community

The Public Science Project conducts and supports participatory action research with a commitment to the significant knowledge people hold about their lives and experiences and a belief that those most intimately impacted by research should take the lead in shaping research questions, framing interpretations, and designing meaningful products and actions. We collaborate with community groups & organizations, organizers, advocates, schools & other public institutions to design research and practice aimed at interrupting justice.

Commitments

The following principles and commitments guide our collaborations and hold our close-knit and loosely-connected community, near and far.

• To value knowledges that have been historically marginalized and delegitimized (i.e., youth, prisoner, immigrant) alongside traditionally recognized knowledges (i.e., scholarly).
• To share the various knowledges and resources held by individual members of the research collective, across the collective, so members can participate as equally as possible.
• To collaboratively decide appropriate research questions, design, methods and analysis as well as useful research products.
• To create a research space where individuals and the collective can express their multiplicity and use this multiplicity to inform research questions, design and analyses.
• To encourage creative risk-taking in the interest of generating new knowledge (i.e., understanding individuals and the collective to be “under construction” with ideas and opinions that are in formation, expected to grow, etc.).
• To attend theoretically and practically to issues of power and vulnerability within the collective and created by the research. To strategically work the power within the group when necessary to benefit both individual and collective needs/agendas
• To excavate and explore disagreements rather than smooth them over in the interest of consensus (as they often provide insight into larger social/political dynamics that are informing the data).
• To use a variety of methods to enable interconnected analyses at the individual, social, cultural, and institutional levels.
• To conceive of action on multiple levels over the course of the PAR project.
• To think through consequences of research and actions.
• To an ongoing negotiation of conditions of collaboration; building research relationships over-time.

People

Researchers active in current Public Science Projects include:
Paul Bartley | Kimberly Belmonte | Evan Bissell | Fawn Bracy | Emerson Brisbon | Pricilla Bustamante | Allison Cabana | Caitlin Cahill | Loren Cahill | Jennifer Chmielewski | Hillary Caldwell | Slema Djokovic | Anthony Downs | Michelle Fine | Madeline Fox | David Frost | Andrew Cory Greene | Prakriti Hassan | Gaurav Jashnani | Jose Lopez | Einat Manoff | Amanda Matles | Cristina Onea | Adilka Pimentel | Melissa Rivera | Sonia Sánchez | Talia Sandwick | Nadine Sheppard | Brett Stoudt | María Elena Torre |  Darian X | Jacqueline Yates | Diane Yoong | Sarah Zeller-Berkman

Public Science Project Post-Doctoral Fellows
Rachel Leibert

Recent community collaborators include:
BreakOUT | Center for Constitutional Rights | Communities United for Police Reform | Gender Justice LA | Girls for Gender Equity | H.O.L.L.A | Make the Road New York | New York Civil Liberties Union | Red Hook Initiative | Streetwise and Safe | Tucson Youth Poetry Slam

Partners

We are grateful to the following foundations who have supported our work: