Youth Resistance Research Methods and Ethical Challenges

What follows is a series of reflections on the pastimes, crossroads, crises, decisions, and resolutions that have comprised our experiences as youth resistance researchers over the past fifteen years. We try to pass along some of the lessons learned from our prior studies in youth resistance, and point to some of the important considerations of this complex work. We write as a brown feminist critical social psychologist and as an Alaska Native de-colonial education theorist; we write as friends, as colleagues, as collaborators. We offer you our insights to swap and share, neon lights that say look this way, earnest re-tellings of the experiences that have informed our work most radically. This chapter is crafted especially for readers who are embarking on their own studies of youth resistance, perhaps for the first time. The first section provides an overview of the methods that have been employed to document and understand youth resistance, with an emphasis on new and emerging methods. The remaining discussions are concerned with the methodological and ethical challenges of youth resistance research, with the hope to help to generate conversation with mentors, colleagues, students, research collectives, and in other spaces in which you make sense of your own work.