Research Teams for Liberation and Worldmaking

While research teams, labs, collectives, and other configurations of collaborative inquiry-based groups abound within the context of education, the literature and research base remains scant with models or guides for the development, maintenance, and activist work tied to community-based research teams (Guest & MacQueen, 2008; Krockover et al., 2001). With collective care, community, liberation, and critical praxis as the guiding values, we call on Black feminist epistemologies (Collins, 2000; Crenshaw, 1991; Dillard, 2000; Walker, 1983) to guide the re-envisioning of photovoice research teams and all critical research collaboratives. This article focuses on the collaborative and community-based power of photovoice research when engaged through the means of a research team or group of people who have come together to engage in photovoice as a collective. Through examples of community-based participatory action research in which we’ve engaged youth, undergraduate students, city leaders, and graduate students as co-researchers, we call for a way forward for research teams that prioritizes community and collective well-being, developing counterspaces, and critical consciousness-raising over fast or “productive” research within the neoliberal academy. We engage a Black, queer feminist lens (Carruthers, 2019) to author a new way forward for research teams that resists antiblackness, capitalism, and the separation of the mind, body, and spirit. We usher in a canon for team practices that nurtures co-research and communities as part of the larger goal of liberation and worldmaking for Black thriving.