This page holds information about past and current research projects. While not all past projects are represented here, this hopefully provides a sense of the kinds of research being engaged under the banner of collaborative Indigenous research. You might also visit Eve Tuck’s faculty research profile on the Department of Social Justice Education website

The Tkaronto CIRCLE Lab 2017-Present

Located in Tkaronto, the Collaborative Indigenous Research Communities Land and Education (CIRCLE) Lab is a collaborative research lab based in Indigenous feminist ethics. The Tkaronto CIRCLE Lab was created in 2017, by founding director Eve Tuck, with funding from the Canada Fund for Innovation John R. Evans Leadership Fund. When it is at full capacity, our lab includes students, faculty, staff, and community researchers. The physical space of our lab is located at OISE, and includes rooms dedicated to arts- and materials-based research, participatory research with youth and communities, visual and audio research, and community gatherings. Our lab commitments are to social change, supportive openness, and collaboration and collaborative writing. We are trying to grow our lab with intention and in good relation to each other, to communities in the city of Tkaronto, and with lands and waters. To learn more about the Tkaronto CIRCLE Lab, go to www.tkarontocirclelab.com

Making Sense of Movements- January 2018-December 2020

The Making Sense of Movements Project seeks to understand how Indigenous youth and Black youth are making sense of the importance of Black and Indigenous social movements in their own lives, especially with regard to postsecondary decision-making. The project has involved a team of youth co-researchers, aged 14-19, since 2018. To learn more about the project, go to www.evetuck.com/msom

The project engages youth in participatory photography techniques as a way to explore injustices against Black and Indigenous youth, and drawing connections between those injustices. The use of photography is a creative approach that will allow youth to explore their identity and define and contribute to their communities specific to their concerns and priorities. Results from this project will take form as photography displays on a project website, posters, reports to research users, and other public formats. Photography taken by youth will be used in innovative ways such as screen printing and comic book art, under the guidance of artists.

We are doing research that tries to understand how social movements impact young people’s decision-making and community relationships. We are doing this research to learn more about what Indigenous and Black youth think about their schools and communities, and the policies that affect them. This study will contribute to future research intent on specifying the implications of these movements for simultaneous processes of reconciliation and inquiry in Canada.

This research has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), The William T Grant Foundation, and The Laidlaw Foundation.

Collaborative Indigenous Research Project 2017-Present

This set of research activities is at the heart of the Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Methodologies with Youth and Communities research program. By bringing together two methodological streams – Indigenous methodologies and participatory methodologies – this program as a whole examines participatory Indigenous research methodologies, and critically analyses how research is conducted with and by Indigenous communities.

Our team of graduate student researchers and technological designers at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education are working together to create a new Collaborative Indigenous Research Digital Garden. The digital garden will be an international collection of examples of Indigenous research studies that use participatory approaches. This archive is meant to be a public database that will allow scholars and community researchers who use it to generate productive insights about the methods, ethics, theories of change, and forms of knowledge mobilization of Collaborative Indigenous Research methodologies. The digital garden launched in November 2022, and received more than 10k visitors in the first few months.

We formed an International Advisory Board for the Collaborative Indigenous Research Archive in 2018. The international advisory board consists of academic and community researchers who discuss the need for the archive and its uses. Throughout the development of the archive, the board will help further develop criteria for inclusion of studies into the archive and the uses it can have in their work.

We also will be conducting a series of interviews with Indigenous collaborative Indigenous researchers, both inside and outside the academy. These interviews were conducted throughout 2021.

This research is supported by the Canada Research Chair program and in-kind support from OISE’s Education Commons.

The Land Relationships Super Collective 2015-Present

This is a collaboration between Eve Tuck, K. Wayne Yang, and five community organizations, including The Black Land Project, Métis in Space, Ogimaa Mikana, The Underground Center, and Sogorea Te’ Land Trust. The Land Relationships Super Collective, as we are imagining it, is a network of land and water-based projects. It is a contingent collaboration of autonomous efforts to decolonize and heal relationships to land. To learn more about The Land Relationships Super Collective, go to www.landrelationships.com/

The Land Relationships Super Collective is meant to provide a space for building mutual support and strategy sharing for organizations doing land-based work. In creating the Land Relationships Super Collective, we are actively avoiding the worst aspects of intermediary organizations. Instead, we want to create something light, flexible and responsive--only for as long as it is needed--to support different paths toward decolonization and the rematriation of land. We see this as an extension of our writings on decolonization, as a way to pursue the theories that have inspired us.

The goals of the Land Relationships Super Collective are to learn about efforts to relate differently to land, share practical advice, theorize together, and identify needs for resources and support, strategize on how best to find those resources and support; hold space for future planning, for the long view of resurgence and relationships to land; whenever possible, bring support and cash to participating members/organizations/collectives in the Super Collective.

This research is supported by our speaker fees and The Spencer Foundation.

Deferred Action and Postsecondary Outcomes 2015-2021

This William T Grant Scholars project comprises a series of participatory photography studies with diverse groups of youth, aged 13-21, in New York’s Hudson Valley and in Toronto, Ontario. Each of these studies invites youth to think with us about their postsecondary decision making. In years 1-3, we engaged the children of Latinx migrant agricultural workers in New York’s Hudson Valley. In years 3-4, this project engaged Black and Indigenous youth in Toronto, and year 5-6, we will continue to work with Black and Indigenous youth while also working with Latinx migrant youth. As a whole, the projects are concerned with young people’s experiences and analyses of forced migration, settler colonialism, anti-immigrant violence, and antiblackness. These projects seek to understand the meaning that youth attribute to immigration status, to belonging, to freedom to live without threat of deportation, to ongoing social movements, and to their own postsecondary plans. In many ways, these projects have explanatory power for how young people learn from their social and political contexts, and from messages of contemporary social movements in order to imagine the future and what it means to live a satisfied life. Core methods in the projects have included life-world interviews, focus groups, photovoice and other participatory photography methods, and conceptual mapping. Creative representations of our research have included photography, podcasting, screen-printing, a graphic novel, and other arts-based communications.

Timely and untimely collaborations with the Super Futures Haunt Qollective

Super Futures Haunt Qollective (SFHQ) is an art and research based collaboration between three avatars: SFAOW (Specularity: Fugitive-Alterity Or Whatever), Agent O, and Lady HOW (Haunting or Whatever). They are also sometimes known as the science fiction pop stars F. Sam Jung, C. Ree, and Angie Morrill. In their terrestrial forms, F. Sam Jung is a community organizer turned M.A. Candidate in the Urban Planning department at MIT and C. Ree (MFA University of California, Irvine) is an artist and film programmer based in California, and Associate Faculty in Art at MiraCosta College. SFHQ shares a theoretical and visceral relationship to haunting as a decolonial and inevitable response to the violence of colonialism. SFHQ also shares an affective, life-generating bond rooted in love that affirms our own existence and those of all people that impels us to look for, create, and demand (with critical hope) more ethical futures not-yet-here.

Read three parts of our collaborative Glossary of Haunting here: www.evetuck.com/writing

Collaborations with The Black Land Project 2010-2015 (now continued within the Land Relationships Super Collective)

See discussions of our collaborations at the following links:

Not Nowhere: Collaborating on Selfsame Land

Geotheorizing Black/Land

Searching and Researching (from Black/Land Project's Blog)

Youth to Youth Guide to the GED 2011-2013

Edited by Eve Tuck and Tasos Neofotistos (2013)

To read the full Youth to Youth Guide to the GED, go to Youth to Youth Guide to the GED

Youth Researchers for a New Education System 2007

The Youth Researchers for a New Education System Project – Eve Tuck, Maria Bacha, Irving Morales, Nzhingha Nkhrumah, Ludwige Saintus, Teresa Ann Willis, and Joanna Vogel

See the YRNES REPORT

This participatory action research project took place between January and November, 2007. The goal of the project was to capture NYC youths’ experiences in public schools. As the team of youth researchers began to work together, two main questions emerged: 1) What are NYC youths’ perspectives on what is and isn’t provided in their schools? 2) What are NYC youths’ perspectives on school organization and leadership? To answer these main questions, the project utilized mixed methods that included a quantitative survey, qualitative focus groups and the Problem Tree. See the YRNES PROBLEM TREE

As we collected and began to analyze our data, we realized that the question of youth perspectives on what is and isn’t provided (question one) could be largely understood as related to unevenly and unfairly distributed resources and competition. The question of youth perspectives on school organization and leadership (question two) could be understood as related to mayoral control and diminished community and youth participation in schooling decision making. These realizations helped us to hone our questions so that we could pose direct questions to youth about their experiences with school resources and access, competition, mayoral control, and opportunities for participation. See YRNES PROJECT DESIGN MAP

The data collection phase of our study was coincidentally simultaneous to a major survey effort in public schools initiated by the Mayor’s office. Although we applauded the Mayor’s office for systematically polling parents and students about their experiences with the school system, we observed that important questions of resources, leadership, and participation were absent from the survey items. For this reason, we spread the word of our survey as, “Not your mayor’s survey.”

Our research yielded three major findings that each serve as an umbrella for many other findings. They are:

1) Young people in New York City believe their schooling is important to them

2) Resources and access to opportunities are unfairly distributed in our school system and in our schools

3) Young people in New York City want more meaningful opportunities to participate in decision making about schooling

Our findings may come as a surprise to some, but we doubt they will be a surprise to many of those who are educators, parents, current and former students, and those who are thoughtful about schooling. These arguments also serve as a progression of our argument/critique of the NYC school system in 2008. It is our hope that our findings will aid in the work toward improving our schools, especially in the redressed distribution of resources and the distribution of leadership and participation.

Our project was featured in “Courage: The Vision to End Segregation, the Guts to fight for It” an exhibit at the Schomberg Center for Research on Black Culture, New York Public Library.

CREDD 2006-2008
The Gateways and Get-aways Project by the Collective of Researchers on Educational Disappointment and Desire

Eve Tuck, Maria Bacha, Jovanne Allen, Alexis Morales, Jamilla Thompson, Sarah Quinter, Jodi-Ann Gayle, Melody Tuck, and Crystal Orama.

“CREDD is the place to interrogate the education system that turned its back on me.” Alexis

“CREDD makes me know that I was sitting down when I should have been standing.” Jodi-Ann

The Collective of Researchers on Educational Disappointment and Desire (CREDD) came together in early 2006 to be a space for youth participatory action research on education in New York City. We are united by our disappointment in the New York City Public school system, and our desire to affect political and educational change in school policies and practices. CREDD researchers are lower and working class, ethnically diverse, live all over the city, and represent a wide range of educational experiences, although many identify as being pushed-out from our former schools, and all of us have felt unwelcome at school. We have developed a critique of a school system that was never intended for us in the first place. Our group defines itself against racism, sexism, homophobia, ageism, the criminalization of poor people, and push out practices in New York City public high schools. We are in favor of schooling that is rigorous, accessible, and free.

CREDD is different from other research spaces because we are not an academic or government space; usually the academy or government has a monopoly on research. We fill different roles based on our interests and talents, where in other research spaces, power is usually only held by those with the most research experience. Finally, we engage in our own process of decision making, whereas other participatory spaces may rely on a one person one vote decision making model that will always muffle the voices of those in numeric minority (Smith, 2000).

CREDD’s approach to PAR holds that those upon whose backs research has historically been carried on are instead researched alongside; In our work, PAR has been a way for young men and women who are marginalized by race and ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality to demand not only access to the conversations, policies, theories and spaces to which we/they have been systematically denied, but better yet, demand that our research inform and inspire these efforts.

CREDD’s approach to PAR is concerned with what knowing is and where knowing comes from, believing that it is often those at the bottom of social hierarchies who know the most about social oppression, but also, the radical possibilities toward redressing domination (Anyon, 2005; Fine, Tuck, Zeller-Berkman, 2007).

Further, CREDD understands PAR as politic- an embedded and outloud critique of colonization, racism, misogyny, homophobia and heterosexism, classism, and xenophobia in our society, in our research sites, amongst our research collective, and within the larger and historical research community- rather than a fixed set of methods. At the same time, CREDD takes method seriously, crafting each instrument to be interactive and pedagogical, drawing from qualitative and quantitative traditions, and growing our own legacy of hybridized methods utilizing visual arts, theater, and schoolyard games.

For us, PAR means that:

1) There is transparency on all matters of the research

2) The research questions are co-constructed

3) The project design and design of research methods are collaboratively negotiated and co-constructed

4) Analysis is co-constructed.

5) The products of the research are dynamic, interactive, and are prepared and disseminated in collaboration.

Our work stands in opposition to the kinds of research that have and continue to be used for domination. Everyone is involved in developing research questions, project design, data collection, data analysis, and product development. Everyone is responsible for making our space a participatory space. We don’t erase ourselves from our work, our whole selves are involved because lots of kinds of skills and thinking are needed, not just one. By action, CREDD means demanding justice, starting a conversation, taking a stand in order to build power and redefining reality. Action happens all throughout the research, not just at the end. By research, we mean looking again in order to make our own interpretations, breaking silences, and reclaiming spaces that have been used against us. Finally, research means refusing to accept analyses that paint us as lazy, crazy, or stupid.

“I’ve learned that it can be more helpful for me to look for people asking similar questions than to count on those offering answers. I came across CREDD and saw a group of people who were also searching for answers about education and youth achieving self-determination. I’d never done research before and had never even heard of PAR. I ended up joining a diverse group of young researchers who are trying something that hadn’t been done before.”- Sarah Quinter

We co-founded CREDD in February 2006 to do a research project that attended to the over-use and abuse of the General Educational Development (GED) credential as a disguise for pushing out unwanted students in New York City high schools; this project became our Gate-ways and Get-aways Project. Towards the end of 2006 we began consulting on other youth PAR projects, and began our involvement with a larger city-wide initiative to replace mayoral-controlled schooling with human rights-based schooling. In early 2007, we facilitated a participatory action research project with another group of local youth, the newly formed Youth Researchers for a New Education System (YRNES). This project seeks to document students’ visions for school governance, schooling based on collaboration rather than competition and control, and the purpose(s) of schooling.

We call our research project the Gateways and Get-aways Project because we are interested in the GED as both a gate way to higher education and employment, and as a get away from dehumanizing high schools. The GED is a credential of General Educational Development that was never intended for widespread use as an alternative to a high school diploma.

We believe that the increase in numbers of youth GED earners in New York City, even in the face of a possibly diminished value of the GED, can be linked to what it feels like to be in high school. To really understand this link, we needed to do participatory action research. Our collective, who includes youth GED earners, designed the Gateways and Get-aways project to privilege the experiences of youth GED earners and seekers in order to challenge mainstream attitudes toward the GED as being an empty credential, and to understand the lived rather than perceived value of the GED. Seeking out the lived value helped us see how federal mandates (like No Child Left Behind) and state mandated exit exams (like the NY Regents) put pressure on schools to push out students who won’t do well on standardized tests. Youth of color and poor youth (many who don’t feel like school was made for them anyway) are explicitly and implicitly pushed out and pushed towards the GED. Many youth are misinformed about the GED process and mistakenly think that they will be swapping one set of tests for another without having to attend four years of high school. Our participatory action research on the GED has taught us that the value of the GED lies less in it being a gateway to higher education and employment and more in being a get away from inhospitable high schools.

For more information see Tuck, E., Allen, J., Bacha, M., Morales, A., Quinter, J., Thompson, J., & Tuck, M. (2008). PAR praxes for now and future change. In J. Cammarota, & M. Fine (eds.) Revolutionizing education: Youth participatory action research in motion. New York: Routledge.

See also Tuck, E. (2012). Urban Youth and School Pushout: Gateways, Get-aways, and the GED. New York: Routledge.