Centering Ethics of Care: Identity-Affirming, Desire-Focused Community-Based Participatory Research with Japanese Canadian Youth

This presentation shares the processes and outcomes of the Japanese Canadian Arts and Activism Project (JCAAP), a community-based participatory research (CBPR) initiative grounded in an ethics of care, cultural affirmation, and collective healing. Uniquely, many members of the research team share intersecting identities with the Japanese Canadian (JC) community involved, challenging the conventional separation between researcher and researched. For many team members, the project became a vital pathway for reconnecting with a community they had previously felt distanced from, while also creating opportunities to amplify JC histories and voices across generations.

Our approach is inspired by Eve Tuck’s (2009) model of desire-based research, which resists deficit-based framings of marginalized communities. The JC community is often remembered in relation to wartime mass incarceration, dispossession, and dispersal. While this history is critical, our research also centers the present and future of the community—its creativity, resilience, and ongoing contributions to social and cultural life.

The JCAAP team conducted interviews and focus groups with over 100 participants—including artists, youth, and activists—and reviewed extensive archival materials, such as more than 100 videos, community publications, and books. Building meaningful relationships with community members was central to our process. These relationships enabled deeper understanding of participants’ stories and helped ensure our research remained relevant and grounded. Alongside public-facing knowledge mobilization events, these engagements aimed not only to gather narratives but also to co-create spaces of belonging, intergenerational dialogue, and subtle resistance. The project underscores how culturally rooted storytelling and artistic expression can foster identity formation, healing, empowerment, and community power.

Drawing on evolving frameworks from Social Movement Theory (SMT), our research challenges linear models that trace grievance to protest. Instead, we draw from SMT’s focus on cultural framing, informal resistance, and everyday enactments of change (Nulman & Schlembach, 2018). We adopt Okruhlik’s (2004) notion of social movements as “solidarity networks with potent cultural meaning,” emphasizing the power of shared ideas and cultural resources over material ones. This lens is especially useful in understanding JC youths’ acts of subtle resistance—such as reclaiming erased histories, forming identity-affirming spaces, and engaging in collaborative research as political practice.

The voices of youth researchers illustrate the project’s impact. One reflected: “JCAAP provides a safe space for healing, critical self-reflexivity, empowerment, and community building.” Another shared: “It’s impactful for people emerging in these fields to feel represented.” A third described unlearning internalized minimization and reconnecting with the community: “It’s been an opportunity for connecting, sharing, and community.”

Ultimately, JCAAP reimagines research as an interdependent, co-creative process rooted in shared histories and future-oriented desires. It demonstrates how CBPR, when grounded in identity-affirming and culturally resonant frameworks, can foster both individual transformation and collective resilience. For researchers and participants alike, the project is both a method and a movement—centered not on extraction, but on care, connection, and creative resistance.