context of YPAR that is enacted in school settings. Building on this recen…
Counter-storytelling: Toward a critical race praxis for participatory action research
As university-based educational researchers who have engaged in participatory methods with marginalized populations, we have rising concerns about how interpersonal and institutional power dynamics affect co-researchers from racial and ethnic minority groups. In this manuscript, we use critical race and critical whiteness theory and counter-storytelling methodology to examine three experiences of the same event, which occurred in the context of a…
Hopefully This Motivates a Bout of Realization”: Spoken Word Poetry as Critical Literacy
The authors examined how youth from the Northern Virginia region communicated their thoughts on significant social issues, school‐level policies, and individual stresses through collaboratively authored spoken word poetry. This poetry was written during a day of out‐of‐school arts‐based inquiry workshops planned by an intergenerational youth participatory action research collective that works to foster connections and conversations about topics i…
Empowerment or exposure? Ethical dilemmas of visual methods with vulnerable migrants
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to present a typology of the treatment of ethical issues in recent studies using visual participatory methods with immigrants and refugees and provide insights for researchers into how these issues can be more adequately addressed. Design/methodology/approach The paper presents the results of a scoping study as a typology of ethical considerations, from standard IRB approval to complete ethical guidelines/fram…
Examining Researcher Identity Development within the Context of a Course on PAR: A Layered Narrative Approach
In this paper we explore the ways in which a group of doctoral students grapples with the epistemology of participatory action research (PAR) in relation to their own personal and professional identities and research agendas while taking a course on PAR. As a professor of research methodology and two doctoral students, we examine the entangled and often hidden processes of teaching and learning PAR in order to identify experiences or events that …
Struggling with/against the unintentional reproduction of power structures in participatory research: Using reconstructive horizon analysis
Shared power and democratic decision making are core epistemological commitments of participatory action research. Scholars who engage in participatory action research with youth seek to share ownership and disrupt adult/child or knower/learner binaries traditional in the Global North, in which adults are the active agents who own and transfer knowledge to children, who remain in a passive role. Yet, we have noticed during several of our projects…
The Role of Researcher in Participatory Inquiry: Modeling Intra-Active Reflexivity in Conversational Reflections
This article presents intimate conversations among three colleagues around ethical considerations of ethnographic inter-racial qualitative inquiry. It draws on an ethnographic research project conducted at a high school in rural Idaho, USA. Focusing on the question, 'Why are our teachers racist?' the collective worked together to challenge subtle inequity at this particular school. The authors come together in a dialogue to reflect on the role of…
Acknowledging and transcending ‘failure’: Lifeworld possibilities and system constraints
In this article, we interrogate the concept of methodological ‘failures’ as they arise during fieldwork, in the process of collecting empirical data. We highlight how the techniques of validity horizon matrices and power analysis can be used as methodological tools to illustrate moments in the fieldwork process where these ‘failures’ occur and to illustrate what makes them ‘failures’ rather than just opportunities for learning. Drawing on example…
It’s too political”: The overt and covert silencing of critical Latino/a voices
Establishing Communicative Validity: Discovering Theory Through Practice
In this article, I examine the process of establishing the communicative validity of research. Using Habermas' ideal speech situation as a theoretical backdrop, I explore three moments in which the roles enacted by members of a research collective were implicitly or explicitly negotiated. I find that by examining moments of role negotiation we can explore the level of participation at which stakeholders engage in the process of knowledge producti…
It wasn’t racism; it was more misunderstanding.’ White teachers, Latino/a students, and racial battle fatigue
This article explores how and why a group of Latino/a high school students identify and explain racism differently over the course of an 18-month participatory action research (PAR) project. To do this we examine what recent scholarship has termed racial microaggressions in what is thought of as the Post-Racial America public school system. Pulling examples from student and teacher interview, focus group, and class discussion data we first examin…
Consciousness-Raising or Unintentionally Oppressive
Photovoice is typically used in community and participatory research to allow people to document and interpret their everyday lived experiences. However, often photovoice is used as a research method without deep reflection on its underlying goals and epistemological commitments to critically empower its participants and spark reflective dialogue within a community. This article showcases selections from a photovoice exhibit and its accompanying …
Endorsing empowerment? A critical comparative study of peace education in Jamaica and Peru
Is empowering peace education primarily about providing individuals with skills to respond to violence they experience and capabilities to enhance their own lives? Or is inspiring social transformation to alter forms of injustice that contribute to violence an equally valid and important dimension of an empowering peace education program? This article draws upon the authors’ experiences researching peace education programs implemented by local no…
Struggling with/against the unintentional reproduction of power structures in participatory research: Using reconstructive horizon analysis
Shared power and democratic decision making are core epistemological commitments of participatory action research. Scholars who engage in participatory action research with youth seek to share ownership and disrupt adult/child or knower/learner binaries traditional in the Global North, in which adults are the active agents who own and transfer knowledge to children, who remain in a passive role. Yet, we have noticed during several of our projects…
It wasn’t racism; it was more misunderstanding.’ White teachers, Latino/a students, and racial battle fatigue
This article explores how and why a group of Latino/a high school students identify and explain racism differently over the course of an 18-month participatory action research (PAR) project. To do this we examine what recent scholarship has termed racial microaggressions in what is thought of as the Post-Racial America public school system. Pulling examples from student and teacher interview, focus group, and class discussion data we first examin…
Establishing Communicative Validity: Discovering Theory Through Practice
In this article, I examine the process of establishing the communicative validity of research. Using Habermas' ideal speech situation as a theoretical backdrop, I explore three moments in which the roles enacted by members of a research collective were implicitly or explicitly negotiated. I find that by examining moments of role negotiation we can explore the level of participation at which stakeholders engage in the process of knowledge producti…
Solidarity as methodological praxis
In this article, we explore the concept of solidarity in the context of empirical social inquiry, a concept that is underdeveloped in the research methodology literature. We do so by drawing connections and contrasts to other more established methodological concepts such as reflexivity and positionality. We draw upon existing literature as well as reflection and analyses of our personal experiences and research endeavors to illustrate the nature …
Empowerment or exposure? Ethical dilemmas of visual methods with vulnerable migrants
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to present a typology of the treatment of ethical issues in recent studies using visual participatory methods with immigrants and refugees and provide insights for researchers into how these issues can be more adequately addressed. Design/methodology/approach The paper presents the results of a scoping study as a typology of ethical considerations, from standard IRB approval to complete ethical guidelines/fram…
The Role of Researcher in Participatory Inquiry: Modeling Intra-Active Reflexivity in Conversational Reflections
This article presents intimate conversations among three colleagues around ethical considerations of ethnographic inter-racial qualitative inquiry. It draws on an ethnographic research project conducted at a high school in rural Idaho, USA. Focusing on the question, 'Why are our teachers racist?' the collective worked together to challenge subtle inequity at this particular school. The authors come together in a dialogue to reflect on the role of…
Consciousness-Raising or Unintentionally Oppressive
Photovoice is typically used in community and participatory research to allow people to document and interpret their everyday lived experiences. However, often photovoice is used as a research method without deep reflection on its underlying goals and epistemological commitments to critically empower its participants and spark reflective dialogue within a community. This article showcases selections from a photovoice exhibit and its accompanying …
Youth-Led Research and the Tensions Between Relational Methodologies and Fast Methods: Learning and Living in the In-Between
Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) has often been characterized as a meaningful way of including young people in research about and for them. Much has been written about the need to develop trusting relationships between adult and youth researchers in this process. These types of research relationships take time to develop authentically and we see a need for that relationship-building time to be built into research designs and timelines. …
Counter-storytelling: Toward a critical race praxis for participatory action research
As university-based educational researchers who have engaged in participatory methods with marginalized populations, we have rising concerns about how interpersonal and institutional power dynamics affect co-researchers from racial and ethnic minority groups. In this manuscript, we use critical race and critical whiteness theory and counter-storytelling methodology to examine three experiences of the same event, which occurred in the context of a…
Acknowledging and transcending ‘failure’: Lifeworld possibilities and system constraints
In this article, we interrogate the concept of methodological ‘failures’ as they arise during fieldwork, in the process of collecting empirical data. We highlight how the techniques of validity horizon matrices and power analysis can be used as methodological tools to illustrate moments in the fieldwork process where these ‘failures’ occur and to illustrate what makes them ‘failures’ rather than just opportunities for learning. Drawing on example…
Examining Researcher Identity Development within the Context of a Course on PAR: A Layered Narrative Approach
In this paper we explore the ways in which a group of doctoral students grapples with the epistemology of participatory action research (PAR) in relation to their own personal and professional identities and research agendas while taking a course on PAR. As a professor of research methodology and two doctoral students, we examine the entangled and often hidden processes of teaching and learning PAR in order to identify experiences or events that …
Endorsing empowerment? A critical comparative study of peace education in Jamaica and Peru
Is empowering peace education primarily about providing individuals with skills to respond to violence they experience and capabilities to enhance their own lives? Or is inspiring social transformation to alter forms of injustice that contribute to violence an equally valid and important dimension of an empowering peace education program? This article draws upon the authors’ experiences researching peace education programs implemented by local no…
Endorsing empowerment? A critical comparative study of peace education in Jamaica and Peru
Is empowering peace education primarily about providing individuals with skills to respond to violence they experience and capabilities to enhance their own lives? Or is inspiring social transformation to alter forms of injustice that contribute to violence an equally valid and important dimension of an empowering peace education program? This article draws upon the authors’ experiences researching peace education programs implemented by local no…
It wasn’t racism; it was more misunderstanding.’ White teachers, Latino/a students, and racial battle fatigue
This article explores how and why a group of Latino/a high school students identify and explain racism differently over the course of an 18-month participatory action research (PAR) project. To do this we examine what recent scholarship has termed racial microaggressions in what is thought of as the Post-Racial America public school system. Pulling examples from student and teacher interview, focus group, and class discussion data we first examin…
Consciousness-Raising or Unintentionally Oppressive
Photovoice is typically used in community and participatory research to allow people to document and interpret their everyday lived experiences. However, often photovoice is used as a research method without deep reflection on its underlying goals and epistemological commitments to critically empower its participants and spark reflective dialogue within a community. This article showcases selections from a photovoice exhibit and its accompanying …
It’s too political”: The overt and covert silencing of critical Latino/a voices
Establishing Communicative Validity: Discovering Theory Through Practice
In this article, I examine the process of establishing the communicative validity of research. Using Habermas' ideal speech situation as a theoretical backdrop, I explore three moments in which the roles enacted by members of a research collective were implicitly or explicitly negotiated. I find that by examining moments of role negotiation we can explore the level of participation at which stakeholders engage in the process of knowledge producti…
Acknowledging and transcending ‘failure’: Lifeworld possibilities and system constraints
In this article, we interrogate the concept of methodological ‘failures’ as they arise during fieldwork, in the process of collecting empirical data. We highlight how the techniques of validity horizon matrices and power analysis can be used as methodological tools to illustrate moments in the fieldwork process where these ‘failures’ occur and to illustrate what makes them ‘failures’ rather than just opportunities for learning. Drawing on example…
Examining Researcher Identity Development within the Context of a Course on PAR: A Layered Narrative Approach
In this paper we explore the ways in which a group of doctoral students grapples with the epistemology of participatory action research (PAR) in relation to their own personal and professional identities and research agendas while taking a course on PAR. As a professor of research methodology and two doctoral students, we examine the entangled and often hidden processes of teaching and learning PAR in order to identify experiences or events that …
Struggling with/against the unintentional reproduction of power structures in participatory research: Using reconstructive horizon analysis
Shared power and democratic decision making are core epistemological commitments of participatory action research. Scholars who engage in participatory action research with youth seek to share ownership and disrupt adult/child or knower/learner binaries traditional in the Global North, in which adults are the active agents who own and transfer knowledge to children, who remain in a passive role. Yet, we have noticed during several of our projects…
The Role of Researcher in Participatory Inquiry: Modeling Intra-Active Reflexivity in Conversational Reflections
This article presents intimate conversations among three colleagues around ethical considerations of ethnographic inter-racial qualitative inquiry. It draws on an ethnographic research project conducted at a high school in rural Idaho, USA. Focusing on the question, 'Why are our teachers racist?' the collective worked together to challenge subtle inequity at this particular school. The authors come together in a dialogue to reflect on the role of…
Hopefully This Motivates a Bout of Realization”: Spoken Word Poetry as Critical Literacy
The authors examined how youth from the Northern Virginia region communicated their thoughts on significant social issues, school‐level policies, and individual stresses through collaboratively authored spoken word poetry. This poetry was written during a day of out‐of‐school arts‐based inquiry workshops planned by an intergenerational youth participatory action research collective that works to foster connections and conversations about topics i…
Empowerment or exposure? Ethical dilemmas of visual methods with vulnerable migrants
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to present a typology of the treatment of ethical issues in recent studies using visual participatory methods with immigrants and refugees and provide insights for researchers into how these issues can be more adequately addressed. Design/methodology/approach The paper presents the results of a scoping study as a typology of ethical considerations, from standard IRB approval to complete ethical guidelines/fram…
Counter-storytelling: Toward a critical race praxis for participatory action research
As university-based educational researchers who have engaged in participatory methods with marginalized populations, we have rising concerns about how interpersonal and institutional power dynamics affect co-researchers from racial and ethnic minority groups. In this manuscript, we use critical race and critical whiteness theory and counter-storytelling methodology to examine three experiences of the same event, which occurred in the context of a…
School-based Ypar: Negotiating productive tensions of participation and possibility
YPAR seeks to position youth as experts on their worlds, investigating issues that affect their lives and then taking action to create solutions. As such, one of the key epistemological principles underpinning YPAR is the robust participation of youth throughout the knowledge creation process. A growing body of literature examines what youth participation looks like in the context of YPAR that is enacted in school settings. Building on this recen…
The ‘Impact’ of Ypar: In their own words
The purpose of this paper is to present a conversation about how impact has been seen and felt by youth and adult co-researchers in a long-term, school-based youth participatory action research (YPAR) project, Courageous Conversations. To stay true to the epistemological commitments of YPAR, and in an effort to speak back to neocolonial and neoliberal definitions of impact, we have intentionally chosen to center the words of the school-based co-r…
Performance as transformation / transformative: Problematizing performance in PAR
In participatory action research (PAR), university-based researchers often take foundational concepts such as transformation, empowerment, critical consciousness, and mutual understanding for granted as desirable or necessary outcomes or achievements. We discuss the danger of this and suggest that researchers recognize these as processes that participants may or may not experience, achieve, or even desire. In this manuscript, four members of a lo…
Solidarity as methodological praxis
In this article, we explore the concept of solidarity in the context of empirical social inquiry, a concept that is underdeveloped in the research methodology literature. We do so by drawing connections and contrasts to other more established methodological concepts such as reflexivity and positionality. We draw upon existing literature as well as reflection and analyses of our personal experiences and research endeavors to illustrate the nature …
Youth-Led Research and the Tensions Between Relational Methodologies and Fast Methods: Learning and Living in the In-Between
Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) has often been characterized as a meaningful way of including young people in research about and for them. Much has been written about the need to develop trusting relationships between adult and youth researchers in this process. These types of research relationships take time to develop authentically and we see a need for that relationship-building time to be built into research designs and timelines. …
Community-Based Research as Civic Action: An Example From the Youth Research Council
Literature on civic engagement has long held an adult bias and is rooted in understandings of civic participation undertaken by adults, not youth. Youth are rarely treated as civic actors in their own right, but instead as would-be civic actors. We make a case for building social science research capacity as a critical tool for civic action, especially salient for groups working toward organizational, institutional, and/or legislative change and …
Filtering Out My Face: Rethinking Critical Narrative Analysis
Based on an 18-month narrative study of female middle managers at a large community college in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States, we examine current critical narrative analysis practices, emphasizing the structural nature of inequity and oppression. We illustrate how critical approaches to structural narrative analysis have missed intersectional aspects of the structures we analyze. We conclude that by explicitly analyzing for both int…
Decolonizing Relationality: Reflections From the Summer Institute in Anti-Racist and Decolonizing Research Methods
We are members of the Summer Institute in Anti-Racist and Decolonizing Research Methods, which attempts to shift social science research to be more inclusive and more explicitly connected to anti-racist and decolonizing principles. We tell a complicated, messy, often difficult story of what relationality could be in the context of work like ours. We hope that readers will consider the complications of relationality beyond the interpersonal questi…
Approaches to resisting linguistic hegemony in critical and participatory qualitative research: Community-based translation and translanguaging
In this methodological paper, we explore the interplay between language shift and research practice in critical and participatory qualitative inquiry. We begin by observing that performing qualitative research frequently requires a shift to English, the hegemonic academic lingua franca–a process often rooted in extractive colonial logics. We argue that critical and participatory qualitative methodologies can play an important role in resisting li…
Youth Perspectives on School Safety: A Study by the Youth Research Council
Critical Participatory Action Research
Critical participatory action research (CPAR), informed by theoretical developments that span time, geographies, and traditions, is characterized by strong ties to epistemology and is often referred to not as a research method but as an epistemological stance. CPAR suggests those who have experience with a phenomenon are experts on that phenomenon and should be the ones who lead inquiry about it. Three central concepts guide this stance: vivencia…
Misaligned expectations for youth-led research in direct policy change: A systematic review
Despite the promise of youth-led research initiatives for enacting transformative change, globally there are vast differences in how youth-led research is enacted by those in leadership. This systematic review asks three questions: (1) To what extent have youth-led research initiatives resulted in direct policy changes?, (2) What mechanisms are employed in youth-led research projects?, and (3) To what extent are youth who are leading research mot…
Sociology (20 works) · Participatory Visual Research Methods (15 works) · Participatory action research (14 works) · Action research (13 works) · Pedagogy (13 works) · Political science (13 works) · Social science (13 works) · Psychology (10 works) · Citizen journalism (8 works) · Epistemology (8 works)