ABSTRACT
As founders of the Graduate Certificate in Participatory Research, the authors' aim in this chapter is to outline the critical process that informed the development of the Certificate and, in doing so, demonstrate three critical practices that have been vital to our efforts toward building a social justice-focused space in the academy: establishing different gatekeeping standards; building more hospitable spaces for marginalized students; and providing training for research traditions that engage participants as co-producers of knowledge. The core course serves as a space for disrupting institutional barriers to collaborative, participatory research practice through its inherent interdisciplinarity. Moving beyond inclusion toward transforming the academy into a space of social justice involves working with, overcoming, and confronting persistent institutional practices. It means reshaping or dismantling the structures of power that have made different modes of living and world-making impossible, rather than seeking to simply open the gates but expect new scholars to reshape themselves for survival.
