"This Ain't the Projects": A Researcher's Reflections on the Local Appropriateness of Our Research Tools

In this article I examine the ways in which Black and Latina/o urban high school youth pressed me to reflexively examine my positionality and that of my research tools during a year-long ethnographic study documenting their communicative repertoires. I reflect on youth comments on my researcher tools, as well as myself, in order to wrestle with the indexical connections fragile and over-surveilled participants might have toward our well-intentioned research methods.