“We Need to Talk About It!”: Doing CYC as Politicized Praxis

Abstract

Like many others seeking to make room for alternative voices in the narrow canon of CYC theory and practice, our work is steeped in theoretical and activist perspectives on colonialism, neoliberalism, normativity, social power, and social change. This critical, multidisciplinary lens is too often cast outside the realm of authentic CYC. In this article, we share our simultaneous struggles with and passion for our work and the CYC field and consider what can be gained from a critical ethic of practice, research, and activism. Our transtheoretical framework, drawn from Indigenous, postcolonial, queer, feminist, and poststructural perspectives, helps us unpack how coming together critically, hopefully, productively enables us to trouble exclusionary notions of CYC. We present vignettes from our practice and research that explicitly challenge the assumption that critical practice is somehow less effective and less responsive to the realities of the diverse children, youth, families, and communities with whom we work.

KEYWORDS:

• feminist
• indigenous
• pedagogy
• postcolonial
• queer
• transtheoretical

Notes

For more on minoritization in CYC, decolonizing practice, critical girlhood work, and youth-engaged participatory action research, see: de Finney, Loiselle, and Dean (2011); de Finney and Saraceno (in press); Khanna (2011); Loiselle (2011); and Loiselle, Taylor, and Donald (in press). For more on critical residential care work and Indigenous analysis, see: Corcoran (2012); de Finney, Green, and Brown (2009); and de Finney, Dean, Loiselle, and Saraceno (2011).

The examples we use in this article are largely drawn from arts-based, youth-engaged and/or action-centered research studies. This is because such moments in our research processes were more rigorously documented than in our other sites of practice and, more importantly, because we have explicit written and verbal consent from those involved to write about and publish their words, experiences, and interactions. While we all have many examples from our practice that were not part of research studies, we find it unethical to share such stories without going through explicit informed consent processes with the children, youth, and families involved.

Minoritized groups are positioned as outsiders to dominant norms and consequently seen to fall short of the standards of the dominant group. When difference is the basis for exclusion, a social context is created where certain groups are privileged and others subjugated or minoritized (i.e., seen as “less than” or “other”) based on their positioning in a normative social hierarchy. These exclusions produce drastically unequal outcomes for certain groups of children, youth, and families (de Finney, Dean, et al., 2011).

This project was conducted through a SSHRC grant in partnership with Antidote, an award-winning grassroots network for/by racialized girls, young women, and women (http://www.antidotenetwork.org).

See http://www.photovoice.org.

This program was part of a larger SSHRC funded study focused on identity, belonging, and solidarity among Indigenous and racialized girls and women in Victoria, led by Dr. Jo-Anne Lee. I had the honor of working on this project with Antidote: Multiracial and Indigenous Girls and Women's Network, a community-based organization that strives to reduce the social exclusion faced by Indigenous and minority girls and women in this city.

“Coming out” has been celebrated as a self-actualizing moment of modernist identity development, assuming a coherent identity. However, it is important to note that coming out is not “an equal opportunity endeavor” (Tilsen & Nylund, 2010, p. 98). Coming-out narratives inscribe and validate privileged (white, male) GLBT liberal subjects, and function as a technology of Western “homonormativity” (Puar, 2005, 2007).

This excerpt is from a spoken-word piece that I wrote and performed for my co-researchers in Project Artemis so that they could better understand how I was making sense of the experiences they were sharing and the knowledges we were generating together through our research.