Reimagining and Revealing Institutional Realities: A Meta-Methodological Study That Documents the Process of Co-Founding a Youth Participatory Action Research Project in an Immigrant-Serving Charter School in Queens, New York

Date of Award

6-26-2026

Date Published

July 2026

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Cultural Foundations of Education

Advisor(s)

Mario Perez

Subject Categories

Education

Abstract

This dissertation presents a qualitative, meta-methodological study that documents the process of co-founding a Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) project at Middle Queens Institute (MQI), an immigrant-serving charter school in Queens, New York. Situated at the intersection of urgent political conditions—including intensified ICE enforcement, federal education reform, and the ongoing targeting of immigrant communities—this study positions youth not as research subjects but as knowledge producers, critical theorists, and architects of more just institutional futures. The study is grounded in two coupled justice-oriented frameworks: abolition as theoretical framework and Healing-Centered Engagement (HCE) as relational theory. Drawing from the Black radical tradition, including the scholarship of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Angela Davis, Robin D.G. Kelley, Susila Gurusami, Rocío R. García, Diya Bose and Bettina Love, abolition functions here as both an epistemological stance and an analytical lens that examines how racial capitalism and heteropatriarchy operate as structural forces shaping schooling, health, and immigration. The concept of freedom dreaming, rooted in Kelley's formulation, guides the study's imaginative and political commitments: namely, the belief that young people are not only analysts of oppressive systems but architects of liberated alternatives. Healing-Centered Engagement (HCE), developed by Shawn Ginwright, serves as the relational theory operationalizing these commitments in practice. In direct opposition to deficit-based, trauma-informed frameworks, HCE asks not what happened to you but what's already right with you, centering cultural strengths, collective well-being, and youth agency. The MQI YPAR project itself enacts the coupling of these frameworks as an abolitionist freedom dream in practice. The overall study documented by this dissertation is the MQI YPAR project itself: a two-year, youth-led participatory action research study co-founded by 15 youth researchers between the ages of 11 and 14—all students of color from immigrant families—and one adult facilitator. Youth researchers collaboratively explored the intersections of health, education, and immigration within their own school community, developing critical analyses of immigration enforcement, schooling structures, health and healing practices, and systems of institutional accountability. The dissertation documents both the first year of pre-planning and IRB navigation and the second year of implementation, which included community building, preliminary research, theme development, and the co-creation of democratic learning structures. The facilitator's dual role as both school administrator and researcher is examined with attention to positionality, ethics, and the inevitable tensions of conducting justice-oriented research within institutional structures. In other words, as a meta-methodological study, this dissertation studies the process of YPAR itself as its object of inquiry. Rather than claiming ownership of youth researcher’s findings, it documents, analyzes, and reflects on the methodological process by which the MQI YPAR project was developed—arguing that this process is as theoretically significant as the research outcomes it produced. The study employs thematic analysis, guided by feminist abolition and HCE frameworks, of audio recordings from YPAR team sessions, semi-structured individual interviews with four youth researchers developed into personal narratives, and student work artifacts. Using MAXQDA for coding, the analysis organizes findings into two categories: theoretical contributions that center youth voice in conversations on immigration, schooling, and health; and meta-methodological insights designed as transferable, accessible tools for educators and researchers seeking to co-create YPAR communities. The methodological contributions include specific strategies for building intentional community, establishing democratic decision-making systems, and grounding learning in youths’ own analytical frameworks. The research unfolds in the specific context of a charter school in the middle of Queens, New York—America's most linguistically diverse borough. This context is not incidental but constitutive: the dissertation traces how national education reform from Reagan through Bloomberg, alongside immigration enforcement policies at the federal, state, and city levels, transformed Queens into a site of both structural harm and profound community resistance. MQI itself is both a product of market-based education reform and a potential space of critical pedagogy and youth empowerment. The research takes place during a politically urgent moment—the period of intensified ICE enforcement in 2025—making the documentation of youth theorizing and the development of accessible YPAR tools not only academically significant but also an act of resistance and solidarity with immigrant youth whose lives are shaped by institutions they did not create and have rarely been invited to redesign.

Access

SURFACE provides description only. Full text may be available to ProQuest subscribers. Please ask your Librarian for assistance.

This document is currently not available here.

Share

COinS