Comadrisma as Method: A Reproductive Justice Approach to Community Based Participatory Action Research

Student parents are often marginalized and/or rendered invisible by academic systems that view their dual role as incompatible with the idealized student (Moreau & Kerner, 2015; Sallee & Cox, 2019; Springer et al., 2009). As a result, these students are often offered limited resources and passed over for opportunities, leading to a lesser academic experience than that of their childless peers. In this article, we argue that eliminating barriers for student parents is largely a reproductive justice issue, and we offer comadrisma as a remedy. Comadrisma is an approach to friendship rooted in Latinidad involving a high degree of support and camaraderie, and this framework has been utilized to embody academic survival by creating inclusive practices of communal care, peer mentorship, and scholarship in academic spaces and beyond (De Los Santos Upton & Hernández, 2023). In what follows, we develop comadrisma as an approach to community based participatory action research framed within the tenets of reproductive justice and demonstrate how we have used this method in our own research with student parents at an R1 university on the Mexico/U.S. border.