My proposed submission centers on community-engaged participatory research in Aurora, Colorado. In this project, we co-designed a community-centered, multilingual listening initiative conducted in local third spaces across six languages, in collaboration with the civic artist collective Warm Cookies of the Revolution. The project sought to surface how residents, including community members who are co-authors of the proposed paper, define civic belonging on their own terms, and to understand the relational conditions, power dynamics, and lived experiences that shape participation, non-participation, and alternative forms of civic exchange.
The work foregrounds linguistic access, relational accountability, and informal civic infrastructures as sites of knowledge production, challenging extractive, and institution-centered norms of civic membership. The paper reflects on how multilingual, arts-led, and place-based methods can contribute to decolonizing participatory research practice in civic and governance contexts.
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