Global Rights Project
Do you believe in Geneva? Methods and ethics at the global/local nexus
-Michelle Fine, Eve Tuck and Sarah Zeller-Berkman
The Graduate Center, CUNY
“The real justification for including Aboriginal knowledge in the modern curriculum is not so that Aboriginal students can compete with non-Aboriginal students in an imagined world. It is, rather, that immigrant society [all non-Aboriginal peoples] is sorely in need of what Aboriginal knowledge has to offer.”
–Battiste, 201
Over the past 15 years, we have designed participatory action research projects with differently situated young people in prisons, schools and communities. Some projects have been planted firmly in the politics of place: the South Bronx, suburban privilege, a prison. Others have been designed to gather material about domination and resistance across places, what George Marcus might call a multi-sited ethnography (1995). Most recently we have begun to work with youth activists from around the globe in a human rights campaign designed to unmask the policies, practices and patterns of injustice and reveal the flashpoints of collective resistance. At this global/local nexus, youth PAR excites and grows tangled; a clear window for witnessing and kneading the complex relation of critical and indigenous methods. Taking up the challenge offered by Marie Battiste, in this essay we cast a critical eye on our participatory research methods with youth, through the lens of Indigenous knowledge.
–From the introduction to the essay. Full draft essay is available here:
“Do you believe in Geneva:
Methods and ethics at the global/local nexus”
