The Poetry of Connection and Care in a Participatory Research Project

Connection and care often sit at the unexamined, perhaps implicitly devalued margins of participatory research. In this paper, we articulate connection and care as affective, social, political, and epistemological processes core to participatory work. We explore how these processes were centered in a youth participatory action research project about mattering for students of color at the youths’ middle school. The project spanned two phases: first with middle school youth and university members as co-researchers and co-designers, and second as a team of university researchers that authored this paper. Drawing from transcripts and other artifacts from both teams’ meetings, we use poems and imagery to access felt experiences, to portray connection and care in action, and to (re)imagine humanizing research, schooling, and social organization. Through these poems and images, we invite readers to consider how the practice of participatory research can create and enact more humanizing ways to be together in a world that constantly challenges the fullness of our humanity.