Who We Are

About the Walkout! Lab for Youth Justice

The Walkout! Lab for Youth Justice is a data driven lab that works across disciplines and institutions to produce action-oriented research and policy. The Walkout! Lab is an interdisciplinary joint project directed by Subini Annamma (Stanford Graduate School of Education) and Rick Banks (Stanford School of Law, Center for Racial Justice) and led by its fellows, including formerly incarcerated youth, community partners, graduate students, researchers, and faculty. The lab draws and builds knowledge from across disciplines and institutions, and seeks to dismantle the criminalization of youth across education geographies and reimagine p-20 liberatory education by centering the voices of and partnering with multiply-marginalized Black, Indigenous, and Youth of Color. 

The name of the lab is in honor of moments of student activism across time and geographic regions; a walkout is a tool that students have engaged across generations to change education and society. Consequently, this lab partners with individual youth as well as youth justice organizations to have substantive youth leadership.

Mission

The Walkout! Lab for Youth Justice targets the most entrenched inequities in education by centering those most impacted, multiply-marginalized Black, Indigenous, and Youth of Color, through innovative thinking and creative partnerships. We work across educational spaces where multiply-marginalized youth are educated, including public schools and youth prisons. Linking the social sciences in education and sociology with the law allows for a lab rooted in theory and practice to influence multiple entry-points across disciplines and boundaries to shift the policies, practices, and discourse around education and youth justice.

Vision

The Walkout! Lab for Youth Justice believes that centering multiply-marginalized Black, Indigenous, and Youth of Color who are at the intersections of multiple oppressions, not only targets racialized criminalization in education, it dreams what robust education looks like, one that is committed to liberatory pedagogy, curriculum, and relationships.

Strategies

The Walkout! Lab for Youth Justice reimagines fundamental questions about and conceptualizations of justice and education through: 1) Designing & Conducting Research, 2) Creating Pedagogical Opportunities, and 3) Collaborating with Community Partners.

Designing and conducting research. To be a data driven lab producing action-oriented research and policy, we are purposefully crossing carefully constructed borders and boundaries. Because education is not limited to a school building, our projects will take place across multiple geographies. We will also employ a variety of methodologies to explore the processes–including policies, practices, and discourse­–that animate education inequities for multiply-marginalized Black, Indigenous, and Youth of Color. Moreover, we will not only focus on the problem, instead we explore the ways youth resist criminalization and imagine solutions to the issues they face. Guided by theory and practice, the research team is made up of experts from across geographies and disciplines. This intergenerational research team includes faculty, postdoctoral fellow, doctoral, masters, and undergraduates as well as high school students. Importantly, students in public schools and youth prisons will be part of the research teams that craft questions, collect, and analyze data.

Creating pedagogical opportunities. The Walkout! Lab for Youth Justice has a corresponding course offered every other academic year. In it, students from across Stanford campus will learn about the historical roots, current landscape, and systemic and individual consequences of and create research memos and policy briefs addressing a specific issue relating to youth justice and education for multiply-marginalized Black, Indigenous, and Youth of Color. The Youth Justice Lab course will be designed for students to both understand and intervene in issues areas of injustice in education. This course will be co-taught by a faculty from the law school and the Graduate School of Education.

Collaborating with community partners. Each outside partner will both support research projects by providing contacts and access, and benefit from research and policy memos that focus on youth justice and education that align with the Lab’s commitments. We will disseminate research memos and policy briefs that recognize the need for creating systemic change and pushing towards policy and practice shifts that focus on building futures with, instead of in fear of, multiply-marginalized Black, Indigenous, and Youth of Color.