Statement by Professor Carrion
Since 2015, when I arrived as an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, the NU Borders and Identities Collaborative has been working with high school age students in the Chicagoland and North Shore areas to create critical community-based research that studies social problems impacting our lives. Utilizing an intergenerational mentoring model, our goal has been to support and work alongside young people to examine our collective social realities through research and to create change through action, resistance, and new imaginaries. Our overall work, which is positioned within conversations on resistance and action, has contributed to the scholarly knowledge production within critical youth studies and education.
Our projects have included the creation and implementation of an ethnic studies curriculum which helped alternative high school co-researchers create original research for their senior thesis projects; worked with co-researchers from the Bronx to explore the history and contextualize policies which “ghettoized” the Bronx; guided Chicago Public School co-researchers who attended a selective enrollment high school through the college application process while also interrogating who has access to and “why attend college?”; helped a local North Shore high school implement a student-led Latinx Summit where co-researchers asked what it meant to be Latinx in their suburb and, workshopped projects on topics such as immigration, surveillance, access to resources and other pertinent issues at their school; and explored gentrification taking place in the Chicagoland area and many urban cities.
This summer, co-researchers created projects about their rights at their schools and the neighborhood where they live. Co-researchers presented their research and actions at an end of summer symposium. Their final projects included an alternative student rights handbook and a documentary examining the violent segregation that exists in the Chicagoland area and how it impacts lived realities.