Participatory and Action Research Within and Beyond the Academy: Contesting Racism through Decolonial Praxis and Teaching “Against the Grain”

This article focuses on some of the epistemological and activist challenges at the center of a participatory and action research teaching-learning process developed through a student-initiated graduate seminar at Boston College, a university in the global North. The course includes participation of students and instructors in a 2.5-day Undoing Racism™ workshop facilitated by the People's Institute for Survival and Beyond (PISAB), a New Orleans based non-profit. Authors, who include a university-based co-instructor and student and a Collaborative Community Fellow, describe the decolonial, antiracist pedagogy performed in a coteaching-colearning process "against the grain." We report participants' feedback on how this teaching-learning experience facilitated their understanding of critical reflexivity and its multiple contributions towards designing PAR processes with communities that elicit and value local knowledge toward collaborative activism. We summarize our experiences and challenges in developing decolonial pedagogy within a predominantly White, elite university, and how the course generates a space through which those who have walked this walk together are able to initiate diverse processes that facilitate community-collaborative knowledge generation and actions toward redressing injustice and inequity through undoing racism.