Principles of Research

Centro staff conducts research about Puerto Rican and other racialized ethnic communities. Scholarship should be relevant for social change and justice in ways that illuminate the contours and mechanisms of power, hierarchy, and domination. It should provide suggestions for how to critically interrogate different layers of power and analyze how traditional constructs (such as family, community, and nation) may obscure the heterogeneity that exists among Puerto Ricans. Centro staff and colleagues are committed to engaging in research that is both collaborative and interdisciplinary, methodological approaches we believe necessary for advancing new understandings and solutions to emerging questions and problems. Finally, Centro Researchers observe the following guiding principles:


1. Sensitive, liberatory research that provides self-representation and self-determination through co-partnerships with non-academic groups. The Centro staff also encourages participatory inquiry that attends to power relations inherent in the research process, various professional contexts and the study of disenfranchised populations. This ethical research includes attention to:

• The internal/external politics of these communities;
• The power dynamics inherent in authorizing voices of legislators, academics, the medical, legal, and religious establishments, and governmental and policy-making agencies;
• Existing power relations among the populations and sites that researchers engage.
  Crucial to this analysis are the sociohistorical and political economic forces that reveal a dialectical understanding of social behavior and organization as these shape the lives of Puerto Ricans.