"I'm Empowered by a Better Connection": Youth Participatory Action Research and Critical Literacy

The following article centers on involving youth in the process of community-based research—especially using Youth Participatory Action Research as a methodology and frame—as a mode of literacy development for and in the direction of community change. The study makes an argument that community literacy centers, through research with youth in a mid-sized city in the southeastern United States, are uniquely positioned to take up multimodal critical literacy as a lever for intergenerational understanding, but particularly for driving policy making that is responsive to the needs of people in underserved and under-resourced communities.