Dominique and Evelyn are Co-Investigators on a TAY-Hub subaward titled Seedless: A Study on the Higher Education Experiences of Youth Impacted by Foster Care with (Dis)abilites.

What brought you to this research?

EKR: I became interested in whose knowledge is valued. We talk about “lived experiences” but often it’s patronizing or seen as biased, or just not as important as the knowledge of someone like Dominique, who has a degree and is an expert. This isn’t the case with Dominique but in my community, we talk about people being experts ON us. It’s not a compliment.

DMM: Like Evelyn said, it’s very interesting for me to look into how we can design studies to bring in this knowledge that’s not traditionally valued. And we start that at the beginning – everything here is co-led by Evelyn and me.

How does having an academic and an impacted community member co-leading this project change it?

DMM: Everything is different. Normally, you start a research project by evaluating what’s in the field by doing a literature review, and then you try to plug a gap. We started this project differently. We decided that Evelyn should identify needs they saw in their community, and only then did we check to see if the topic had been well covered in the literature (it hadn’t.)

EKR: Instead of hiring a bunch of grad students to be research assistants, we decided to hire community members who will have that kind of knowledge that allows them to understand the important cultural nuances that we wanted to get at with our study.

What do you hope changes as a result of your research?

EKR: Of course I want people to better understand the topic, but I really want people to wake up to the idea that when researching people, you have to know and respect and honor them. Our expertise is valuable and should be included whenever we’re studied.

DMM: As researchers, we should push ourselves to not just pay lip service to the importance of lived experiences but to fold them into every bit of our work. It’s hard, but it’s critical – not just for reasons of justice, but because it makes the work better. TAY-Hub was one of the few partners who would step up for this kind of work; I hope that others follow their lead.