Shéár Avory’s research while affiliated with New Jersey Institute for Social Justice and other places

This chapter will examine the experiences of LGBTQ youth—describing issues related to identity development, systemic oppression, and discrimination. Because most scholarship on LGBTQ youth writes about their experiences through adult and non-LGBTQ lenses, this chapter utilizes the What’s Your Issue (WYI) project—a national participatory action research project, which was led by (and directly involved) thousands queer and trans youth from across the United States. By highlighting youth perspectives—in their own voices and narratives—we provide insights for the many ways that queer and trans youth (especially queer and trans youth of color) have learned to develop strengths and resilience to navigate a world which devalues dehumanizes, and pathologizes them. The chapter ends with personal reflections from the second author—who as an alternative to a case study—describes three themes: (a) embracing complexity and demanding recognition, (b) navigating structural dispossession and precarity, and (c) engaging activism and community.

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 individuals, communities, and movements dedicated to social justice. We open with a brief review of the origins of CPAR and the epistemological commitments of this approach to inquiry. We then explore why and how participation matters, and the delicate dynamics of CPAR through various phases of research: putting together a research team, crafting research questions and design, selecting methods, sampling, participatory analyses of qualitative and quantitative material, and figuring out how to produce and circulate findings in ways accountable to the community/movement of interest. The second half of the article offers a slow journey into one CPAR project, What's Your Issue?, a multigenerational, national, participatory survey designed by and for LGBTQIA+ youth, with an emphasis on the participation and representation of youth of color. We write this article for scholars, practitioners, activists, educators, and students to make visible why participation is so crucial to social justice research; that "no research on us, without us" is both scientifically and ethically valid, and how mixed methods research with LGBTQIA+ and gender-expansive youth can open new horizons for theory, methods, and action. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

This article is crafted to unpack the methodological, epistemological, and ethical modes of inquiry embedded in a participatory, multi-method, intergenerational survey of/by/for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual, and two spirited (LGBTQIA2S+) youth from across the Unites States. We write alongside a racially diverse and inclusive sample of over 1,800 young people who participated in a national survey and referenced themselves as “queer” and “neurodiverse” in open-ended responses. This qualitative deep dive into the lives of neuroqueer youth presents back their narratives of struggle and desire through an intersectional lens attentive to multiple interlocking systems of oppression and resistance. We write to reflect the expansiveness of this community and their strategies to break free from normativity and binary expectations of gender, sexuality, and ability that are constraining all people. We illustrate how neuroqueer youth operate in ways that are multi-scalar with struggles that are deeply personal, embodied, and political. Their existential desires to be recognized as “me” and get through the day are often met with solidarity activisms that confront intersectional injustices, both in-person and online.