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This chapter reports on the purpose, methods, and findings of a CDC-funded project in Hartford, Connecticut, entitled the Community Responses to Risks of Emergent Drug Use Project. This project was designed to (1) use ethnographic and epidemiological data collection to identify and track emergent drug use trends; (2) analyze these patterns in terms of the sociodemographic traits of participants; (3) assess the potential impact of identified changes on local public health; and (4) use a Participatory Action Research (PAR) model to implement community-based public health responses to research findings in collaboration with a community advisory group. Three illicit drug use trends examined in the project—the spread of methamphetamine among hard-core drug users, the adoption of PCP among emergent adult users, and the use of sweetened cigars among youth—are assessed while describing applied initiatives designed to address the public health implications of identified drug use trends.

This chapter shows how weekly Participatory Action Research Team for Youth (PARTY) meetings facilitated the deepening of critical consciousness and the formation of a collective, oppositional political identity among the youth participants. This, in turn, enabled the exercise of political agency. This deepening of critical consciousness was not primarily a result of the formal “research” conducted in the group, but rather of the dialogic process of open-ended critical reflection that occurred in weekly meetings.

This chapter examines how youth Participatory Action Research Team for Youth (PARTY) members and prospective PARTY members from Jackson High School interacted with the “discourse of these kids.” It shows how youth participants mobilized, reproduced, and contested the discourse of these kids by alternately positioning themselves in opposition to it, in accordance with it, or by contesting certain aspects of it.

This chapter examines the results of the shift of Participatory Action Research Team for Youth (PARTY) from theory to practice—from envisioning and planning a social justice class to actually teaching one at Jackson High School. It demonstrates that, despite attempts to implement an alternative and liberatory model of education for social change, the practices and discourses of traditional classroom teaching were largely reproduced. It examines how the social context of Jackson High, and the more generalized figured world of schooling, shaped the emerging teacher identities of PARTY members and their ability to exercise agency as individuals and as a collective.

This chapter examines internal debates within Participatory Action Research Team for Youth (PARTY) about the curricular goals of social justice education, particularly those focused on the meaning of academic standards and preparation for college and careers. Core debates within PARTY concerned the meaning and role of academic skill building and “standards” in the social justice class, and the relative value of academic versus vocational preparation for empowering Jackson students in their transition to adult roles. The chapter contextualizes PARTY's intragroup debates by connecting them to the realities of the postindustrial labor market and the historic struggle to define the purpose of high school at the bottom of the educational hierarchy.

This introductory chapter studies the possibilities and tensions for co-produced research practices that emerge from the collision of long-established, community-oriented research practices, an increased institutional emphasis on community co-production in academia, and the ongoing critique of the key terms of these practices. Among long-established approaches to community-oriented research scholarship, Participatory Action Research (PAR) is squarely oriented to a particular vision of social justice and community defined methods and research questions. The chapter cites various case studies about what co-production looks like and some of the challenges that arise. It opens up the field and begins to illustrate in practice what the tensions and challenges of co-production are.

One of the core challenges of grounded normative theory is to deploy a methodology for theorizing that guides us to seek insight from lived experience even though our knowledge of that experience can be only partial, incomplete, even flawed. Grounded normative theory is a broad methodological approach that requires specific methods for developing the empirical basis appropriate to each normative inquiry. Chapter 5 describes the specific methods I used to develop the theory of just responsibility. It provides an argument for drawing on the strategic initiatives of human rights activists and describes the research–activist partnership from which the normative theory presented here derives.

Chapter 8 provides a rational for using the feminist participatory action research method of Photovoice as a means of creating a more complete picture of “non-action in the face of injustice.” Through recruiting 54 women living in five coal-mining communities for an eight-month Photovoice project, a micromobilization context was created to study the factors that facilitate and hinder the process of “becoming an activist.” Forty-seven of the recruited participants had no prior involvement in environmental justice activism, while seven of the participants (one or two in each of the groups) were associated in some way with one of the local organizations fighting irresponsible coal industry practices in the region. The chapter presents how this project was organized, how the five communities were selected, how the 54 women were recruited, how the meetings were run, and what data were collected throughout the 8-month project and beyond. Descriptions of each of the five communities and the demographics of the participants are also included in this chapter.