Youth participatory action research, trauma, and the arts: designing youthspaces for equity and healing
Abstract
Goessling, K. P. (2020). Youth participatory action research, trauma, and the arts: designing youthspaces for equity and healing. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 33(1), 12-31.
Coming of age in an urban setting presents both opportunities and challenges for development and learning. In this paper, I illustrate the importance of understanding the ways in which marginalized young people respond to, resist, and are shaped by complex traumas stemming from structural oppression as a result of ongoing colonial and racial violence. I offer “youthspaces” as a framework that centers those with direct experiences of oppression as trauma as experts and cultural producers to envision a more socially just future-world and imagine things as though they could be otherwise. Five guiding principles and a living curriculum are offered for co-creating humanizing spaces with youth grounded in radical imagining, belonging, and collective creative inquiry. This work provides researchers, youth workers, young people, community organizers, activists, and educators a toolkit for conceptualizing, designing, and implementing praxis for critical consciousness and more effective, culturally sustaining programming, services and policies.
Abstract
Goessling, K. P. (2020). Youth participatory action research, trauma, and the arts: designing youthspaces for equity and healing. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 33(1), 12-31.
Coming of age in an urban setting presents both opportunities and challenges for development and learning. In this paper, I illustrate the importance of understanding the ways in which marginalized young people respond to, resist, and are shaped by complex traumas stemming from structural oppression as a result of ongoing colonial and racial violence. I offer “youthspaces” as a framework that centers those with direct experiences of oppression as trauma as experts and cultural producers to envision a more socially just future-world and imagine things as though they could be otherwise. Five guiding principles and a living curriculum are offered for co-creating humanizing spaces with youth grounded in radical imagining, belonging, and collective creative inquiry. This work provides researchers, youth workers, young people, community organizers, activists, and educators a toolkit for conceptualizing, designing, and implementing praxis for critical consciousness and more effective, culturally sustaining programming, services and policies.