Youth participatory action research, trauma, and the arts: designing youthspaces for equity and healing

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

• Praxis
• social justice art
• anti-oppression
• youth participatory action research
• youthspace

Note

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Neoliberalism refers to a rationality that underpins policies, values, and practices through an economic framework that views all social activity in terms of a market. Neoliberal market logic posits human well-being is achieved by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills, privileging private over public interests, and minimizing government intervention in all domains in favor of free-market rule (see Harvey, 2005).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kristen P. Goessling

Kristen P. Goessling is an Assistant Professor of Human Development and Family Studies at Penn State, Brandywine. She is invested in creating spaces of belonging where people build meaningful relationships in the pursuit of liberatory social change. Kristen uses participatory research as a tool for movement building and leadership development.