The Limits of Representation in Youth Voice Research for Equity

Collaborative and youth led research often generates curricular and pedagogical insights within hierarchal school environments and from conventional qualitative analysis, which can limit its emancipatory potentialities. Examining tensions related to representing voice, this inquiry project reengages previous methods, analyses, and interpretations of youth feedback at a summer achievement program with Denise Ferreira da Silva’s conceptual-analytical device, blacklight. Blacklight makes obscurities shine such as the symbolic colonial-racial violences that fuel federal and state conceptions of educational disadvantage and provision funds for educational service providers to obliterate such disadvantage. At stake in the present reading of previous methods, analyses, and interpretations is breaking free from insidiously designed equity pursuits that are underwritten by racial power/knowledge.