A critical mixtape for the movement: reflecting on creative and critical youth practices in research

We, the four co-editors, write the introduction for this special issue from our respective locales and positionalities while being flooded with images and accounts of injustice. The present moment is marked by a desire for radical change, a belief in new possibilities for the world, and an overwhelming sense of urgency. Things have to move. We consider this volume a critical mix-tape created by young people, artists and scholars during this moment of possibilities as evidence of how this urgency drives conceptual and methodological innovations to advance notions of equity, liberation, hope, healing, transformation, and justice. Each of the manuscripts in this issue contribute unique “songs,” with melodies of uplift, rhythms of resistance, and lyrics of liberation that encourage us to create humanizing spaces through embodied praxis as social justice.