Kathryn R Berringer

KATHRYN R. BERRINGER, then a graduate student at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, was awarded funding in October 2019 to aid research on ‘Caring for LGBTQ Detroit Youth: Replicability and the ‘Science’ of Care,’ supervised by Dr. Damani Partridge. This project explores how social and medical services providers seek to produce safety and enact care for Black LGBTQ+ Detroit youth in the context of profound disinvestment, the collapse of urban infrastructure, the dispossession of public goods, and ongoing crises of racial and economic injustice. In doing so, it examines the politics of recognition, representation, and surveillance, as practitioners engage in modes of activism that seek to expand visibility and improve outcomes for LGBTQ+ youth in various systems of care and public institutions. It also examines how practitioners, working towards this goal, take up, advance, and sometimes contest the principles of ‘Implementation Science”an emerging but largely unscrutinized field in health care and social service research. In this mode of practice research, practitioners work to produce care as measurable, testable, and replicable social interventions in order to establish an ‘evidence-base’ for practice tailored to LGBTQ+ youth. In examining these various forms of care and epistemic activism’that is, activist engagements in knowledge production’this project examines how practitioners and youth negotiate visibility, confront marginalization, and seek to resolve the ethical dilemmas inherent to this work.