Michelle Fine

The brief, practical texts in the Essentials of Qualitative Methods series introduce social science and psychology researchers to key approaches to qualitative methods, offering exciting opportunities to gather in-depth qualitative data and to develop rich and useful findings.

In this book, Michelle Fine and Maria Elena Torre provide an introduction to critical participatory action research, an approach that reveals the everyday stories of struggle and survival of the persons being studied, combats social injustice, and leverages social science research for action. Critical participatory action research challenges the narrow ways in which research has traditionally been conducted, and elevates the voices and perspectives of formerly marginalized groups.

About the Essentials of Qualitative Methods book series: Even for experienced researchers, selecting and correctly applying the right method can be challenging. In this groundbreaking series, leading experts in qualitative methods provide clear, crisp, and comprehensive descriptions of their approach, including its methodological integrity, and its benefits and limitations. Each book includes numerous examples to enable readers to quickly and thoroughly grasp how to leverage these valuable methods.

In this intensely powerful and personal new text, Michelle Fine widens the methodological imagination for students, educators, scholars, and researchers interested in crafting research with communities. Fine shares her struggles over the course of 30 years to translate research into policy and practice that can enhance the human condition and create a more just world. Animated by the presence of W.E.B. DuBois, Gloria Anzaldúa, Maxine Greene, and Audre Lorde, the book examines a wide array of critical participatory action research (PAR) projects involving school pushouts, Muslim American youth, queer youth of color, women in prison, and children navigating under-resourced schools. Throughout, Fine assists readers as they consider sensitive decisions about epistemology, ethics, politics, and methods; critical approaches to analysis and interpretation; and participatory strategies for policy development and organizing. Just Research in Contentious Times is an invaluable guide for creating successful participatory action research projects in times of inequity and uncertainty.

The authors argue that the present cascade of reforms to public education is a consequence of a larger intention to shrink government. The result is that more of public education's assets and resources are moving to the private sector and to the prison-industrial complex. Drawing on various forms of evidence-structural, economic, narrative, and youth-generated participatory research—the authors reveal new structures and circuits of dispossession and privilege that amount to a clear failure of present policy. In the final chapter the authors explore democratic principles and offer examples essential to mobilizing, in solidarity with educators, youth, communities, labor, and allied social movements, the kind of power necessary to contest the present direction of public education reform.

This book aims to reset the discourse on charter schooling by systematically exploring the gap between the promise and the performance of charter schools. The authors do not defend the public school system, which for decades has failed primarily poor children of color. Instead, they use empirical evidence to determine whether charter schooling offers an authentic alternative for these children. This essential introduction includes a detailed history of the charter movement, an analysis of the politics and economics driving the movement, documentation of actual student outcomes, and alternative approaches to transforming public education so that it serves all children. 

For those seeking to understand how Muslim youth and other groups of immigrant youth negotiate their identities as Americans, this book provides a much needed roadmap. Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent war on terror, growing up Muslim in the U.S. has become a far more challenging task for young people. They must contend with popular cultural representations of Muslim-men-as-terrorists and Muslim-women-as-oppressed, the suspicious gaze of peers, teachers, and strangers, and police, and the fierce embodiment of fears in their homes. With great attention to quantitative and qualitative detail, the authors provide heartbreaking and funny stories of discrimination and resistance, delivering hard to ignore statistical evidence of moral exclusion for young people whose lives have been situated on the intimate fault lines of global conflict, and who carry international crises in their backpacks and in their souls. 

Revolutionalizing Education makes unique contributions to the literature on young people by offering a broad framework for understanding a ground-breaking critical research methodology known as Youth-led Participatory Action Research. YPAR is a way to involve young people in defining the research questions and problems most relevant in their lives-and more importantly in acting upon them. Many scholars have turned to YPAR as a way to address both the political challenges and inherent power imbalances of conducting research with young people, while remaining sensitive to the methodological challenges of qualitative inquiry in recent years. This collection offers the first, definitive statement of YPAR as it relates to sites of education, in particular, drawing on a unique combination of theory and practice, and bringing together student writings alongside those of major scholars in the field.