Migrant youths’ creation of visual counternarratives to expand the boundaries of civic belonging

Abstract

In the context of heightened worldwide migration, emotion-based discourses portraying migrants as fearsome and dangerous continue to regulate nation-state boundaries. This paper reports on a critical visual research study in which migrant youth living in New York City were given digital cameras and asked to take pictures of places they thought were important in their school, neighborhood, and family. The study’s research methodology was designed to explore the role of emotion in how migrant youth enacted citizenship and used photography to construct visual counternarratives. In order to challenge emotion-based discourse that excluded migrants, the youth in this study mobilized feelings of care and cultivated transnational affective ties to assert their right to belong in public spaces. Implications for participatory qualitative research methods and school-based civic education practices are explored.

Keywords:

• Affect
• emotion
• visuality
• citizenship
• migration

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the youth participants for their willingness to share their visual stories with the wider world. I am also grateful for the critical insights of Dr. Sandra Schmidt during data analysis, as well as the seven anonymous reviewers fwhose feedback strengthened this manuscript.

Notes

1 All names of schools and participants used in this study are pseudonyms.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Patrick Keegan

Patrick Keegan is an assistant professor in the School of Education and Counseling at Purdue University Northwest. Dr. Keegan's research focuses on youth civic engagement with racially, ethnically and linguistically diverse students, elementary social studies teacher preparation and theories of emotion and political participation in the social studies.