University and School-Community Partnerships: Exploring Ethics, Intersectionality, & the Education of Pre-School Children

This paper focuses on navigational strategies Latina immigrants engage with to care-educate their children before school-age in contexts of precarity. I situate the topic within coloniality, racism, patriarchy, capitalism. In multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in New Jersey, I will engage with families through chain-referral sampling. I want to understand how Latinas make decisions about care-education and how communities collaborate in that endeavor. Informed by findings in the field of early childhood, I hope to expand the understanding of struggles faced and investments made in educating young children, drawing from authors that intersect anthropology, education, and family.

Preserving History for the Persistent Legacy of Our School is a historical ethnography and Critical Youth-led Participatory Action Research (C-YPAR) project that is examining the rich history of an African American high school in Philadelphia. During the summer of 2019, four researchers including a university professor, a graduate assistant, and two high school seniors took part in experiential learning activities to strengthen their ability to lead the project. The following paper shares the findings of a collaborative autoethnography between the adult and youth researchers as they explored their identities at the intersection of race, gender, and difference.

This paper explores how a partnership between Penn and two local high schools produce moments of ethical deliberation, during which student voices are centered. I apply Saba Mahmood’s (2005) concept of ethical self-cultivation and Jarrett Zigon’s (2010) formulation of moral assemblages to ethnographically study Ethics Club discussions between Penn administrators and African-American Muslim high schoolers. I argue that students interpret ethics and produce knowledge based on their interpretation of what kind of knowledge counts as ‘evidence,’ and what kind of embodied disposition is ‘appropriate’ to engage in ethical discussions. Students’ actions reshape normative frameworks suggested by Penn administrators.