Humanizing Research: Decolonizing Qualitative Inquiry With Youth and Communities

*Winner of the 2015 Outstanding Book Award from the American Educational Research Association’s Qualitative Research Special Interest Group (SIG).*

What does it mean to conduct research for justice with youth and communities who are marginalized by systems of inequality based on race, ethnicity, sexuality, citizenship status, gender, and other categories of difference? In this collection, editors Django Paris and Maisha Winn have selected essays written by top scholars in education on humanizing approaches to qualitative and ethnographic inquiry with youth and their communities. Vignettes, portraits, narratives, personal and collaborative explorations, photographs, and additional data excerpts bring the findings to life for a better understanding of how to use research for positive social change.

Django Paris is a James A. and Cherry A. Banks Associate Professor of Multicultural Education and the director of the Banks Center for Educational Justice at The University of Washington at Seattle. He was previously an Assistant Professor of Language and Literacy in the College of Education at Michigan State University, and faculty at Arizona State University. Paris received a B.A. in English from the University of California, Berkeley, an M.A. and a Ph.D. from Stanford University. He spent 6 years as an English Language Arts teacher in California, Arizona and the Dominican Republic before entering graduate school. Paris is also Associate Director of the Bread Loaf School of English, a summer graduate program of Middlebury College. He has published research in numberous journals including the Harvard Educational Review, Educational Researcher, and the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education. He has recently published a book entitled Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Justice in a changing World with Columbia University Press (2017) and Language Across Difference with Cambridge University Press (2011).

Maisha T. Winn obtained her Ph.D. at University of California, Berkeley. Prior to that, she was a public elementary and high school teacher in Sacramento, CA. Currently, she is the Susan J. Cellmer Chair of English Education in Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She has published research in a range of Journals (Harvard Educational Review, Race, Ethnicity and Education, Anthropology and Education Quarterly, Journal of African American History, and Research in the Teaching of English, Written Communication and English Education). She published Writing in Rhythm: Spoken Word Poetry in Urban Classrooms (published under Maisha T. Fisher by Teachers College Press), Girl Time: Literary, Justice and the School-to-prison pipeline (Teachers College Press), Writing instruction in the culturally relevant classroom (co-authored with Latrise Johnson for NCTE), and Education and Incarceration (co-edited with Erica Meiners for Routledge).