Research

Noor’s mixed methods dissertation research focuses on understanding the transitions of Black, Indigenous, and Youth of Color (BIYOC) between the child welfare and juvenile legal systems and back to their communities during reentry. In this area, she has conducted qualitative studies examining the factors that social workers, public defense attorneys, and youth identify as facilitating or preventing crossover of BIYOC from the child welfare to the juvenile legal system; how attorneys and social workers intervene in the child welfare to juvenile legal system pipeline; and how youth resist structural and interpersonal racism in both systems. For this study, Noor completed two years of observations in two Massachusetts juvenile courts and analyzed interviews with multiple stakeholders using thematic and phenomenological analyses.

Noor has also conducted a comprehensive content analysis of how Massachusetts state agencies conceptualize and describe pathways into the MA juvenile legal system. Additionally, she uses administrative child welfare and juvenile legal data to examine strength-based factors associated with positive reentry experiences including youth community engagement and participation in reentry programming. She is working with the Massachusetts Department of Youth Services to leverage study findings in informing racial equity and inclusion programming and policies within the Department’s reentry and diversion programs.

This work been recognized with several awards, including the Initiative on Cities Early Career Research Grant ($10,000); the 2022 Society for Social Work Doctoral Fellow Award; and the 2022-2023 Ford Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Award, one of the first of Ford Fellowships awarded to a social work researcher.

Noor’s second research prong entails investigating the precise circumstances of youth racialization within criminal legal and social service settings. As critical criminologist Cunneen (2020) argues:

…it is imperative to understand the social processes through which the dominant society engages in racializing different groups, in making race intelligible and in structuring the field of raced relation(ship)s. It requires an examination of the ‘precise circumstances’ in which racialization occurs within the criminal justice system (Glynn, 2014) and the production of knowledge about the behaviours and pathologies of the racialized ‘other’ which justifies exclusionary practices (Collins et al., 2000) (p.523).

While Noor’s dissertation deals with this prong most directly, she has also worked with Dr. Astraea Augsberger (Boston University School of Social Work) and Dr. Rob Eschmann (Columbia School of Social Work) to examine racialization in multiple settings. With Dr. Eschmann, Noor has analyzed data from Twitter examining how people talk about race, racism, and the criminal legal system as a racialized space, and conducted focus groups with BIYOC on how they combat racism in the digital sphere.

The third prong of Noor’s research involves youth-engaged and Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR), and the use of YPAR as an antiracist modality in research methods. Noor has served as the facilitator and research consultant of several youth-engaged and YPAR projects, working with BIYOC in particular to make the research process more accessible. Working with Dr. Augsberger, their research team partnered with youth to examine experiences of racial discrimination within healthcare settings and the influence of racial discrimination on medical mistrust and health service utilization. This project led to the formation of the inaugural Youth Advisory Board at a local, large safety net hospital. Following this project, Noor has trained and continues to work with two cohorts of BIYOC researchers on research methods they can use to design and conduct studies examining the school- and cradle-to-prison pipelines.