Collaborative Indigenous Research is a way to repair the legacy of harmful research practices

Eve Tuck

Published: November 21, 2022 1.46pm EST

A recent disclosure from Harvard’s Peabody Museum has brought attention, yet again, to the need to rethink the relationships between universities and Indigenous communities.

Recently, the Peabody Museum announced that it has been holding locks of hair collected throughout the 1930s from more than 700 Indigenous children forced into residential boarding schools in the U.S.

The museum has apologized, vowing to return the hair clippings to Indigenous communities. In their written statement, they acknowledge that the clippings were taken at a time in which it was common practice in anthropology to use hair samples to “justify racial hierarchies and categories.”

If you grew up outside of Indigenous communities, Black communities, poor communities, and/or disabled communities, you might be surprised to learn that many have had negative experiences with university-based researchers. Nearly 25 years ago, renowned Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith observed that research is “probably one of the dirtiest words in the Indigenous world’s vocabulary.”

Some of the studies that have done Indigenous communities the most harm were used to justify genocide and land dispossession. These weren’t research as we would understand it today — they were white supremacist propaganda. But they are still the legacy of many contemporary fields of science and social science.

Some of these studies amounted to forms of torture deployed on Indigenous people, alongside Black people, people in concentration camps, disabled people and poor people under the auspices of science. These are the sorts of studies that necessitated the introduction of institutional ethics review boards in universities and communities.

Legacy of harmful research

Some studies have been coercive, not allowing Indigenous communities the ability to refuse or withdraw. Others have been conducted under duress. Some are deceptive. These are studies that say they are about one thing, but are really about something else.

Many other studies are extractive. Researchers pop up for a time, take what they need and leave. Far more are harmful because they over-promise (they can’t possibly generate the change that Indigenous communities desire). Or they are simply time-wasters: they learn something that the community already knew, but no one seemed to listen to them about.

Because of this history and contemporary situation, many people who grow up in Indigenous families are critical of researchers who don’t appreciate the real stakes, or real benefits, of research for Indigenous communities.

Indigenous Peoples have always been researchers. Many Indigenous worldviews, knowledge systems and values are based in inquiry, curiosity and sharing the results of inquiry through storytelling. (Shutterstock)

Learning from Indigenous ways of knowing

Since time immemorial, Indigenous communities have engaged in research activities, even when these approaches to research have been dismissed as unsystematic or not objective. Indigenous Peoples have always been researchers. Indeed, so many Indigenous worldviews, knowledge systems and values are based in inquiry, curiosity and sharing the results of inquiry through storytelling.

In addition to these ways of knowing, for more than two decades another approach to research with Indigenous communities has been practiced by researchers working inside and outside of the university. This approach, what I and others have come to call Collaborative Indigenous Research, is a deliberate challenge to the harmful ways university-based researchers have engaged with Indigenous communities.

This approach is rooted in the belief that Indigenous communities have long pasts, and even longer futures. It begins with the premise that Indigenous people have expertise about their everyday lives and the institutions and policies that affect them. This expertise reveals how institutions and policies impede their hopes and dreams. Collaborative Indigenous Research examines how Indigenous communities can bring about change to policy, practice, and relationships to lands, waters and one another.

This is research that honours Indigenous knowledges, not as something from the past, but as something that is enlivened through our collaboration. This is research that focuses on supporting the agency and self-determination of Indigenous communities, often in collaboration with Black communities and communities that have also experienced colonial violence.

Collaborative Indigenous research

One of the barriers that has kept people from learning how to do Collaborative Indigenous Research is the lack of support for Indigenous scholars who might otherwise be able to mentor newcomers to the field. This is a practice that, like so many other Indigenous ways of knowing, is best learned by doing, and from someone who is invested in the learner’s future. However, the same harmful aspects of university-based research that make Indigenous people suspicious of some research are also at work when Indigenous students stay away from careers in universities.

The Collaborative Indigenous Research (CIR) Digital Garden is one way of removing that barrier, by creating a space for learning, sharing and connecting across the internet in order to grow inspiration and expertise.

As an Indigenous scholar, I am often asked how research with Indigenous Peoples can be done in a more ethical way. This project — which took five years to build — is an answer. The CIR Digital Garden is a new online platform where users can search, read and post brief profiles of their studies.

Each profile includes key information about a study, including location, communities, research questions and methods. Profiles use categories and tags to make it easier to search and browse the site — think Pokémon cards, but for Indigenous research.

Unlike other research databases, the profiles also include the theories of change — how the collaborators think we can bring about social change — and what constitutes evidence in each study. The CIR Digital Garden isn’t behind a paywall or written only for an academic audience. The goal is to show how collaborative Indigenous research is already a thriving practice, with important place-based specificities represented in the various profiles.

To give new users a taste of what the capabilities of the garden are, we have already pre-loaded nearly 200 studies, so that you can search and read the types of profiles we hope will someday fill the garden. We hope that these initial 200 will be just a fraction of all of those that university and community-based researchers will add. We have an editorial team in place to review and support contributors in creating their study profiles.

We hope that this garden finds those who have a strong desire to do research differently. We hope this garden can be a gathering place for those who know this work is important, and might thrive with the support that isn’t often available in universities. We hope that we can nurture growth away from the harmful legacies of research done to Indigenous communities.

OISE scholar grows Indigenous-led research with a garden of examples

By Christine Ward

November 15, 2022

Dr. Eve Tuck wants to see more research done with rather than on Indigenous communities.

The OISE Indigenous Studies scholar has created a wholly innovative digital resource to inspire researchers to exchange their typical research methodologies for “more ethical, collaborative practices,” she says.

The new Collaborative Indigenous Research Digital Garden

launched this week. Available free to university and community-based researchers, it contains 200 examples of research undertaken in collaboration with Indigenous communities around the world. But, these are only meant to show the potential of the digital garden, which Tuck hopes will soon be filled with exponentially more profiles.

The Intergenerational Knowledge Room functions as the hub for community researchers and community-based research. Photo courtesy Tkaronto CIRCLE Lab.

Inspiring examples of Indigenous-led research

“Many of us know that research has done harm, but don’t have access to the inspiring ways we can be doing research more ethically with Indigenous communities,” explains Dr. Tuck, an Unangax scholar, founding director of the Tkaronto CIRCLE Lab

and the Canada Research Chair of Indigenous Methodologies with Youth and Communities.

She points to a reasonable mistrust of academia on the part of Indigenous people and a reluctance to participate in research that has taken more than it has given to Indigenous communities.  “I wanted to address the barriers to learning how to do research in a way that is ethical, accountable to Indigenous communities and that learns from Indigenous expertise and theories of change,” she says.

Dr. Tuck assembled an international advisory board of 15 field-making scholars and a team of Black, Indigenous and racialized graduate students who worked with OISE’s Education Commons staff to build the digital site. The research team reviewed nearly 1,000 studies over five years before moving forward to create the initial 200 profiles. In addition to a general description of the study and a list of its authors and citations, each profile includes the research methods, ethical framework, theory of change, types of evidence and how the knowledge was shared. Tuck hopes that the inclusion of theories of change of the studies, in particular, will be a field-shifting innovation.

The Tkaronto CIRCLE Lab team, photographed in January 2020.

Created and grown by researchers for researchers

Dr. Tuck emphasizes that the digital garden at the point of this public launch is “an offering to get the conversation started,” she says. She hopes practitioners from around the globe will add their own studies to grow the field much like the garden that is its namesake.

The submissions can be academic studies, work done in partnership with a university or research led by Indigenous communities alone, working outside of the university.

“One of the core ideas in participatory research is that universities shouldn’t hold the monopoly on who does research and whose forms of inquiry are considered research,” Dr. Tuck says. “Participatory research should be useful. It matters. You shouldn’t have to work at a university to achieve the research goals you have for your community.”

In fact, she argues, it’s the institutional apparatus itself that is preventing Indigenous-led and participatory research from growing. It’s why she created the Collaborative Indigenous Research Digital Garden as an open-access, digital tool outside the existing paywalls of traditional academia and scholarly journals.

“This is one way for people to connect to something bigger, to really change the way research is done and, ultimately, change the purpose of universities in terms of how they relate to Indigenous peoples,” she says.

Tagged:

Indigenous, Research Impact, Social Justice

New 'digital garden' aims to bring together Indigenous research and academics, reduce harm

Olivia Bowden

• CTVNews.ca Writer, Producer

As an Unangax̂ scholar, Eve Tuck knows how academic research can harm and alienate Indigenous communities. 

She’s seen how elders in her community on St. Paul Island, Alaska, talk about painful experiences with non-Indigenous researchers, where they were left feeling betrayed, and confused.

Tuck has been a professor for more than 15 years. She’s had many people approach her over the years, asking how best researchers should approach Indigenous communities.

“I didn’t ever want to come up with one model that was a universal way of doing research, because Indigenous communities are so diverse around the world…our knowledges come from the specificity of those places,” she told CTVNews.ca in a phone interview.

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Knowing that Indigenous knowledge is multidimensional and global, Tuck, who is an associate professor of critical race and Indigenous studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, wanted to make available the important research being done worldwide that are led by Indigenous scholars and communities.

That’s why she’s led the creation of the Collaborative Indigenous Research Digital Garden, a platform that launched Tuesday with the help of other academics at Uof T. The ‘garden’serves as a digital repository that focuses on studies done with Indigenous communities, rather than work done on Indigenous communities globally.

“I wanted to create a place where we could show the array of types of ethical research that people have created for themselves, in the aftermath of this other kind of colonial, harmful research,” she said.

Dr. Eve Tuck and the Tkaronto CIRCLE Lab Members who created the digital garden (Supplied by the University of Toronto)

More answers aregrowing all over the worldabout how to best approach research around Indigenous communities and evolving methodologies, instead of a singular way, she said. That’s why the platform is called a garden— it’s ever evolving, she said.

In Canada, there is a long history of research and academic pursuits that harmed Indigenous communities. For instance, nutritional experiments were performed on Indigenous children in residential schools in the 1940s, where researchers denied children nutrition to see the impact on the body.

A 2018 report from the federal Panel on Research Ethics highlighted that research on Indigenous peoples in Canada has been done primarily by non-Indigenous researchers.

Flawed approaches have marred the relationship between academic research and Indigenous communities, the report said.

In Indigenous communities globally, each place has adifferent relationship with colonialism and history with how research has been conducted, said Tuck. That’s why each community’s needs may be different, and so research approaches should be different, she explained.

Another goal of the garden is to make this kind of research accessible, as academic writing and research can often be alienating and use overly complex language to impress seriousness, when really it prevents people from understanding the work, she said.

“The way that people are sharing their studies is by creating a profile of the studies in the digital garden. It’s more immediate than a journal publication which can take many years, from submission to actual publication,” she said.

It’s also more relevant for research users, she said.

Users can enjoy the digital garden by searching for specific topics they are interested in. There are also expandable fields on the platform where a user can learn more about the research and methodology and how an analysis was approached.

And Tuck expects the garden to continue to grow, over months and years.

“The most important piece of the site is that users are able to contribute their own studies. There is a contribution form that people can download, and work on, with their collaborators,” she said.

Tuck said Indigenous scholars can often feel isolated in academia, and have their work unfairly scrutinized or labelled as advocacy due to working alongside Indigenous communities to mitigate harms.

The garden is a way to ensure those researchers feel connected and supported, she said.

“My hope is that people see that this is already an established set of practices, and one that is still growing, and inviting to people who are inspired to take action in the face of the harms that research has done,” she said. 

New Edited Volume--Toward What Justice? Describing Diverse Dreams of Justice in Education

Link to book webpage with link to book preview

Toward What Justice? Describing Diverse Dreams of Justice in Education, Edited by Eve Tuck & K. Wayne Yang, 2018

Toward What Justice? brings together compelling ideas from a wide range of intellectual traditions in education to discuss corresponding and sometimes competing definitions of justice. Leading scholars articulate new ideas and challenge entrenched views of what justice means when considered from the perspectives of diverse communities. Their chapters, written boldly and pressing directly into the difficult and even strained questions of justice, reflect on the contingencies and incongruences at work when considering what justice wants and requires. At its heart, Toward What Justice? is a book about justice projects, and the incommensurable investments that social justice projects can make. It is a must-have volume for scholars and students working at the intersection of education and Indigenous studies, critical disability studies, climate change research, queer studies, and more.

Review by Ashon Crawley:

"What if justice were a collective improvisational practice and not a thing that we could seize and hold? What if justice were not simple nor simplistic, what if it were not an empty set nor an empty void? How would we then approach the possibility for doing, practicing, inhabiting the rubric and sign of social justice? In this volume, edited by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, justice as social is put to question. Theirs is a project that grounds contingency and incommensurability not as foreclosures but as openings to the very possibilities for collaborative work and practice. In this way, justice-social would not be a private property to be grasped and held and owned, settler logic, but would instead be a pursuit in the direction of a mode for relating, a practice of behavior, a way of life. Not a utopia but a restiveness and desire and drive that imagines the constant flow and force of unfolding otherwise possibility."

—Ashon Crawley is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia, USA

Table of Contents

Introduction: Born Under the Rising Sign of Social Justice

[Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang]

1. Against Prisons and the Pipeline to Them

[Crystal Laura]

2.Beginning and Ending with Black Suffering: A Meditation on and Against Racial Justice in Education

[Michael J. Dumas]

3. Refusing the University

[Sandy Grande]

4. Towards Justice as Ontology: Disability and the Question of (In)Difference

[Nirmala Erevelles]

5. Against Social Justice and The Limits of Diversity; or Black People and Freedom

[Rinaldo Walcott]

6.When Justice is a Lackey

[Leigh Patel]

7. The Revolution Has Begun

[Christi Belcourt]

8.Pedagogical Applications of Toward What Justice

[Deanna Del Vecchio, Sam Spady, and Nisha Toomey]

OISE Professor Eve Tuck, newly appointed Canada Research Chair, to tackle groundbreaking research with Indigenous youth and communities

Link to article

In Canada and around the world, committing truth and reconciliation with regard to how settler societies have abused and disrespected Indigenous communities, requires community-led research approaches that reflect Indigenous ways of knowing and acting.

In her recently announced position as Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Methodologies with Youth and Communities, OISE Professor Eve Tuck will provide significant leadership at this important time.

“Dr. Tuck’s research is extremely innovative, timely and important,” said Abigail Bakan, Chair of Social Justice Education at OISE. “We are in an era of considerable, and long overdue, attention on reconciliation with Indigenous peoples, particularly regarding education. Dr. Tuck’s CRC focusses on Indigenous methodologies, specifically with youth and communities, and will involve these communities centrally in every stage of the research process.”

“We will all benefit greatly from this work – in the Department of Social Justice Education, at OISE, at the University of Toronto, and in the wider community,” she noted.

Building critical knowledge

Professor Tuck’s work will build critical knowledge about Indigenous research participatory methodologies rather unlike traditional Eurocentric approaches.

OISE Dean Glen Jones says this approach is critical.

“Eve’s program of research on participatory, community-based Indigenous research methodologies will make a vital contribution to the understanding of how we can and should engage communities in collaborative research,” he said.

Noting that OISE has a number of outstanding professors pursuing critical scholarship on Indigenous ways of knowing and education, Jones said, “I am extremely pleased that one of these excellent scholars, Eve Tuck, will receive national recognition through her appointment as a Canada Research Chair. Eve is an exceptional scholar and a huge contributor to our community. Her work will have both national and international impact.”

Impact of social movements on youth

Prof. Tuck says her work as Canada Research Chair aligns well with research she’s conducting as part of an SSHRC IDG (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Insight Development Grants), for which she is already running a participatory project. This work, ‘Making sense of movements’, will be part of her CRC research agenda.

“These are young Black and Indigenous youth who are growing up during the Idle No More and Black Lives Matter movements. We’re using photovoice (participatory photography research) to think about how growing up during those social movements informs the decisions young people make about what they’ll do after high school and the kinds of futures they can dream,” she explained, noting the research also involves thinking about Toronto as Indigenous land and the type of “shared futures” people living there can have.  
 

‘We both teared up’

Overall, Prof. Tuck says she’s extremely grateful for the CRC appointment and the opportunity to pursue such important work.

She first learned she’d been selected for the CRC at the AERA (American Educational Research Association) conference, when two OISE colleagues, Lara Cartmale and Michele Peterson-Bidali, pulled her aside to tell her she’d been chosen.

“They came into the room just before the session was about to begin, and they called me down…they did it in a way that made me wonder if it was an emergency. It didn’t cross my mind at all that they were sharing this news. Then Lara said, ‘You got it!’ and we both teared up because we had worked really hard,” she said. “There was a whole team of people involved to make the application ready and it was really neat to have been told in that way.”

Related

• Bio: Eve Tuck
• Podcast: The Henceforward
• OISE’s Indigenous Education Network (IEN)

Eve Tuck is featured in a profile published by Indian Country Media Network

Change for the Better: How One Native Researcher Is Improving the Lives of Young People

Link to article

Lynn Armitage • October 20, 2016

As a young girl, Eve Tuck spent a lot of time visiting relatives in St. Paul Island, Alaska—the largest of the Pribilof Islands in the Bering Sea where fur seals migrate and breed. It’s a place she fondly calls home, even though she was born and raised in Pennsylvania. “It is the most beautiful place I have ever been, but my memory can never compare to the experience of being there,” says the 37-year-old Unangax.

It’s also a place where she learned to mistrust researchers. Family members often told stories about the U.S. government working with these scholars on the island to harvest and process seals, eventually driving her ancestors into forced labor and relocation.

When she applied to graduate school at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, she learned that research would be a significant part of her academic work, and she considered dropping out of the program. “Becoming a researcher was a big ethical dilemma for me.” But thanks to the encouragement of her mentor, Tuck went on to earn her Ph.D. in Urban Education, and found her calling.

“I was able to find in participatory action research an ethic that was really working against exploitation, honoring the expertise of participants and following the lead of young people and community members who have real research needs,” says the associate professor of Critical Race and Indigenous Studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto.

Tuck’s research centers on the experiences of youth and communities around education and social policy. “So instead of doing research on people, I do research WITH people,” she explains. One of her passions is showing how indigenous social thought can address/is relevant to addressing social problems. “From a very early age, I understood that inequity and inequality are created by society. To me, that means we can change them.” Tuck says it is important to look at the theories of Native and indigenous people who have lived in Canada and the U.S. to analyze social problems. “So much of that knowledge can inform how we make change and how we make space for one another in our societies.”

One of her earlier studies highlighted the consequences of the Regents Exam. When it became mandatory, she says it contributed to a culture of pushing out students from New York City high schools. “This narrowing of routes to graduation was going to choke graduation opportunities for youth who were never going to pass those tests,” says Tuck, who discovered that teachers and school administrators were frequently encouraging certain students to drop out and pursue a GED. She said this unwanted population was more likely to be students of color, queer, disabled, or politically vocal and critical of school procedures.

“Our research found that the GED can’t be the last remaining alternative for young people who are not going to pass Regents exams in New York. There is a need for multiple routes to graduation, not in a tiered system, but so that each of those routes is challenging and meaningful, not just based on a test,” she explains the outcome. Her research also resulted in a “Youth to Youth Guide to the GED,” widely printed and distributed in libraries and GED centers.

Tuck is the author/co-editor of several books. But is perhaps best known for a 2012 article she wrote with colleague K. Wayne Yang called “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor,” which garnered widespread attention. “Through that paper, we heard from a lot of community organizations about the land-based work they are doing and created the Land Relationship Super Collective to help bring all these people together.”

Currently, Tuck is in the first year of a five-year study working with migrant youth, ages 12 to 20, in New York City on issues involving Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). This national immigration policy implemented in 2012 allows some undocumented youth to receive a renewable two-year work permit and exemption from deportation. “New York is a state where a large population of young people are eligible for DACA, but don’t participate. And we are trying to find out why,” she says.

For this study, Tuck trained these young migrants to collect data using photovoice research, a participatory method by which researchers use photography to answer the questions being posed. “They are so enthusiastic about it and see it as a way to push back against the injustices they see in the world,” she says.

Tuck defines herself as a teacher, researcher and writer. “I’m lucky that I do the work that I do because it puts my hope and despair in balance. If I just worked on policy, I would be in despair all the time. But because I do work with youth and communities, I am more often very hopeful.”

One area of education that deeply concerns this Native academic is the standardization of learning, such as the Common Core-aligned test standards adopted by 42 states and the District of Columbia. “I am troubled by any kind of curriculum or test-based policy that says learning happens only in one particular way. The process of learning, by definition, cannot be standardized,” she explains.

She believes standardization is an especially bad fit for indigenous children. “They come from communities where place really matters and attend schools which ask them to leave all that at the door in order to learn a knowledge that says everything is the same everywhere. It’s ridiculous!”

Tuck says the result can be quite detrimental. “It teaches young people that school is not for them, and that they are not meant for this place that we require them to go by law.”

What really excites Tuck is finding ways to organize schools by trying to answer the question: What does schooling feel like? “Making schools more local, more relational, more intergenerational and as bases that are the hubs of communities and sites for conversations … I welcome policies that will make this happen.”

Lynn Armitage is a contributing writer and an enrolled member of the Oneida Tribe of Indians of Wisconsin.

Associate Professor Eve Tuck has joined the Department of Social Justice Education.

Article by Marisol D'Andrea, Administrative Coordinator, OISE Research

Associate Professor Eve Tuck has joined the Department of Social Justice Education. Tuck is Unangax̂ and a member of the Tribal Government of St Paul Island, in Alaska. She grew up outside of her territory in Pennsylvania, near Hershey. Tuck completed her PhD in Urban Education at The Graduate Center, The City University of New York. She lived in New York for 18 years prior to coming to OISE from State University of New York at New Paltz, where she was Associate Professor of Educational Foundations and Coordinator of Native American Studies.

Tuck raises questions about audience and the purposes of academic labor, and she explains that her theoretical work also “engages questions of decolonization, desire, futurity, making claims, ethics of research, and settler colonialism.” She uses participatory action research and is especially concerned with “Indigenous theorizations of settler colonialism and Black theorizations of antiblackness, specifically what they (can) say to one another.”

As a William T. Grant Foundation Scholar (2015-2020), she will study mobile migrant youth in New York's Hudson Valley. Her participatory project will examine the purposes of schooling, navigating federal and state level immigration-education policies, and relationships to place and home through interviews and photovoice. She is also working on other projects, as she explains, “I also have started a new initiative, the Land Relationships Super Collective, with my frequent collaborator K. Wayne Yang. I have several ongoing collaborations with the Super Futures Haunt Qollective and The Black Land Project.” Tuck hopes to begin a new participatory research project with Black youth and Indigenous youth on relationships to selfsame (urban) land.

Tuck is excited to be now at OISE and to be a part of the community of Indigenous theorists at OISE. She further wishes to reflect on the term “social justice” and its implications to colonialism and antiblackness. In addition, she hopes the Unangax̂ community is proud of her because she asserts, “I am so proud of them.”

Link to original article

Tuck to Join Department of Social Justice Education at OISE, Toronto

Soon, Eve Tuck will join the department of Social Justice Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto as Associate Professor of Critical Race and Indigenous Studies.

Previously, Tuck was Associate Professor of Educational Studies and Coordinator of Native American Studies at State University of New York at New Paltz.

She is thrilled to be joining this vibrant intellectual and political community.

From the department chair, Abigail Bakan: 

I am very pleased to inform you that Dr. Eve Tuck will be joining the Department of SJE as of July 1, 2015, as Associate Professor in the area of Critical Race/Indigenous Studies in Education.

Dr. Tuck received her Ph.D. in 2008 in Urban Education at The Graduate Center, The City University of New York.  The title of her dissertation was “Gateways and Get-aways: Urban Youth, School Pushout and the GED.” She is currently Associate Professor of Educational Foundations, and Coordinator of Native American Studies, at State University of New York at New Paltz. Her publications include, with K. W. Yang, eds., Youth Resistance Research and Theories of Change (2014); and, with M. Smith, A.M. Guess, T. Benjamin and B.K Jones, “Geotheorizing Black/Land: Contestations and Contingent Collaborations”, Departures in Critical Qualitative Research (2014). She was recently named William T. Grant Foundation Scholar, adding to a list of prestigious awards, including an Early Career Award from the Committee on Scholars of Color in Education of the American Educational Research Association (2014), a Ford Foundation Diversity Postdoctoral Fellowship (2011-2012), the Outstanding Book of the Year Award from the Qualitative Research SIG of AERA (2013), and a Critics Choice Book Award (2013) from the American Educational Studies Association. Dr. Tuck is Unangax, a member of the Tribal Government of St. Paul Island, in Alaska.

This is excellent news for our department. Please welcome Dr. Tuck to this new position, joining and contributing to our outstanding faculty, students and staff.

Place in Research

New in 2015

Eve Tuck and Marcia McKenzie

Bridging environmental and Indigenous studies and drawing on critical geography, spatial theory, new materialist theory, and decolonizing theory, this dynamic volume examines the sometimes overlooked significance of place in social science research. There are often important divergences and even competing logics at work in these areas of research, some which may indeed be incommensurable. This volume explores how researchers around the globe are coming to terms – both theoretically and practically – with place in the context of settler colonialism, globalization, and environmental degradation. Tuck and McKenzie outline a trajectory of critical place inquiry that not only furthers empirical knowledge, but ethically imagines new possibilities for collaboration and action.

Critical place inquiry can involve a range of research methodologies; this volume argues that what matters is how the chosen methodology engages conceptually with place in order to mobilize methods that enable data collection and analyses that address place explicitly and politically. Unlike other approaches that attempt to superficially tag on Indigenous concerns, decolonizing conceptualizations of land and place and Indigenous methods are central, not peripheral, to practices of critical place inquiry.

Youth Resistance Research and Theories of Change

New in 2014

Youth resistance has become a pressing global phenomenon, to which many educators and researchers have looked for inspiration and/or with chagrin. Although the topic of much discussion and debate, it remains dramatically under-theorized, particularly in terms of theories of change. Resistance has been a prominent concern of educational research for several decades, yet understandings of youth resistance frequently lack complexity, often seize upon convenient examples to confirm entrenched ideas about social change, and overly regulate what “counts” as progress. As this comprehensive volume illustrates, understanding and researching youth resistance requires much more than a one-dimensional theory.

Youth Resistance Research and Theories of Change provides readers with new ways to see and engage youth resistance to educational injustices. This volume features interviews with prominent theorists, including Signithia Fordham, James C. Scott, Michelle Fine, Robin D.G. Kelley, Gerald Vizenor, and Pedro Noguera, reflecting on their own work in light of contemporary uprisings, neoliberal crises, and the impact of new technologies globally. Chapters presenting new studies in youth resistance exemplify approaches which move beyond calcified theories of resistance. Essays on needed interventions to youth resistance research provide guidance for further study. As a whole, this rich volume challenges current thinking on resistance, and extends new trajectories for research, collaboration, and justice.

Editorial reviews

“This cogent, rich, and multi-voiced volume advances the field of resistance theory by countering attempts in mainstream scholarship to domesticate youth resistance under the banner of such terms as ‘empowerment’ or ‘civic participation.’ It faces squarely the messiness of resistance by illuminating its complexities, contradictions, tensions, and dilemmas in ways that both honor and deepen our understanding of youth’s acts of agency.  Kudos to Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang for a bold and courageous text!”—Angela Valenzuela, author of Subtractive Schooling and Leaving Children Behind, College of Education, University of Texas at Austin

“The passion, clarity, and diversity of thought offered here powerfully signal new possibilities for how educators can critically comprehend conditions of educational injustice and the vital role youth resistance plays in the process of transformation. In contrast to the disrespect and hopelessness often attributed to youth in schools, these essays speak volumes to the formidable strength and courage of students, who despite potential risks, rise up valiantly to oppose colonizing educational practices that threaten their humanity.  Most importantly, the book challenges one-dimensional notions of youth and resistance by rethinking structural complexities so often ignored. It is truly a must read.”—Antonia Darder, Leavey Endowed Chair in Ethics and Moral Leadership, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles

“Tuck and Yang’s Youth Resistance Research and Theories of Change could not have come at a better time. Public education, our youth, and communities of color have come under assault from an onslaught of neoliberal education and public policy reforms. This book not only helps us understand resistance in more complex and powerful ways, it points to the critical role of youth in building, activating, and sustaining social justice movements in the 21st century.”—Wayne Au, editor for Rethinking Schools and Associate Professor of Education, University of Washington-Bothell