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Remixing Research with Judy Pryor-Ramirez · Partnership Work

0:15
Paul: Welcome to Partnership Work, where we explore the art and science of collaboration. I'm Paul Kuttner.
0:22
Paul: My guest today is Judy Pryor-Ramirez. Judy is a clinical associate professor
0:28
Paul: at the Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University,
0:32
Paul: where she studies and teaches about social justice leadership.
0:35
Paul: She is also a consultant for social justice leaders and their organizations
0:39
Paul: and is currently getting her Ph.D.
0:41
Paul: There's a lot we could have talked about, but I invited Judy on specifically
0:45
Paul: to discuss her approach to research.
0:47
Paul: Research, in one form or another, has been one of the through lines in her varied
0:51
Paul: career, which has spanned jobs in government, non-profits, and higher education.
0:57
Paul: Judy works from the tradition of participatory action research, or PAR.
1:01
Paul: PAR researchers partner with communities and organizations that are closest
1:05
Paul: to the issue at hand to do research together and use that as a springboard for action.
1:10
Paul: As you'll hear, Judy also experiments with creative and playful methods in her
1:15
Paul: research in ways that foster relationships and community.
1:19
Paul: Most recently, Judy has been developing what she calls the story circle interview
1:23
Paul: method, which she describes as a sort of remix of story circle practices that
1:28
Paul: came out of the Black Freedom Struggle.
1:30
Paul: We go deep into what that practice looks like.
1:33
Paul: Before we start, a quick ask. If you like this show, please rate and review
1:37
Paul: it in your podcast platform. It's the best way for us to find our audience.
1:41
Paul: That's enough of me. Let's get to the interview.
1:57
Paul: Judy Pryor-Ramirez, thank you so much for joining me on Partnership Work.
2:01
Judy: Thank you so much, Paul, for having me here. It's such a pleasure.
2:05
Judy: As you already know, as a fan of the podcast and listener, it's great to be on.
2:10
Paul: Excellent. So to start off, I understand that you recently had something of a beach trip.
2:15
Paul: I wondered if you could tell us a bit about this virtual trip to the beach that
2:19
Paul: you took with some of your colleagues.
2:21
Judy: Yes.
2:22
Judy: So I'll tell you a little story. Last summer in June and July of 2025
2:28
Judy: I had the good fortune of being part of a research team at the University of Richmond,
2:33
Judy: and we were doing an organizational assessment that we called an attunement
2:38
Judy: process, which we were really listening in to their community of stakeholders
2:43
Judy: in order to what we might do in a strategic planning process,
2:47
Judy: think about work forward.
2:48
Judy: One of the approaches that we took to analyzing the many stories that we heard
2:54
Judy: was something called the data lab.
2:57
Judy: And that was an approach that they had developed as a center for assessing all
3:03
Judy: kinds of work. But they hadn't thought of using that approach to assess and
3:08
Judy: analyze the stories that we had collected in the process.
3:12
Judy: And so I'll tell you about the data lab, a couple of things that are important about it.
3:16
Judy: One is that it's play-based. And the idea is that you're making sense collectively,
3:20
Judy: in a group, of data through play.
3:23
Judy: And the way play comes in is that the group chooses a metaphor that feels resonant.
3:28
Judy: So we were working over the summer.
3:30
Judy: Many of us were lamenting how much we wanted to go to the beach.
3:34
Judy: And the beach theme just kept coming up about the sun and, you know,
3:38
Judy: it's quite hot in the summers in Virginia.
3:40
Judy: And so it was just something that
3:42
Judy: we used and extended that metaphor and brought into our data analysis.
3:46
Judy: And it was a way for us to look at the data through aspects of a day at the
3:52
Judy: beach. So when I came in to set up the room to get us ready,
3:55
Judy: I put beach towels out, I bought some shells and kind of spread them around the room.
4:00
Judy: We had sand pails, we had, you know, beach toys and balls and everything sort
4:06
Judy: of that really brought the theme to the space.
4:10
Judy: And when we were looking at the data, we also used elements of the natural world
4:15
Judy: to help us make sense of what we were seeing. So one colleague said,
4:18
Judy: yes, let's have the pointy shells represent the challenges in the stories that we're reading.
4:24
Judy: Let's have the seaweed serve as sort of the emotions because it kind of moves
4:29
Judy: and kind of, you know, sometimes attacks us or it kind of soothes us.
4:33
Judy: And then another person said, let's think about a fisherman's net as a way to
4:38
Judy: hold the stories about the way that the center connects people and brings people
4:44
Judy: together across difference and at the institution.
4:47
Judy: So it was a lot of fun to work with a metaphor and to think about how we can be playful,
4:54
Judy: Find joy in research, and that research isn't something that those folks over
4:59
Judy: there go do, and that we can see, most importantly,
5:04
Judy: research as a practice that we can build skill around, build partnership and
5:07
Judy: relationships around to deepen our work together.
5:11
Paul: I love that. It's a good start just to sort of shake us up that we're not going
5:14
Paul: to be having a conversation about the normal kind of research that we're often
5:18
Paul: used to. Let's back up a little bit.
5:21
Paul: You didn't necessarily take a traditional route towards academia.
5:26
Paul: Did you ever see yourself doing research? Is this surprising to find yourself
5:30
Paul: excitedly talking about research on a podcast?
5:34
Judy: Yeah, I am because I think for a long time, I didn't see myself as a researcher.
5:40
Judy: I have a lot of respect for my colleagues who came through the traditional route.
5:47
Judy: I'm currently a PhD student at the New School for Social Research.
5:51
Judy: So going back to complete my doctoral work in something that I had wanted to
5:56
Judy: do for a long time. I really first learned about applied and policy research.
6:02
Judy: My first jobs were in local and state government as a policy analyst.
6:06
Judy: And so I knew in college, I really enjoyed researching. I just didn't know or
6:13
Judy: understand as a first-generation college student what it meant to be a full-time
6:18
Judy: researcher, a professor.
6:19
Judy: I had no conception of that. And so my early work in research was writing policy
6:26
Judy: briefs and memos and engaging large data sets,
6:30
Judy: public data sets at the New York State Department of Education when I was working there.
6:35
Judy: When I was working for New York City Council, I was really drawing a lot on
6:38
Judy: secondary research and kind of pulling together these memos for the elected
6:42
Judy: officials for the Committee on Education that I staffed.
6:45
Judy: So I had an opportunity to engage in that kind of, you know,
6:51
Judy: research for policy making and decision making, but that's not the same exactly
6:56
Judy: in terms of the research that I'm doing now.
7:05
Paul: You work from the tradition of participatory action research,
7:09
Paul: and you have your own take on it. But I want to talk a bit about that term.
7:13
Paul: Could you share how you define participatory action research,
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Paul: and where did you first learn about it, and why did this approach speak to you as a person?
7:23
Judy: I'll start with the latter question and come forward into the definition.
7:26
Judy: I think I came into it largely out of desire for wanting to know in different
7:35
Judy: ways and to know in community.
7:38
Judy: So I first came across it without having the definition or the term.
7:43
Judy: And one of my really early positions, I had the good fortune after graduate
7:49
Judy: school, I went to Teachers College at Columbia University, to work at a new center
7:53
Judy: called the Center for Educational Equity,
7:55
Judy: led by a legal scholar, Michael Rebell, who actually in his legal scholarship
8:01
Judy: brought community together.
8:03
Judy: And part of some of my work was to help coordinate.
8:05
Judy: I remember working in Harlem communities.
8:09
Judy: I remember those voices were a really important part of how he was creating
8:14
Judy: his research agenda and advocating using the tools of legal scholarship and
8:19
Judy: litigation to make change in the state of New York,
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Judy: and particularly with respect to public education and the funding of those schools.
8:25
Judy: Fast forward probably about 10 years later, I come into work at Centers for Civic Engagement.
8:32
Judy: There is where I learned the kind of technical term for it. And as a director
8:35
Judy: of such centers, I was funding faculty doing that work.
8:40
Judy: In terms of definitions, for me,
8:43
Judy: I would say that I sit in the kind of critical camp
8:47
Judy: where we think about the way in which the research can unsettle and shift power
8:54
Judy: relations between individuals on the project and that the results of the project
9:01
Judy: actually catalyze some kind of change.
9:04
Judy: That's how I think about this research is that it's a kind of collaborative
9:08
Judy: research that moves and shifts for change.
9:11
Judy: I'm also someone who practices really kind of community-based as well,
9:16
Judy: really thinking about geography in certain places.
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Judy: And so my practice has often been projects in particular communities and places
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Judy: or particular organizations.
9:25
Paul: Got it. So how does this differ from maybe more traditional kinds of research?
9:33
Judy: For me, I think a difference is there's no prescribed agenda,
9:38
Judy: that the research questions, hypotheses are not predefined at the start,
9:44
Judy: and then you're going into community.
9:45
Judy: Those questions, those hypotheses are created together with the community.
9:51
Judy: I think another component that feels distinctive to me about this approach is
9:57
Judy: that at, if not at all moments,
10:01
Judy: at strategic moments, you're thinking about what does participation look like
10:05
Judy: of those who need to be involved in this aspect.
10:08
Judy: One thing I'm learning in my practice is that not every single aspect of the
10:13
Judy: research project needs to have participation. And I thought it always had to.
10:18
Judy: And I've learned that we can be a little bit elastic and flexible.
10:24
Judy: And but that is made in that kind of decision making from the start when you're
10:28
Judy: setting up the research design with the questions, with the kind of objectives of the research.
10:34
Paul: I want to talk a bit about sort of your first steps into doing some participatory action research.
10:40
Paul: Like, what were those early experiences like and what did you have to learn along the way?
10:46
Judy: Mm-hmm. I'm thinking about my project that I came on to in 2019,
10:54
Judy: a project that was at Drew University in Madison,
10:59
Judy: New Jersey, so a suburb of New York City.
11:02
Judy: I'm based in New York City. We received federal funding from the Corporation
11:06
Judy: for National Community Service, CNCS. We were part of a cohort of 16 or so other
11:13
Judy: higher education institutions to identify a community
11:16
Judy: issue and to bring community and to use CBPAR as the actual approach on the project.
11:22
Judy: Our issue was identified in this group of folks who ranged from individuals
11:29
Judy: who were using a voucher to make home, as well as undergraduate students with
11:34
Judy: lived experience being unhoused,
11:36
Judy: nonprofit workers, faith-based leaders, many folks, probably about 24 at our
11:40
Judy: largest individuals across the table.
11:42
Judy: And so what we identified was a gap in the system, particularly as it relates
11:48
Judy: to onboarding, preparing, and retaining landlords so that there are sufficient
11:53
Judy: units in the county for those who have the voucher.
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Judy: Because one of the largest pieces in our research found that folks with the
12:01
Judy: voucher were not finding units in time, in the very short time that HUD gives
12:06
Judy: you to find your unit with the voucher.
12:08
Judy: And so our action part of the project, if you will,
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Judy: was we designed a landlord support program that would train interested landlords,
12:17
Judy: those who wanted to think about using either their homes or their properties
12:23
Judy: as Section 8 or Housing Choice Voucher properties.
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Judy: And so that's what we did. We ended up receiving a $300,000 grant to roll the program out.
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Judy: And now it currently lives and exists with one of the nonprofit partners that was on our project.
12:38
Judy: The last time I checked, we had met our goal of 50 landlords in the system using that.
12:43
Judy: So for a small county like Morris County, that was a real success.
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Judy: And we were very excited that we were able to leverage the many relationships
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Judy: that quite frankly existed before the project and the timing was right to come
12:57
Judy: together and we had the people around the table to really make this intervention happen.
13:02
Judy: I was really tentative at first to join that particular project I think because
13:07
Judy: of my critical orientation to PAR work and wanting to ensure that.
13:15
Judy: Someone from the community might have this spot.
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Judy: And I remember even pushing back a year prior when the PI had invited me to join.
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Judy: And it just wasn't the right moment. But I also was like, I'm not based in New Jersey.
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Judy: And I really thought that this position ought to be for someone from New Jersey,
13:35
Judy: who I did end up recommending a really wonderful colleague.
13:38
Judy: But another role opened up and my colleague said, I really think it's your skills.
13:43
Judy: We need your skills of facilitation. We need your skills of bringing people
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Judy: together and working through difference.
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Judy: And so that is what convinced me. And I was reminded that we can be from outside
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Judy: of the community and come in.
14:00
Judy: And there may be other parts and positions of our lives that connect us to the project.
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Judy: And there, there were some of my own personal experiences with housing growing
14:11
Judy: up that linked me to and where I found solidarity with the project.
14:22
Paul: You often bring up your parents when you're talking about this work.
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Paul: How did your parents and your early upbringing shape the partnership worker
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Paul: and researcher that you've become?
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Judy: Yeah. So as an individual
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Judy: With mixed heritage and identity, I think there's some inherent partnership
14:44
Judy: work that goes into that.
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Judy: My father is an African-American man from Richmond from the South.
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Judy: My mother is a first-generation Mexican-American woman from Texas and the Tex-Mex borderlands.
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Judy: She grew up in Corpus Christi, but we have family all in the Rio Grande Valley
14:59
Judy: in Texas, where Texas and Mexico meet.
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Judy: And so I would say one of the earliest experiences that I recall that I think
15:09
Judy: makes me think of partnerships.
15:12
Judy: My grandparents moved from Texas to Virginia when I was probably about five
15:15
Judy: or six and was really transformative in many ways.
15:19
Judy: But one of the ways is observing how they built community in a place that had
15:26
Judy: very little context for Latinos at that time,
15:29
Judy: how they navigated a society with limited English and how they really left behind
15:37
Judy: a legacy because of their, I would argue, it came out of their kind of Christian
15:42
Judy: training and wanting to be of service.
15:45
Judy: They were really a home for many individuals who were coming from Mexico and
15:51
Judy: other parts of Central and Latin America.
15:53
Judy: I saw them opening their home, cooking dinners, hosting meal shares,
16:00
Judy: and just taking care of other people and doing that through their church.
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Judy: I think so much of my partnership work comes out of the notion of care and wanting
16:09
Judy: to bring care to work we do with others, whatever that might look like.
16:15
Judy: And I think I learned that through my grandparents and through my family.
16:19
Judy: Really, they were kind of those bridge builders and connectors for many people.
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Judy: And so by the time they passed away in the mid-aughts, Richmond was a very different
16:30
Judy: place in terms of the growth of the Latino community.
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Judy: And there were so many people at their funerals just coming up to me,
16:40
Judy: my sisters, and other family members remarking about how crucial my grandfather
16:45
Judy: or my grandmother was to their establishment and just getting settled here.
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Judy: And I saw that very early on. And I think that that informs some of how I think
16:55
Judy: about class solidarity,
16:57
Judy: solidarity just in the kind of mutual aid and what it means to work with others very locally,
17:04
Judy: hyper-locally, to support when our systems and infrastructure,
17:09
Judy: you know, sometimes fail or are designed not to serve us well.
17:14
Paul: What about your parents?
17:15
Judy: Hmm.
17:17
Judy: You know, I think a story about my father that really kind of I hold on to is
17:24
Judy: he was, so he was born in 1944.
17:28
Judy: He grew up in the Jim Crow South, Virginia, and he did not graduate from high school.
17:35
Judy: He went to work very young. He was a union man.
17:38
Judy: So I also saw
17:40
Judy: Growing up when he would go, when the union would go on strike,
17:45
Judy: he's, you know, he did not cross the picket line. He stood with his union.
17:49
Judy: And so there were always these moments where there were different,
17:51
Judy: you know, moments of bargaining the next contract.
17:54
Judy: So I was aware that he was part of something bigger than himself and others
17:58
Judy: and that they were working together for some different kind of set of conditions.
18:02
Judy: What I didn't know, and he never shared with us, but I learned from an older
18:06
Judy: white man colleague of his union. And he shared with me at his funeral that
18:10
Judy: my dad was one of four Black men who integrated that union in the mid-early 70s.
18:15
Judy: And so he never gave off that he was a civil rights kind of guy.
18:20
Judy: Like, I didn't have that image of my father. He was just a hard worker.
18:24
Judy: And so to learn that he was committed to integrating, to being a part of that
18:30
Judy: struggle for Black folks to have connections.
18:35
Judy: And to improve their lives.
18:36
Judy: I just, I thought that was such a beautiful story and, and it helped me see
18:40
Judy: how I'm connected to broader black freedom struggle.
18:43
Judy: And that to me, I hold onto that quite a bit. In the case of my mom,
18:48
Judy: she didn't go to college. So I'm a first generation college student,
18:51
Judy: as I mentioned before, she did serve our country in the military.
18:55
Judy: She went to the, at the time it was the women's army corps.
18:58
Judy: And so she, I think just seeing that she chose to leave her very,
19:04
Judy: you know, small community in Texas, culturally tight, and quite frankly,
19:11
Judy: a patriarchal home where our grandfather kind of ruled.
19:13
Judy: And her decision to go to the army was to get out of having to get married and have babies.
19:19
Judy: And that would have been the life that would have been prescribed to her.
19:21
Judy: But she wanted something else.
19:23
Judy: And so I think my mom, I don't think she would call herself a feminist,
19:26
Judy: but she is absolutely a feminist.
19:27
Judy: And that feminist tendency to seek a better life and to change the condition
19:33
Judy: and the relationship to patriarchy is something that I see her consistently
19:37
Judy: doing, whether she has the language for it or not.
19:40
Judy: And so my feminist orientation certainly starts, you know, from observing and
19:46
Judy: witnessing my mother's life.
19:49
Paul: That's beautiful. So you've developed something you call the story circle method.
19:53
Paul: It's sort of an alternative to traditional interviews or focus groups.
19:57
Paul: It's a different way of listening and learning from people. So I'm really curious
20:01
Paul: about what what was happening
20:04
Paul: that led you to develop this method, who did you develop it with, and i guess
20:09
Paul: what i really want to know is like what was lacking or what was not right that
20:12
Paul: made you feel like we need a different way of doing this. So if you could share
20:16
Paul: that kind of through the story of how it came about.
20:21
Judy: Yeah. So in 2020, I was invited to consult on what we might call a network assessment
20:30
Judy: report with a colleague.
20:32
Judy: And it was actually, this is interestingly connected to my family and my life,
20:37
Judy: it was actually for a network in the Texas region that my grandmother and my
20:44
Judy: mom and my grandparents and family are from.
20:46
Judy: So that Rio Grande Valley, Brownsville, Texas, more specifically,
20:50
Judy: but they also worked as far west as Harlingen, Texas, where my grandfather's from.
20:55
Judy: So I immediately said yes, because it would reconnect me, even if I couldn't
21:00
Judy: get there physically because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
21:03
Judy: It meant something to me personally to be working within the geographic space
21:08
Judy: in which I still have family.
21:09
Judy: And so the network was called the Equal Voice Network, and they had several
21:14
Judy: across the country. And this happened to be the Rio Grande Valley network.
21:18
Judy: And they were going through a moment of change and really needed folks to come
21:23
Judy: in and do, you know, assess the network, tell us where we need to improve, da da da.
21:28
Judy: The network weaver,
21:29
Judy: though, was like, but we don't want to do it in the ways that we've had other consultants do it.
21:34
Judy: And I really appreciate that she gave us a lot of room and space to develop something.
21:41
Judy: One of the steps that we needed to go through was just assess and hear and learn
21:47
Judy: about what is happening currently in the network.
21:49
Judy: How do people understand themselves in the network? What's needed to move forward?
21:54
Judy: Those kinds of things. And so I pitched the idea of the story circle practice
21:59
Judy: without having an interview method design exactly attached to it.
22:04
Judy: But I described the story circle practice and it's as simple as it sounds.
22:09
Judy: It's sitting in a circle telling stories.
22:12
Judy: And I think that's what really attracted me to it is its simplicity and the
22:17
Judy: fact that because of the pandemic, we still could do it virtually.
22:20
Judy: And I didn't need to, I didn't have to, we didn't have to be in person and that
22:24
Judy: we could construct the story circle conversations over Zoom.
22:28
Judy: And that's what we did for the community in Texas. I think I've shared with
22:32
Judy: you is I like to make the distinction, and it's very important for me as a student
22:37
Judy: of the story circle practice,
22:38
Judy: not to co-opt or claim that I invented an entire method, but instead have adapted
22:44
Judy: and sort of remixed, if you will. I'm a girl of the 90s.
22:47
Judy: I remixed something that exists
22:49
Judy: and kind of put it back out into the world that we can use in research.
22:54
Judy: And I would argue other people have already been doing this,
22:58
Judy: but I hadn't seen it really conceived of in the context of we want to use the
23:04
Judy: stories as data to interpret those stories to either design intervention,
23:09
Judy: either to make some broader meanings,
23:12
Judy: to connect to broader generalizations about a particular social issue that I quite hadn't seen.
23:18
Judy: And I was really curious about doing that. And so.
23:22
Judy: That's what I did. I took something that I've learned in practice,
23:27
Judy: and I want to name my teachers in this practice because I think it's really important.
23:31
Judy: So I learned the Story Circle practice as a board member of Imagining America,
23:36
Judy: which is a consortium of higher education
23:38
Judy: institutions and cultural arts organizations committed to change.
23:43
Judy: And I learned from three people, Erica Kohl-Arenas, who brought me into the
23:49
Judy: practice, Carol Bebelle, and Carlton Turner, who all engage in the practice and bring others in.
24:02
Paul: Paint us a picture of what it looks like to engage in a story circle,
24:06
Paul: which, as you say, is a practice that has deeper roots, specifically with your
24:12
Paul: approach and thinking of this as kind of research data.
24:17
Judy: So a story circle is, you know, constituted of two or more individuals sitting,
24:23
Judy: you know, nearly knee to knee, looking at each other with the intention of being able to listen.
24:30
Judy: It's, I would argue, not so much a conversation circle, it's a listening circle.
24:36
Judy: And I say that because everyone is allotted a specific amount of time to talk.
24:42
Judy: And that, to me, having a timekeeper and someone facilitating really does what
24:48
Judy: I call the practice of power sharing.
24:51
Judy: How many of us have been in a meeting or a workshop and someone has just gone
24:57
Judy: on far too long and ends up taking over so much time that you might not have
25:02
Judy: the time, an opportunity to share?
25:05
Judy: So for me, that kind of practice of cutting people off, the practice of really
25:09
Judy: honoring the time and saying, this is all we have time for.
25:13
Judy: And we trust that the next round, and depending on how many rounds you do,
25:17
Judy: there'll be an opportunity for you to go deeper or for you to share something else.
25:21
Judy: And so I have seen practices where everyone gets as little as two minutes to
25:26
Judy: five minutes or eight minutes. It all depends.
25:29
Judy: Another thing about the story circles practice and
25:32
Judy: interview method is very flexible and nimble you can adjust it
25:35
Judy: to what your community might need and so in that
25:38
Judy: way there's not a tight prescription around it but to me the
25:41
Judy: most important prescription to stick to is that everyone has the equal amount
25:44
Judy: of time and if you finish early the idea is not to rush off and start the timer
25:49
Judy: again and let someone else go but allow the silence and so it's also like listening
25:56
Judy: to silence and holding silence because sometimes in that silence.
26:00
Judy: If someone finishes early, something else may occur to them and they have maybe
26:04
Judy: 30 more seconds to share and they can add to that.
26:07
Judy: And in terms of the story circle interview method, the way I've adapted it is
26:12
Judy: there's no, like we might experience in a moderated focus group or in an individual
26:17
Judy: interview and qualitative research,
26:19
Judy: there's no notion of probing, no notion of follow-up questions.
26:23
Judy: There's another level for as a researcher
26:26
Judy: a practice of trust that the stories that
26:29
Judy: you get are sufficient in and of itself
26:32
Judy: and that that is the data that you will work with
26:34
Judy: and there's a trust in and whoever analyzes whether
26:37
Judy: you're co-analyzing or individual analyzes it that
26:40
Judy: what needs to kind of you know
26:43
Judy: rise to the surface that that that will happen and so for me it's it was it's
26:50
Judy: been very hard it's not always easy i even struggle with it myself and i think
26:55
Judy: what i find folks mostly struggle with too is how do we tell a story i think in some ways in our.
27:02
Judy: Information saturated society with a lot of opinion and analysis we i think
27:07
Judy: we've lost the art of what does it mean to to say when the question is tell
27:13
Judy: me about a time when you felt most free and that it's not,
27:16
Judy: well, I feel free because, or I feel free because, you know,
27:21
Judy: and you don't answer through a story.
27:24
Judy: You don't say, there was a time when I was four and I was walking to the park
27:29
Judy: and I sat on a swing and I, and I was going up and back and forth and the clouds were big.
27:36
Judy: And I remember I fell, but I get, you know, like, like that is,
27:41
Judy: that's the story we I don't want a re-articulation of some other person's idea
27:47
Judy: of freedom and opinion on what freedom is or it isn't,
27:51
Judy: but really about the embodied experience through story of that.
27:59
Paul: So that's interesting to me. Since I interview people, I have found that sometimes
28:03
Paul: it is difficult for people to think of is if people jump very quickly to giving
28:08
Paul: to saying things like, well, I always do this or I usually do this.
28:13
Paul: And sometimes people struggle to find a real concrete story.
28:17
Paul: How do you frame that for people? Do you give them time to prepare?
28:20
Paul: How do you get to that story?
28:22
Judy: So in the trainings I do with folks, I always have a slide around like tips for.
28:29
Judy: Like what it
28:30
Judy: Means to tell a story. Sometimes I would also like put up a two minute video
28:35
Judy: on the screen that shows someone telling a story. I think we learn best from examples.
28:41
Judy: And so between the tips and or showing a video, just reminding ourselves,
28:45
Judy: what are the key points of story?
28:48
Judy: Characters, a little bit of a plot, perhaps a little tension,
28:52
Judy: setting the background in the context, you know, maybe getting to an end.
28:56
Judy: There's like the hero's journey.
28:57
Judy: Is there some kind of arc? So just kind of going back to some of the things
29:01
Judy: that we learned very early in, at least in the U.S. education context, right?
29:05
Judy: And so those are some of the things that I pull out. What I also remind facilitators
29:10
Judy: is it's okay if they're not exactly wrapping it in a story.
29:14
Judy: But I find that with each round and the gentle reminder to tell a story,
29:20
Judy: not opinion, with successive rounds, folks improve on that storytelling because it is a practice.
29:27
Judy: And I think that's why it's called the story circle practice,
29:29
Judy: because it's something that we have to do over and over again,
29:33
Judy: especially in academic circles when we're not trained in that kind of narrative way.
29:38
Judy: We're trained in the claim and the evidence and the right.
29:41
Paul: Why do you want stories? Why do you want stories instead of people's general
29:47
Paul: opinions or takes on the topic?
29:50
Judy: Hmm. Oh, I don't know if you want to ask me that question.
29:55
Judy: Selfishly or just personally, I learned best from story.
30:00
Judy: I read a lot of stories as a child. I'm one of three girls.
30:05
Judy: Our mom took us to the library a lot. It was like the free thing that we could do in our community.
30:11
Judy: So I was the kid that had 10 books checked out and my sisters had like two.
30:16
Judy: And like whether or not I got through all 10, I just loved flipping through them.
30:22
Judy: Whether it's picture books I was already on the
30:24
Judy: chapter books pretty early on and was really excited about
30:28
Judy: reading so for me I just I think
30:31
Judy: I just understand the world through story and
30:34
Judy: narrative I also think that in some ways we just happen to stories helped happen
30:40
Judy: to just a very age old and kind of human nature way of relating to each other
30:47
Judy: and I think what I find is that because in the story circle practice,
30:53
Judy: one of the invitations that a facilitator makes is don't try and think about
30:59
Judy: your story ahead of time.
31:00
Judy: Just listen and trust that something will come up.
31:03
Judy: When folks actually do that, a very unlikely story surfaces and one that you
31:08
Judy: might not have thought you would share actually comes out.
31:11
Judy: I think another thing I remind facilitators is we also don't need to invite
31:15
Judy: people to tell the hardest story.
31:17
Judy: It's not about revealings all the time. We need to go to those hardest places
31:22
Judy: that could bring up, you know, any trauma or cause any harm.
31:26
Judy: And so those are other reminders in the practice to take care.
31:29
Judy: But with that said, I think for me, it's the unexpected, the kind of raw,
31:37
Judy: unvarnished insights that come out of storytelling that.
31:42
Judy: Maybe would not have come out if it was a direct question. I think the other
31:47
Judy: thing to know about the story circle practice is we're not we're also not asking
31:51
Judy: questions. It's a statement.
31:53
Judy: It's what's called a seed story. You're sort of prompting people to say,
31:57
Judy: tell me about the prompt is tell me about a time when X or tell a story about Y.
32:03
Judy: And so the the invitation is not answering a question, again,
32:08
Judy: it's framing you to talk about a time when something happened or when you imagine a kind of future.
32:14
Judy: And so I think that's a very different like orientation too.
32:18
Judy: And I think that to me feels like an exciting provocation to have people talk
32:25
Judy: from that lens rather than kind of question answer logic.
32:29
Paul: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So could you talk about the outcome of doing one of these?
32:34
Paul: Can you talk about kind of after a story circle session or series,
32:40
Paul: an example of something you've learned, something you've observed,
32:44
Paul: something that's come out of that work together?
32:48
Judy: Yeah.
32:48
Judy: So I just came back from a conference not too long ago with Imagining America
32:53
Judy: at New Mexico State University, and we facilitated Story Circle practice.
32:59
Judy: And two things that I always observe when I'm training other folks in the method
33:04
Judy: and the practice, one is not something with words, but it's just my observation
33:12
Judy: is there's a lot of smiling.
33:14
Judy: There's a lot there's laughter there's just
33:16
Judy: an embodied component about it that all
33:20
Judy: the kind of tenseness coming into the workshop folks not
33:23
Judy: feeling like they know each other there's just a different sense in
33:27
Judy: the room and there's just there's a
33:30
Judy: real generosity of people recognize that
33:33
Judy: people have shared something and I think there's this
33:35
Judy: kind of like kindredness that we went through this
33:38
Judy: micro experience together but somehow we're connected
33:42
Judy: and we heard each other we heard and we listened because
33:45
Judy: again to me this is a practice of listening and then in
33:48
Judy: that listening there's like just a slight shift and
33:51
Judy: and i feel that that's the embodied part the other thing i hear folks say is
33:55
Judy: i didn't think i was going to tell that story and i think it's because of that
33:59
Judy: invitation to try not to prescribe your story just listen and see what emerges
34:04
Judy: and a lot of times folks say well it was because i because when i heard such
34:08
Judy: and such story it made me think of this,
34:11
Judy: even though I thought I was going to talk about this when I heard the seed prompt.
34:14
Judy: So then the stories become a little bit informed by each other.
34:18
Judy: So there is that, that can happen, not always, but that is, those are the two
34:23
Judy: things that I think about that, like what I've learned, what I observed. And I think that.
34:29
Judy: I think the story circle interview method is a kind of approach that you have
34:35
Judy: to be willing to have an appetite for ambiguity and for like not knowing.
34:41
Judy: And I think that could be said the same for participatory action research.
34:48
Judy: These aren't approaches that you know what the outcome will be.
34:54
Judy: There's a lot of unknown in this work.
34:57
Judy: And I do think that my upbringing and my life experiences have prepared me well
35:05
Judy: to withstand and to have a pretty hearty appetite for ambiguity and change.
35:11
Judy: And it's a kind of mindset, a flexibility and elasticity that you need in this
35:17
Judy: work. And it's not always easy because it's a real practice of trust.
35:21
Judy: It's a real practice of power sharing.
35:23
Judy: And in my mind, also a practice of care, self-care and community care.
35:35
Paul: So you teach participatory action research at the Wagner School for Public Service at NYU.
35:43
Paul: What are some of the main lessons that you try to teach in this class?
35:47
Paul: What do you most hope they take away from it?
35:49
Judy: It's a relatively new class. This is, I've taught it twice.
35:53
Judy: So in the spring, it'll be the third instance. And each time they were taught slightly differently.
35:59
Judy: The first one, we did not have project partners connected to the course,
36:03
Judy: and that was intentional. I didn't want to rush into partnership.
36:07
Judy: And we know entering and exiting partnerships, it's a practice of care and a
36:14
Judy: lot of intention needs to go into it.
36:15
Judy: And so we actually turned our classroom into a, we saw that as community and
36:21
Judy: the students then there undertook a project there. The second year,
36:25
Judy: this past semester, we had project partners, three different project partners.
36:30
Judy: And so the class is both a little theory and practice.
36:33
Judy: So I wanted to make sure that it wasn't just understanding the traditions,
36:39
Judy: reading studies that have really great examples of different methods,
36:44
Judy: but that there was a pretty healthy dose of practice.
36:47
Judy: And that's really important, I would argue, in a professional school like Wagner,
36:53
Judy: that is the degree-granting institution at NYU for the Master in Public Administration, right?
36:59
Judy: These are folks who are going to go into organizations, whether it's government,
37:03
Judy: nonprofit, philanthropy, or social enterprise, to do some kind of work, right?
37:09
Judy: And so I think about my teaching as important.
37:14
Judy: Making sure that they are walking away with some practices that they can carry with them.
37:18
Judy: And so for me in my class, that looks like, yes, kind of first making sure I would,
37:23
Judy: I want them to understand fundamentally what PAR is and what the possibilities
37:28
Judy: are from a policy standpoint, but also from an organizational standpoint.
37:33
Judy: I also want them to, and I do a little bit of kind of turning the classroom over to them.
37:40
Judy: And we actually practice some of these methods. So I do teach the story circle
37:46
Judy: interview method. We also do a practice called data walks from a colleague on.
37:52
Judy: In the UK, Alison Powell, I believe is her name.
37:56
Judy: And then we also practiced thematic elicitation, which is just a form of collaborative
38:02
Judy: kind of what I might call thematic analysis. How do you do that in groups?
38:07
Judy: And photo voice has been a practice that I've also brought in.
38:10
Judy: So different kinds of methods, I invite the students to teach back to the class.
38:15
Judy: And so their job is to study that method. and for one class time,
38:20
Judy: I'm turning the class over to them and they're giving us some kind of experience
38:23
Judy: in practicing the method.
38:25
Judy: And then lastly, because project partners are now anchored to the course,
38:30
Judy: and I'm really delighted, we have three different partners last year.
38:33
Judy: The goal was not so much to run a whole PAR study,
38:37
Judy: but to think about the question that our partner had and how might we invite
38:42
Judy: some kind of form of participation into their inquiry and to what they wanna
38:46
Judy: do with their community or stakeholders.
38:49
Judy: And so it gives my students a chance to go beyond what the text says.
38:56
Judy: And most importantly, to learn the things that I think only come in practice.
39:01
Judy: And that's how do you allow for projects to shift and change?
39:06
Judy: I think for many students, they're like, well, we wrote this down.
39:09
Judy: We said, this is what we were going to do with the partner.
39:11
Judy: And I can tell you each project had different contours and went in other directions
39:17
Judy: and it wasn't always easy for my students, but I think they learned that research
39:21
Judy: is not always going to go how you have on your research design.
39:24
Judy: I think that's a really important thing to learn.
39:27
Judy: And how do you communicate and negotiate and make those choices in the moment?
39:31
Judy: And so for me, that was a really important thing that they walked away learning.
39:36
Judy: I think the other piece that I wanted them to walk away is to learn to trust
39:40
Judy: themselves because I think that's also a really huge part of the research process
39:45
Judy: is trusting your own knowing,
39:47
Judy: trusting everything that you've been training and preparing for shows up in
39:52
Judy: how you're able to execute the project. And.
39:56
Judy: Throughout the semester, there are these mini milestones where I invite the students to reflect,
40:02
Judy: to kind of provide updates on the project, but less from kind of outcomes perspective
40:07
Judy: and much more from a reflective standpoint about what are you learning about
40:11
Judy: how to move through a lot of ambiguity, partners changing their mind.
40:16
Judy: External threats happening, you know, in the wider world.
40:20
Judy: I know one project particularly had to take an entirely different dimension
40:24
Judy: given, you know, recent political changes in our economy and society.
40:29
Judy: And so how do you navigate those contours of change really became important
40:34
Judy: conversations that we were having in class. And lastly, I'll say the other thing
40:38
Judy: is, how do you bring your own creativity and your own self to the project?
40:42
Judy: And so I really enjoyed that one of the groups that were teaching us back,
40:46
Judy: the Story Circle interview method, made an adaptation and themselves remixed
40:50
Judy: the Story Circle interview.
40:52
Judy: And they said, in order to get into the seed crop and to feel prepared,
40:55
Judy: we're going to hold a collage workshop session before we go into our story circles.
41:01
Judy: And I thought that was such a wonderful riff on the story circle interview method
41:06
Judy: and for them to see that these methods and approaches are for us to adapt, to use,
41:12
Judy: and that there's not a rigid prescription for how we need to go about our research.
41:17
Judy: But what does the community need?
41:18
Judy: What do what are the you know, how are we leveraging the best of our talents
41:23
Judy: and gifts to bring that to the research context?
41:26
Judy: And I think that was something that particular group really took away from the class.
41:39
Paul: Thank you so much for coming. Before we go, could you share a bit about where
41:42
Paul: people might be able to read a bit more about your work?
41:46
Judy: Absolutely. So folks can learn more about the interview method.
41:52
Judy: There was a book chapter that I authored in an edited volume called Anti-Colonial
41:58
Judy: Research Praxis, Methods for Knowledge Justice.
42:01
Judy: It's a Manchester University press book, and I'll make sure you have the link
42:05
Judy: to that. And also, I can make sure you have the link to Lizzie Cooper Davis's
42:11
Judy: book chapter called The Free Southern Theater Story Circle Process.
42:15
Judy: And that's also a chapter in a book that was published in 2019.
42:19
Judy: So it'll tell really, you know, I think a nice history of the story circle process.
42:28
Paul: Thank you all for joining me today. To see the episode transcript and show notes,
42:33
Paul: head over to partnershipwork.org.
42:36
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42:40
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42:44
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42:48
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42:52
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42:56
Paul: wonderful organization Urban Media Arts here in my hometown of Malden, Massachusetts.
43:01
Paul: Check them out at urbanmediaarts.org. I'll see you next time. Take care.