The Public Science Project Critical PAR Institutes: Wedging Open Freedom Spaces in the Academy With Epistemic Justice and Community Liberation

Against the current backdrop of fascist tyranny, we offer a meditation on the Public Science Project Critical Participatory Action Research (PAR) Institutes that have taken place at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York each spring for over a decade. Born of a desire to reimagine the role of the academy as one responsible to the communities that surround it, the Critical PAR Institute brings together cohorts of graduate students, faculty, community and municipal workers to learn the history and praxis of Critical PAR and engage the epistemological challenge of communities to the academy: that there should be “no research about us without us!” Crafted as nourishing imaginative spaces in the cracks of state abandonment and academic contestation, the Critical PAR Institute centers lived experience, critical theory, action, and desire, inviting participants to take up collective inquiry with the liberatory spirit of freedom dreams and radical resistance.