Multimodal Cosmopolitanism: Cultivating Belonging in Everyday Moments With Youth

Abstract

This article explores the idea that everyday moments hold cosmopolitan potential wherein such recognition can reorient educators and youth toward one another in meaningful and generative ways. Found in the quotidian practices of young people are indicators of their affiliations, their proclivities, their interests, and their curiosities. Educators, should they choose to take these practices seriously, will find ample fodder in the wide range of youths’ communicative and expressive practices for making connections across differences and to move toward lowering barriers of participation for youth in institutional spaces. Data from an ethnographic study of a theater project housed within an alternative to detention program are reanalyzed using a lens of multimodal cosmopolitanism to explore everyday and often fleeting moments of interaction to render visible the ways in which participants expressed and experienced belonging in myriad ways—belonging to the project as well as to one another. A discussion following two ethnographic vignettes of the theater program offers recommendations for how a multimodal cosmopolitan orientation can support educators to approach curriculum and enact pedagogy that nurtures belonging with and among youth every day.

Notes

Notes

All names of participants and programs, including “Journeys” and the “Theater Initiative,” are pseudonyms.

This vignette originally appeared in a previously published chapter (Vasudevan, ) and I include it here to call forth different salient elements under the reenvisioned framework of multimodal cosmopolitanism.

One alternate option is to remain incarcerated in the city’s largest jail facility pending trial, and this is an option that some young people select rather than attend Journeys or one of the other alternative to incarceration programs.

See, for example, Vasudevan et al., ; Vasudevan & Rodriguez Kerr, .

Guinier and Torres () write extensively about the narratives that become sedimented in the broader social consciousness, particularly those about race and communities, and describe these narratives as “stock stories” that are evident in institutional policies and practices that result in inequitable conditions for people who occupy social margins.