research

My research focuses on engaging those most directly impacted by organizational and social issues to achieve equity and justice.

Research areas

I specialize in community-rooted, participatory, and action-oriented research in order to shift power and enable co-ownership in research projects. My current research agenda is in partnership with high school students, civic engagement staff, and housing subsidy recipients to change prevailing leadership narratives from a single credentialed hero to collective and liberatory leadership by everyday people. My research study and practice aim to contribute to the longstanding tradition of scholar-activism.

Stories as Data

How can we use the narratives gathered from a story circle as data for qualitative research? I’ve been grappling with this question since I began my story circle practice in 2019, and in 2020, I developed an interview method that builds upon this narrative practice.

A Seat at the Table

How do the concepts of leadership, agency, and power play out when individuals with lived experience are invited to serve on policy advisory boards or committees? Collaborating with New York City high school students and housing subsidy recipients in suburban New Jersey, I seek to understand their experiences as public service leaders.

Stories as Data

Having developed the Story Circle Interview Method in 2020 for an organizing group in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, I continue to utilize it in other contexts and geographies. Drawing on the story circle practice developed by the Free Southern Theater during the U.S. Civil Rights era, this interview method enables co-researchers to gather and analyze stories in community. These stories generate themes and insights that can be used for organizational and community change. Participants have shared that this method uses low-tech ways to create critical connections, community, and knowledge. 

I have held online and in-person trainings on this method for staff members at the Partnership for Public Service and the University of Richmond Bonner Center for Civic Engagement, students at Smith College Wurtele Center for Leadership, leaders from the Sterling Network NYC, and members of The Latinx Project network. I authored a chapter on this method in the edited book Anti-colonial Research Praxis: Methods for Knowledge Justice (editor Caroline Lenette). The chapter explains the origins of the story circle practice, the interview method’s origins, and the contexts in which it has been used.

Currently, I’m co-leading a participatory action research project with the University of Richmond Bonner Center for Civic Engagement, utilizing the Story Circle Interview Method. We are co-designing and implementing a community-engaged “attunement process” to joyfully and fully involve stakeholders in collectively painting a bold vision for the Center’s future as it nears its 20th anniversary. While the Story Circle Interview Method is core to the project’s data collection efforts, we are utilizing the Bonner Center’s participatory data analysis method, Data Labs, to make meaning of the stories gathered.

A Seat at the Table

Political scientist Ange Marie Hancock, in her book Politics of Disgust, argues that misperceptions of public service recipients (e.g., the “welfare queen” stereotype) lead to “legislative outcomes that are undemocratic both procedurally and substantively” (Hancock, 2004). Similarly, the “myth of bureaucratic neutrality” (Portillo, Humphrey & Bearfield, 2022) underscores the flawed nature of public administration and its outcomes as it relates to race. Building on this scholarship, I’m in early stage research phase exploring the policy and public administration bodies that actively involve constituents with lived experience in leadership and decision-making processes. I plan to study the role of these constituents as policy actors across two geographies and policy contexts: housing in suburban New Jersey and public education in New York City. Using qualitative methods like interview, observation and document review, I seek to understand these questions:

  1. What leadership practices are exercised in these spaces? 

  2. What processes or structures help or hinder their agency on these policy bodies? 

  3. What kind of power do they have, if at all, and how might they wield or subvert the power in order to redress the politics of disgust and the myth of bureaucratic neutrality?

  4. How does the experience of the policy bodies shape their lives?

Through this project, I hope that public service leaders learn more about how the lived experience of constituents on policy bodies can or cannot influence policy as a strategy for social equity. In addition, I hope it invites them to consider the ways in which public service initiatives like this can advance social equity in the face of disgust and mythic neutrality.

Projects

Social Equity Leadership Conference Roundtable Discussion (2024) 

A Seat at the Table paper (in development)

“Collaborative research instantiates us in a world of rampant individualism.”

—Dána-Ain Davis,

professor of Urban Studies and Anthropology,
CUNY Graduate Center