Well What Do the Young People Think

Panelist include: CJ Greer, Doctoral student in the Educational Leadership & Policy Analysis program

Racially minoritized young people historically hold a precarious relationship with their perception within schooling spaces and the greater society. Often, these young people navigate predatory structures that unintentionally penalize their humanity. These penalties manifest in inequitable discipline outcomes, unwarranted surveillance, and stigmatizing labeling (Casella, 2018; Welch & Payne, 2018). This paper builds on previous Critical Race Theory (CRT) scholarship by introducing a theoretical framework, Youth-centric Critical Race Theory (YouthCrit), that explicitly examines the intersection of adultism and racism that racially minoritized youth navigate.

We leverage scholarship from bodies of knowledge such as legal and education CRT scholars (Crenshaw et al., 1995; Delgado & Stefancic, 2017; Ladson-Billings, 2021), critical youth studies (Cammarota, 2017), student voice (Cook-Sather, 2020), youth participatory action research (Kirshner, 2010), and the out of school time field (Baldridge et al., 2017) for this framework’s cultivation.