Michelle Fine

• The Graduate Center, CUNY

This paper documents the hopes, desires and structural betrayals experienced by young people attending transfer schools in New York City. Transfer schools enroll more than 15,000 students each year who are disproportionately young people of color, poor and working-class youth, from immigrant families, and youth with disabilities. Most have fallen b...

We write as the Survivors Justice Project (SJP), a legal/organizing/social work/research collective born in the aftermath of the 2019 passage of the New York State Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act (DVSJA), a law that allows judges to re-sentence survivors of domestic violence currently in prison and to grant shorter terms or program alternat...

Building on the conceptual foundation of articles published in the 2005 volume of the Journal of Counseling Psychology on the qualitative turn in Counseling Psychology, we write to introduce and reflect on Critical Participatory Action Research (CPAR) as an intersectional approach to knowledge production by psychologists researching alongside indiv...

The purpose of this article is to analyze possible connections between research in social psychology based on critical participatory action research (CPAR) in the North American context and on intervention research (IR) in Brazil. Participatory research questions positivism and neutrality in the social sciences by creating mechanisms for the resear...

We present critical participatory action research as an enactment of feminist research praxis in psychology. We discuss the key elements of critical participatory action research through the story of a single, national participatory project. The project was designed by and for LGBTQIA+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, intersex, asexual, plus)...

This epilogue is written in three voices. I reflect back, in conversation with Adrienne Asch, on the history of critical disability studies in psychology; then I thank Kathleen R. Bogart and Dana S. Dunn as I review the magnificent set of articles in the volume centering the construct ableism, and finally I write to the next generation of dis/crit...

Highlights Economic precarity was associated with poorer health among LGBTQ & GNC youth. This association was partially explained by minority stress and activism. Minority stress was linked to poorer heath, but also heightened activism. Engagement in activism was associated with fewer health problems. These associations varied based on intersection...

Through a feminist and critical race analytic, this paper theorizes the disruptions evoked by leaky women—actually doubly leaky women—those whose nipples, peri-menopausal uterus’ and mouths have “leaked” in ways that rupture/stain/expose the white-patriarchal-capitalist enclosure of work, home and the streets and then dared to leak again by suing f...

This article investigates the relationship between exposure to structural injustice, experiences of social discrimination, psychological well being, physical health, and engagement in activist solidarities for a large, racially diverse and inclusive sample of 5,860 LGBTQ/Gender Expansive youth in the United States. Through a participatory action re...

This article investigates the relationship between exposure to structural injustice, experiences of social discrimination, psychological well being, physical health, and engagement in activist solidarities for a large, racially diverse and inclusive sample of 5,860 LGBTQ/Gender Expansive youth in the United States. Through a participatory action re...

This essay reflects on the promise and challenges of community-engaged, critical participatory action research (CPAR) hinged to social policy in times of racialized state violence and massive community resistance. With cautious optimism, we argue for the potential of CPAR to facilitate more just social policy, by enhancing research validity, policy...

This chapter elaborates critical bifocality through two emblematic studies on the production and reproduction of privilege, and the shadows cast on institutions and communities of cumulative disinvestment. In employing critical bifocality, it opens up quandaries about how to document and theorize what is purposely designed to be unseen. The chapter...

This essay explores the political economic roots of the notion of precarity and migrates the construct into critical educational studies, reviewing the literatures on structural dispossession and race; disruptive innovation and educational reform, and embodied precarity as narrated by youth of color, poverty and immigration. Implications for urban...

This article invites a conversation about how critical participatory research transforms the production of knowledge, enables a complex chronicling of counter stories, and nurtures the contestation of dominant narratives with the very people who have been misrepresented as Others. Through a series of research stories fomented in prison, courtrooms,...

This article takes up the challenge of critical methods in “revolting times,” as we conduct qualitative research on (in)justice festering within repulsive inequality gaps, and yet surrounded by the thrill of radical social movements dotting the globe. I introduce a call for “critical bifocality,” a term coined by Lois Weis and myself, to argue for...

In this chapter, Chmielewski and colleagues present findings from a multi-method, collaborative research project examining the disproportionate rates and consequences of school discipline for LGBTQ youth of color at the intersection of race, gender and sexuality. Using both survey and focus group data with LGBTQ youth of color in New York City publ...

In this manuscript, we take up a “critical friend” perspective on sociopolitical development (SPD), seeking to expand the field’s understanding of the collective, intersectional, and dialectic qualities and dimensions in which sociopolitical youth development might occur. Specifically, we contribute to thinking around how SPD is conceptualized and...

Youth experiences of police surveillance from the United States, Canada, & Australia

To date, there has been little research documenting the individual experience of men and women who come home from prison and decide to change their lives through higher education. In order to better understand the challenges that formerly incarcerated students face when applying to and entering college and the unique strengths that they bring into...

Responding to Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1968 address at the American Psychological Association calling for a psychology that would educate Whites about racial injustice, this article challenges the widening epistemological gap between those who suffer from inequality and those who conduct social policy research on inequality. In this 20-year memoir...

In this paper we are explicitly in conversation with Doug Foley's recently published paper in AEQ. Given our shared commitment to the linkages between intersectionality and broader social and economic arrangements, two noted ethnographers argue that the paradigmatic shift highlighted by Foley demands detailed attention to what this means for questi...

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is the most common diagnosis given to children. In recent decades, there has been an increase in the diagnosis of ADHD and in methylphenidate use. This research analyses the discursive construction of ADHD in the Italian context, focusing on the positioning of the child. The study addresses the discou...

Coming from a critical youth studies perspective, this article sketches a participatory action research project designed by youth and adults in New York City to evaluate the impact of neo-liberal public policies on young people. Through telling the counter-story of the Polling for Justice (PFJ) project, we propose that re-considering accountability...

Attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder is currently the most debated childhood psychiatric diagnosis. Given the circulation of competing perspectives about the 'real' causes of children's behaviour and the 'best' way to treat them, we aim to analyse the interactions of the central social actors' discourses about attention deficit/hyperactivity di...

Billig (2008) argues “some of the ideas in today's critical psychology have a longer history than is often supposed” (pg. 195). We begin with that premise by excavating the theoretical history of psychological mapping methods in social psychology (including but not limited to place/space mapping). We have found deep theoretical linkages between our...

Playing with the doubled use of the term “revolting”—as an adjective to describe the repulsive inequality gaps that litter the globe and as a delightful gerund to capture the thrilling days of global collective protest—this Lewin address muses about social psychology's debt in politically difficult times of massive inequality and sustained oppressi...

In this article, Lois Weis and Michelle Fine introduce critical bifocality as a way to render visible the relations between groups to structures of power, to social policies, to history, and to large sociopolitical formations. In this collaboration, the authors draw upon ethnographic examples highlighting the macro-level structural dynamics related...

The construct of privilege has been undertheorized in the field of psychology. The discipline more commonly examines those who have been disenfranchised, marginalized, and discriminated against. However, psychologists concerned with social issues must also attend to questions of power and privilege. This article uses a collaborative research projec...

Writing in the spirit of feminist psychologists who have historically refused to narrow the gaze of our craft, I want to cast a critical eye on popular calls for ‘evidence-based practice’ and more specifically research epistemologies funded to produce such evidence. Surrounded by sprawling debris reflecting the gendered, raced, classed and sexualiz...

This book will reset the discourse on charter schooling by systematically exploring the gap between the promise and the performance of charter schools. The authors do not defend the public school system, which for decades has failed primarily poor children of color. Instead, they use empirical evidence to determine whether charter schooling offers...

Playing with the doubled use of the term “revolting”—as an adjective to describe the repulsive inequality gaps that litter the globe and as a delightful gerund to capture the thrilling days of global collective protest—this Lewin address muses about social psychology's debt in politically difficult times of massive inequality and sustained oppressi...

For Mort Deutsch, justice is a political vision, a theoretical field, a way of teaching and being in the world. We write as the intellectual children and grandchildren of Mort, who have taken up his commitment to justice studies as a line of inquiry. For us, Mort’s thinking about distributive injustice expands to consider how the right to research...

Taking seriously the call for methodological and analytic pluralism, we advance three key assumptions of theory and method: 1) young people develop “hyphenated selves” in shifting social and political contexts and in everyday circumstances; 2) pluralistic methods and research designs have the potential to capture identity movement across time and s...

Community self-surveys, popularized by Margot Haas Wormser and Claire Selltiz in the 1950s, brought together diverse community groups to examine racial injustice in their local contexts. A precursor to contemporary participatory action research, the self survey method provides evidence of SPSSI's long history of “engaged scholarship.” In this artic...

This article reviews two ethnographic studies in which "disruptive pedagogies" are engaged in public schools, designed to enable youth to work across categories of difference toward a grounded sense of social critique and participation. Respectfully challenging/extending the premises of reproduction theory, it is argued that educational researchers...

This qualitative analysis of 154 life-histories with poor and working-class young adults uncovers both broad and deep concern with urban crime and violence. More powerful and unanticipated, however, the analysis reveals how profoundly race, ethnicity, and gender shape the kinds of violence experienced and feared and the kinds of remedies urban resi...

The question posed in this paper is: How do public schools, which are supposed to be universally accessible moral communities, engage in patterns of systematic exclusion? Through three case studies of public secondary schools, in each of which issues of exclusion of groups of students have arisen, this analysis pierces educational ideologies of “me...

This article critiques the assumptions about the nature and meaning of disability advanced in social-psychological writing, suggests the origins of these assumptions, and proposes a return to a Lewinian/minority-group analysis of the situation of people with disabilities. It concludes by placing the articles in this issue of the Journal of Social I...

Using the data from two ongoing studies of resilience and thriving, one of gay men growing up in heterosexist environments, the other of women living with AIDS, we review how qualitative approaches have enabled researchers to grapple with conceptual, methodological, and ethical dilemmas related to the study of resilience and thriving. We discuss th...

A reflective, and adoring, commentary on Jessica Van Denend's Kleinian analysis of how society views women who have been incarcerated in prison. Drawing on Klein, feminist theory, and critical race theory, this article interrogates the projections of good and bad breast onto women, particularly women of color, during times of neoliberal shrinkage o...

As critical scholars of public education and mass incarceration, we witness in our daily work the soft coercive migration of youth of color, especially poor youth of color, out of sites of public education and into militarized and carceral corners of the public sphere. We watch as educators and youth try to negotiate conditions of systematic misedu...

Women have the right to abortion for any reason they deem appropriate. Newborns with disabilities have the right to medical treatment whether or not their parentIs) wishes them to be treated. Both rights are unequivocal, consistent, and currently protected by statute. Both sets of rights are, however, under severe attack-the former from the right a...

This mixed methods study explored dual identification among Muslim-American emerging adults of immigrant origin. A closer look was taken at the relationship between American and Muslim identifications and how this relationship was influenced by experiences of discrimination, acculturative and religious practices, and whether it varied by gender. Da...

Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent "war on terror," growing up Muslim in the U.S. has become a far more challenging task for young people. They must contend with popular cultural representations of Muslim-men-as-terrorists and Muslim-women-as-oppressed, the suspicious gaze of peers, teachers, and strangers, and po...

In this article, we present social–psychological notions about critical consciousness, change, and power that we consider foundational to the study of youth under siege. Relying on Lewin's field theory and Du Bois’ dual consciousness, and critical psychology literature on sociopolitical understandings of conflict, we propose a new conceptual and th...

In the wake of the events of September 11, Muslim-American youth found that the multiple cultures within which they live were suddenly and alarmingly in conflict. The developmental consequences of living in a world fractured by religious and ethnic terror have yet to be determined for Muslim youth in the United States. This exploratory, mixed-metho...

This article reports on a qualitative investigation of 15 young Muslim-American women living in New York City, after 9/11 and in the midst of the Patriot Act. Participants completed surveys about identity, discrimination, and coping; drew “identity maps” to represent their multiple identities and alliances; and participated in focus groups on sever...

This article contains reflections provoked by the articles in this volume of The Counseling Psychologist. As a relative outsider to counseling psychology, the author thoroughly enjoyed immersing herself in these contributions and then extracting a set of thoughts inspired by the writers.

In this article, we consider the ways in which educational policies and institutions today enable or obstruct young people who are immigrant English-language learners as they seek to cross cultural and educational borders. Contrasting a class action suit in California protesting high stakes testing that will significantly limit graduation rates, an...

We open this chapter with the performers of the theater piece Echoes of Brown: Youth Documenting and Performing the Legacy of Brown v. Board of Education. Picture five strong young women taking center stage, speaking back to social injustice. In the following we have spliced together the individual poetry of Ariane Ashley Gilgeous, Iralma Osorio So...

This article enters the ‘intimate details’ of a participatory action research project nested inside a college-in-prison program for women in a maximum security prison. Conceived out of a conversation of prison reform advocates, the piece is deliberately not co-authored by all of the researchers - prison based and university based - because this art...

This paper examines how the public views an act of discrimination as a consequence of the social context in which the injustice occurs and as a function of how the victim rcsponds. Results indicate that a context that offers grievance procedures to workers who feel unjustly treated enhances the public's perception of injustice if the victim decides...

Dark and Clark's pioneering study in 1947 demonstrated that Black children were ambivalent about racial self-identification. Subsequent research indicates that during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, Black children were increasingly likely to demonstrate a commitment to identifying with a Black stimulus. The present study investigates the extent to whic...

This paper forecasts a “fictional” methods textbook for researchers interested in studying social oppression and resistance. The volume moves between historic and contemporary writings on methods, with particular interest in questions of objectivity and subjectivity, history and psychology, relations among units of analysis, expert and construct va...

Recognizing the intent of Affirmative Action to include historically marginalized citizens into institutions of higher learning, we stretch the limits of Affirmative Action to consider the role of higher education in prison. We present empirical findings of a 4-year, qualitative and quantitative participatory action research study of the impact of...

Research addressing the lives and friendships of older Black lesbians is virtually nonexistent. Using narrative analysis, we chronicle the lives of two older Black lesbians (73 and 85 years of age) through the lens of positive marginality. The concept of positive marginality asserts that living both inside and outside of the mainstream produces str...

We introduce participatory action research as a strategy for "consultation with." We elaborate the possibilities and limits of participatory consultation as a strategy that enables sustained relations with communities of material poverty and resilience wealth. Consulting with an activist organization, and dedicated to producing a Web-based oral his...

We introduce participatory action research as a strategy for "consultation with." We elaborate the possibilities and limits of participatory consultation as a strategy that enables sustained relations with communities of material poverty and resilience wealth. Consulting with an activist organization, and dedicated to producing a Web-based oral his...

This article reports on the extensive qualitative and quantitative findings of a multi-method participatory study designed to assess urban and suburban youths’ experiences of racial/class justice or injustice in their schools and throughout the nation. Constructed as a letter to Zora Neale Hurston, who was immediately critical of the Brown decision...

This article reports on the extensive qualitative and quantitative findings of a multi-method participatory study designed to assess urban and suburban youths’ experiences of racial/class justice or injustice in their schools and throughout the nation. Constructed as a letter to Zora Neale Hurston, who was immediately critical of the Brown decision...

This article draws from research conducted with poor and working-class youth in California attending schools that suffer from structural disrepair, high rates of unqualified teachers, high teacher turnover rates, and inadequate books and instructional materials. Arguing that such schools accomplish more than simple "reproduction" of class and race/...