Deconstructing Counterspaces

Resistance to oppression needs further elaboration as a theoretical construct useful for a liberatory approach to community research and action. This is especially true in the context of such ostensibly neutral and universalistic practices as “positive youth development” and the “evidence-based practice” movement. The counterspace framework (Case & Hunter, 2012) advances this goal by proposing a unit of analysis for the study of how resistance emerges in response to local conditions. Counterspaces facilitate adaptive responding among oppressed people, meaning their efforts to not be changed by oppression or to change the conditions that maintain oppression. They do so through three “challenging processes,” narrative identity work, direct relational transactions, and acts of resistance. While useful for understanding what resistance might look like, the counterspace framework does not tell us what resistance does. This extended case study (Burawoy, 1998) addresses this problem by developing Case and Hunter’s framework into a more elaborate theory for interpreting the relationship between counterspaces and their organizational hosts. The case under study was a Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) program with young men of color at a youth and family services agency in Chicago. In my role as facilitator of this program, I practiced participant observation (supplemented by interview data and archival research) and grounded my analyses in the experiential knowledge of the youth participants. Both the YPAR youth and the agency were concerned with violence and violence prevention. Yet, they understood violence in fundamentally different ways. The youths’ lives were steeped in violence, from gang life to media exposure. They understood violence in an embodied way and communicated this knowledge through spontaneous narrative practices that were the foundation of their collaborative research projects. Agency staff, on the other hand, understood violence in a professionalized way that was constrained by the logic of the evidence-based practice movement and neo-liberal theories of urban youth of color as lacking and at risk. By comparing these two ways of knowing, I show how oppression can be maintained through organizational patterns of exclusion (Kivel, 2004) that reflect “dynamics of dominance” (Mananzala and Spade, 2008) present in the broader society. More importantly, I frame resistance as diagnostic (Kelley, Tuck and Yang, 2014) of subtle oppressive practices by showing how specific challenging processes counter specific patterns of exclusion, and in specific domains. The result is a revised counterspace framework that should be useful for developing oppressed people’s power in organizational and community settings.