Kinship and being together “otherwise” in community-university partnerships

This article theorizes the concept of kinship in the context of a university-community collaboration between a Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) team and an undergraduate course at an elite liberal arts college in the Midwest. The two co-authors, who were the two faculty involved in this partnership, build on the YPAR team’s definition of and emphasis on kinship in their research and action to center Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) youth in creating liberatory educational spaces. We examine how this concept can guide the development of university-community collaborations that move away from a history of extraction and exploitation. Kinship can instead point us towards the possibility of being together “otherwise” by creating multiple opportunities to collectively refashion the role that young people can play in educational and activist spaces. This case study also provides a concrete example of how to move beyond platitudes about putting relationships first in such collaborations.