Exploring transformative learning in third space: youth participatory action research with East and South Asian American youth

The Asian Youth in Action & Research (AYAR) program is a Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) initiative that took place during the height of the two global pandemics—coronavirus and racism. The East Asian and South Asian youth viewed this program as an opportunity to engage with the issues that enabled them to make sense of the contradictory ways in which they become both victims and perpetrators of racism. Ultimately, this research demonstrates how the program created an inclusive and critical dialogic third space for social justice praxis and generative resistance, in which the Asian American youth cultivated their transformative and collective agency to commit to their newly found roles in advancing equity. As such, the ethnographic study of the implementation of AYAR offers insight into the pedagogical opportunities and affordances of broadening consciousness-raising learning spaces within formal and/or informal educational structures through YPAR.