Whose Chinatown? Chinese Diasporic Youth Agency Through YPAR in an Era of Neighborhood Change and Social Vulnerability 

This project examines New York Chinese School (NYCS), a 117-year-old community heritage school in Manhattan’s Chinatown, as a dynamic third space where working-class Chinese diasporic youth negotiate identity, family history and heritage culture amid intensified immigration enforcement and neighborhood change. Drawing on a theoretical trifecta of Hall’s cultural identity theory, third space theory, and postmemory, the study conceptualizes youth identity as an ongoing process of becoming, shaped by inherited community and individual histories and present racialized conditions.

This research utilizes an art-based Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) framework to engage young participants with intergenerational interviews and creative multimedia production to understand the relation between immigration and their identity. Through the collaborative analysis of interview data and youth-generated artifacts, the study explores how youth develop communal and familial knowledge and how such knowledge enables them to re-envision their identity, critical agency, and advocacy in relation to Chinatown’s past and present.

This study positions Chinese diaspora youth as researchers, storytellers, and civic agents within a historic heritage school to investigate how intergenerational storywork influences their understanding of contemporary immigration realities, their sense of communal and familial responsibility, and their conceptualization of a culturally and historically bonded Chinatown. By doing so, the project contributes to existing academic literature on Chinese diasporic identity, and offers actionable findings for policymakers and heritage institutions dedicated to supporting cultural development of immigrant communities.

PI: Dr. Shuang Fu, Assistant Professor, Teaching and Learning, Steinhardt

Experiences of Racism Across Time, Contexts, and Levels: Suicide Risk Among Racially Minoritized Youth

Suicide has disproportionately risen among racially minoritized youth compared to their non-Latinx/e white peers. Experiences of racism, which have been linked to suicidal thoughts and behaviors (STBs), may help explain this racial disparity. The existing research, however, has largely focused on offline, individual-level forms of racism obtained subjectively (i.e., interpersonal racial discrimination). Our project will examine the compounding and cumulative effects of experiences of racism across multiple contexts (i.e., offline, online), across multiple levels (i.e., cultural, institutional, individual) and across time (i.e., historical, contemporaneous). We will merge several publicly available national datasets including the Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which contains information about STBs among racially minoritized youth across the US and personal experiences of racial discrimination. We will also use the Structural Racism Index to capture historical institutional racism via state-level racial disparities across various institutions; CRTForward to capture contemporaneous race-based policies; Project Implicit to capture offline cultural racism via aggregate scores of state-level racial bias; and online cultural racism will be captured via negative racial sentiment online. We will conduct a series of multi-level models to test our research aims and examine the relationship between cultural, institutional, and individual experiences of racism and STBs among racially minoritized adolescents. Our interdisciplinary team of developmental scientists, clinical psychologists, epidemiologists, and sociologists are well positioned to successfully carry out this proposed project. These findings will broaden our understanding of racism as a social determinant of suicide risk and help identify novel targets of intervention to promote multi-level strategies of youth suicide prevention.

PI: Dr. Lillian Polanco-Roman Assistant Professor, Applied Psychology, Steinhardt

Co-Is: 
Dr. Brendesha M. Tynes, Professor of Education and Psychology, USC 

Dr. Sasha Zhou, Associate Professor, Department of Public Health, Wayne State University

Dr. Catalina Cañizares, Assistant Professor, Applied Psychology, Steinhardt

Dr. Gabe H. Miller, Associate Professor, University of Alabama at Birmingham

Advisor:
Dr. Pamela Morris-Perez, Professor, Applied Psychology, Steinhardt