Towards Community Rooted Research and Praxis: Reflections on the BSS Safety and Youth Justice Project

This article focuses on the Brothers, Sons, Selves (BSS) Safety and Youth Justice project to describe what we refer to as a Community Rooted and Research Praxis (CRRP) approach. BSS is an organizing coalition for boys, young men, and masculine-identifying youth of color that works to decriminalize communities of color. In 2018, BSS developed a survey to capture how safety and justice is experienced by youth of color across multiple contexts and institutions in Los Angeles County. With over 3000 surveys collected, the findings have now been used to promote racial equity and decriminalize youth at the local and state level. Building on a Black Radical Tradition, including abolitionists struggles against the carceral state, in this paper, we name CRRP as a framework to describe BSS’s community engaged scholarship. In other words, we contend that the CRRP approach is a mode of community engaged scholarship that brings together youth, university affiliated adults, and community organizations to engage in youth participatory action, research, political education, and collective struggle.