Creation as participation/participation as creation: Cultural production, participatory politics, and the intersecting lines of identification and activism

We write this editorial on the heels of troubling juridical manifestations of pervasive institutional racism in the United States of America – the dismissal of charges against two White police officers, Darren Wilson and Daniel Pantaleo, for the separate murders of two unarmed Black men, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner, in New York City, respectively. Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu introduced “Jewish nation-state” legislation that would effectively legalize discrimination against non-Jewish citizens by limiting their right to self-determination. In Canada, the murder and disappearance of Indigenous women continues to make news, even as the state refuses to recognize that the pattern is evidence of continued violence of the white supremacist settler colonial state.

While state officials like Prime Minister Stephen Harper may believe that such instances of violence should be viewed as individual crimes and not “as a sociological phenomenon” (Boutilier, 2014), people on the streets beg to differ. Indeed, if the growth and success of the Idle No More movement in Canada and abroad is any indication, there is widespread agreement, at least among Indigenous peoples and their allies, that the otherwise inexplicable murder rate of Indigenous women only makes sense as a symptom of the violence of a settler colonial project based on sexism and racist ideology (Smith, 2005; Simpson, 2014; Sium, 2013). The same is true if we are to make sense not only of the grand jury decisions in both the Brown and Garner murder cases, but of the innumerable instances of police brutality against Black men, who are killed by police at a disproportionate rate when compared to the general population (Johnson, Hoyer, & Heath, 2014; Chang, 2014; Gabrielson, Grochowski Jones, & Sagara, 2014). Racism and settler colonialism also intersect through daily violence in the nation building project of the Israeli state, where illegal settlements and military actions that have been widely sanctioned by the international community continue unabated.

To such forms of state-sponsored violence, people respond through a wide range of means, some passively and others more actively. The latter, active engagement in political participation, has been a primary concern for educators and education scholars for some time, particularly for educators committed to notions of citizenship and civic participation who suggest that by some accounts such participation appears to be declining, particularly among young people (Kahne & Westheimer, 2006; Macedo et al., 2005). And yet, if the public outcry in response to the examples listed above and other recent manifestations against state violence across the globe—from Hong Kong to Mexico, from Egypt to Chile — is any indication, political engagement is alive and well in today's globalized and digitally mediated world.

What is clear, however, is that how people participate in politics today looks very different from the days when voting and writing letters to parliament or congress seemed like a good enough way to influence public life. Today, corporations and wealthy elites yield an inordinate amount of influence on both electoral politics and public policy (Gilens & Page, 2014). This has the effect of undermining traditional forms of participation, by delaying and shifting accountability and allowing the state — literally and figuratively — to get away with murder. While marches and other forms of protest have strong historical precedent, the present conditions have also forced the various publics to find other means of expressing their opinions and attempting to shape the conditions that impact their own communities and families.

One way in which communities express their opinions as well as confront the violence of social and political oppression is by engaging different modes for producing and disseminating cultural artifacts and exchanging ideas through symbolic and expressive means. In response to the failure of the state to indict the police officers that killed Michael Brown and Eric Garner, for example, spoken word artist Daniel J. Watts collaborated with 100 theater professionals in New York City to produce a flash mob in front of an NYPD station in Times Square, titled “This is how we shoot back” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpfTos6NroM). And according to author Chandni Desai (in this issue), shooting back is precisely what Palestinian youth are doing with their video cameras when they produce documentation of the violence perpetrated by Israel in their villages as a way to “participate” through forms of resistance. Such resistance is also often a form of what Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor (2008) calls “survivance” as it is manifested through the many cultural practices that have been central to the Idle No More movement in Canada, from walking, to drumming, chanting, and forms of visual art that give substance and life to political participation (http://www.idlenomore.ca/).

Of course, expressive and symbolic modes that draw on cultural production practices are not new to political participation. The singing of spirituals, for example, was central to the U.S. civil rights movement from its very beginnings, and cultural resistance has been central to anti-colonial movements throughout the 20th century across the globe, from Palestine to Puerto Rico, from South Africa to Taiwan. Yet, the analysis of cultural production within the context of political protest and participation has often treated these modes of expression as vehicles for communicating ideas rather than as forms of political participation in their own right. As new technologies transform the ways in which people express themselves and communicate with each other, it is increasingly important to understand the relationship between participatory politics and cultural production. This is critical if we are to take seriously the question of how educational projects of various kinds and in various settings may promote and support new modes of political engagement through youth cultural production.

This lack of attention to the relationship between cultural production and participatory politics is particularly striking when we consider that at least since the 1970s cultural studies scholars have examined the significance of cultural production in daily life. The early focus on youth “resistance” framed cultural production primarily through the lens of antagonisms with dominant culture (Hall & Jefferson, 1976; Hebdige, 1979). This focus became more layered by the work of scholars who paid attention to dynamics of gender and race in particular (Gilroy, 1991; McRobie, 1993). Later, scholars like Paul Willis (1990, 2003) moved toward a more nuanced attention to daily practices and “grounded aesthetics.” Even more recently, others have provided examinations of cultural negotiation (Dimitriadis, 2009), embodiment (Maira, 2000), and affect (Muñoz, 2000), paying attention to interactions between the local and the transnational (Maira & Soep, 2004). In all, these scholars have provided significant insight into the role of cultural production in processes of identification and subject formation and how youth negotiate the symbolic and material conditions that shape their lives. Based on this work, cultural production can be conceptualized as any form of creative and symbolic exchange that arranges and/or rearranges available materials through cultural practices in order to express, create, and recreate ideas, feelings, and various aspects of cultural life. For Gaztambide-Fernández (2013), cultural production refers “to the broader landscape of cultural practices, processes, and products that may or may not be included under the discursive banner of the arts as practices of symbolic creativity” (p. 215), but which nonetheless involve engaging in creative work that reflects the particularities of material and symbolic relations that shape people's lives.

Parallel to this work, in recent years there has been an increasing interest in various forms of youth political engagement. This work has mobilized concepts of citizenship and civic participation and has paid particular attention to education for democracy (e.g. Kahne & Westheimer, 2006). More recently, this work has been framed around the concept of participatory politics. Kahne, Middaugh, and Allen (2014) define participatory politics as “interactive, peer-based acts through which individuals and groups seek to exert both voice and influence on issues of public concern” (p. 3, see also Cohen & Kahne, 2012). Such a broad conceptualization of participatory politics has been key for taking serious account of how the internet and various forms of social media increasingly provide the mechanisms for new forms of participatory politics to develop. This work has extended how civic engagement is conceptualized by bringing into view a wider range of contexts and practices through which young people in particular express their ideas and participate in the political sphere.

Despite this shift in attention, cultural production has not been theorized extensively in relationship to such activities. While the work on civic engagement and participatory politics tends to be more concrete regarding contexts of participation and political aims, it also tends to romanticize cultural practices, often through the language of “the arts,” and tends to focus on these practices as vehicles for, rather than definitional to, participation. The seven articles in this special issue of Curriculum Inquiry collectively address this conceptual lapse by examining the relationship between cultural production and participatory politics in a range of national and political contexts. Each article examines how youth engage cultural production as part of their political participation, and how political participation is sometimes central to and expressed through cultural production.

The authors in this issue provide examples of the intersections between youth cultural production and participatory politics and bring together a range of approaches to the examination of these intersections, providing illustrations of the complexities involved in these processes. Each of the articles takes up different kinds of practices — from street art (Jaramillo) to video production (Desai), from online activism (Ito et al.) to installation work (Recollet), and examine a range of political contexts — from students striking at the University of Puerto Rico (Rosario) to activism in community arts centres (Kuttner) and university classrooms (Jocson). As editors, we engaged the seven articles in this special issue by asking ourselves what becomes evident when we pay close attention to the intersection of cultural production and participatory politics: what does participatory politics help us see about cultural production and how does cultural production expand how we understand participatory politics? In the next section, we provide a summary of each article and highlight what emerges for us as the key insights regarding this intersection.

Creation as Participation/Participation as Creation

In the first article of the issue, titled “Learning Connected Civics,” authors Mimi Ito, Elisabeth Soep, Neta Kligler-Vilenchik, Sangita Shresthova, Liana Gamber-Thompson, and Arely Zimmerman provide a meta-analysis of several research projects that examine how youth engage in participatory politics. They look across a range of studies in order to draw insights about the relationship between socially connected learning, cultural production, and participatory politics, particularly within online environments. From slam poets to Harry Potter fans, the authors trace the ways in which youth mobilize their cultural contexts and productions to pursue civic and political action. They focus specifically on the possibilities offered by today's “networked ecosystem” (p. 10), which provides a fast and accessible way for youth to communicate and engage with their peers in a variety of ways and across settings. The authors propose the term “connected civics” to refer to “a form of learning that mobilizes young people's deeply felt interests and identities in the service of achieving the kind of civic voice and influence that is characteristic of participatory politics” (p. 11). Their work seeks to understand the connection between youth expressive cultural practices and civic culture, as well as how youth make sense of aspects of their political life, even when they do not necessarily understand these practices as political.

While Ito and her colleagues provide a large picture of the wide range of practices through which young people engage in online activism, Korina Jocson brings us into her own classrooms, as she engages her students in political action through a broadened conception of multiliteracies. In her article, titled “New Media Literacies as Social Action: The Centrality of Pedagogy in the Politics of Knowledge Production,” Jocson reflects on the ways in which university students in a new media literacies class use cultural production to engage with social change in their community. The study of new media literacies afforded the class the space to think about “new ways of embodying identity and community” (p. 32), while developing new patterns for organizing, producing, and disseminating their own multimedia creations. The importance of these developing identities is evident in the selection of topics that students made for their culminating social action projects, which Jocson notes were “purposefully connected and contingent upon other discourses in which students had participated” (p. 42). Through the process of media making, Jocson argues that the students shifted their perceptions of themselves as “members of society with the ability to produce knowledge, to use particular forms of knowledge to challenge normalized ways of thinking and doing” (p. 47), pointing to the importance of identity formation with regards to cultural production.

Stepping outside the higher education classroom and into the courtyards and contested public spaces of the University of Puerto Rico, Melissa Rosario examines the symbolic strategies mobilized by students during a system-wide strike. In her article “Public Pedagogy in the Creative Strike: Destabilizing Boundaries and Re-imagining Resistance in the University of Puerto Rico,” Rosario examines the spatial dimensions of these practices, showing how strikers disrupted the normative boundaries between protest space/public space, and actor/spectator through their direct engagement with the police force, whose purpose was to control the protests. Through several long days of public costumed performances and outdoor musical events from behind barricades, Rosario traces the ways in which protesters engaged police officers in ways that reconfigured the public space of the university. She connects this spatial reconfiguration to public pedagogy, suggesting that the activists were themselves transformed by the activism as much as their spectators/learners.

Shifting the focus to community arts centres in the United States, Paul Kuttner draws on political theory and cultural studies to examine the different kinds of cultural citizenship that emerge from different kinds of arts education programs. Rather than looking at cultural citizenship as a way to make demands on the state, Kuttner's article, titled “Educating for Cultural Citizenship: Reframing the Goals of Arts Education,” focuses on the individual citizen and sheds light on the multiple possibilities for cultural citizenship. In this sense, cultural production is a key process in identity formation through which youth in this program seek out ways to be involved in their community, value different types of cultural production, and are taught that claims and obligations are put on them as artistic creators and consumers. In his examination of a community organization that trains youth as “cultural organizers,” Kuttner traces the ways in which this educational project is invested in the development of a justice-oriented citizen (Westheimer & Kahne, 2004). This kind of cultural citizenship involves a critical examination of the cultural products being consumed in the mainstream media, using alternative modes of expression to tell counter narratives of particular communities. In this way, Project HIP-HOP uses cultural production to engage young people in a participatory politics that allows them to enact social change.

Staying with the focus on activism in the context of community-centred organizations, Nathalia Jaramillo draws on recent events in Venezuela to examine how youth use cultural production to enact their political agency and express their evolving subjectivity in relationship to the nation-state. In particular, in her article titled “The Art of Youth Rebellion,” Jaramillo uses the cultural production of the colectivos to understand the role of expressive and symbolic work when the state is invested in, and encourages, the development of and participation in popular power movements. In this instance, the conditions of alterity are not the locus of resistance, but rather a mode through which young people in communities express their support for the state and become citizens. This is particularly important for youth from low-income communities who have felt marginalized and dispossessed by previous governmental policies and now find themselves playing a central role in support of the state. In engaging in these cultural practices, Jaramillos argues that the youth exercise collective freedom, witness a transfer of power to the community and “establish the foundation for continued social action” to improve their lives (p. 103).

By situating cultural practices enacted on the streets at the center of political participation, in the article titled “Shooting Back in the Occupied Territories: An Anti-Colonial Participatory Politics,” Chandni Desai argues for an expansion of the conceptualization of participatory politics that takes into account contexts where the very idea of a citizen is under erasure. Drawing on Willis's (1990) notion of symbolic resistance, Desai analyses how Palestinian youth are “shooting back” through the production and distribution of films that capture their everyday experiences in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. This mode of cultural production goes beyond a politics of resistance to enact a politics of refusal that both articulates and mobilizes a Palestinian political identity. In utilizing technology to share these videos, Desai argues that Palestinian youth are crossing state and continental lines to bring their experiences to a broader public and mobilize international support, in effect to exert their voice on issues that concern them outside of the parameters imposed by a colonizing force.

Like Desai, Karyn Recollet situates her work within the streets of the settler colonial invention that is Canada. In her article titled “Glyphing Decolonial Love through Urban Flash Mobbing and Walking with our Sisters,” Recollet deploys a spatial analysis of the urban flash mob round dance of the Idle No More movement, as well as Christi Belcourt's Walking with our Sisters commemorative art installation. Recollet explores new geographies of Indigenous resistance in Canada. In particular, she focuses on the production of what she calls “spatial glyphs” through the embodied motions of Indigenous artists in the round dance flash mob, as well as the emergent pathways created by the strategically positioned vamps in Walking with our Sisters. In the tracing of these glyphs, Recollet demonstrates their implication for reconceptualizing processes of solidarity building, activism and pedagogical practices of resistance.

For us as editors, what emerges from a collective reading of these seven articles is the critical insight that cultural production is not simply a vehicle for communication in participatory politics, but central to the very process through which participants come to form their ideas and build political identities. Likewise, participatory politics is not just a context within which young people can share their creations, but the process of participation is itself a process of cultural creation.

Creation is Participation

While describing very different social and cultural contexts, each of the articles in this special issue offers examples of the ways in which cultural production always involves forms of participation that always have political implications. In the case of the colectivos in Venezuela, for example, Jaramillo shows how youth use cultural production as a way to connect to a political system that emphasizes communal participation. By contrast, as Rosario illustrates in the case of the students strikers at the University of Puerto Rico, cultural production is also a means of protesting against the state while challenging the repressive state apparatus. This is most evident in the video production of Palestinian youth, through which they do not only confront the military presence of an invading army, but also become active participants in the telling of a political narrative.

While Jaramillo, Rosario, and Desai illustrate how creation is a form of participation through engaging the state as a form of what Ito and her colleagues frame as “capital P” politics, the other four articles offer examples that require a broader conceptualization of politics. This is crucial because many of the youth involved in projects such as those described by Ito and her colleagues have grown disenchanted with mainstream politics “and want to distinguish themselves and their work from the figures who self-identify as politicians and from the kinds of events typically understood to be motivated by politics” (p. 14). This does not mean, of course, that their engagement in cultural production is any less participatory or any less political. Indeed, their work might be tied to community organizations invested in creating the kind of social justice oriented cultural citizen that Kuttner describes, which involves participation through the creation of cultural artifacts. Similarly, it might involve the kind of participation with local organizations that some of the students in Jocson's class engaged through their media production and without which the work would not have been possible. What ties all of of these contexts together is that young people are engaged in modes of cultural production that are inherently premised on participation and in engaging with the broader social context as a way to promote social change. It is this participative aspect of cultural production that underscores its importance for participatory politics.

When we examine cultural production as a mode for participation, we are able to see widespread political engagement in ways that focusing on more narrowly defined political engagement seems to miss entirely, as Ito and colleagues suggest. This focus on cultural production as participation allows us to consider how a wider range of cultural practices, such as murals (Jaramillo), people's journalism (Desai), hip hop culture (Kuttner), round dances/flashmobs (Recollet), and fan websites (Ito and colleagues) can all be understood as forms of participation. Moreover, it lets us move beyond the scope of practices narrowly framed as “the arts” toward the importance of symbolic creativity and recognize the everyday cultural practices of youth as potential terrain for political participation. This participation, taking place far away from polls and political campaigns, is rooted in community capacity building and, as Kuttner argues, gives youth a way to begin organizing and to “see themselves as part of larger struggles for justice, and be open to the kind of collaboration that undergirds successful social change efforts” (p. 86).

This is significant, as Ito and her colleagues remind us, because “young people's everyday experiences of agency in their social worlds, and of citizenship and community involvement turn out to be largely disconnected from what most educators might think of as sites of civic and political engagement” (p. 13). The authors in this issue demonstrate that in their participation, youth are not only exerting their voice in order to express ideas, but also trying to exert change into the world. It is through their cultural production that youth create and participate.

Participation is Creation

If the forms of creation described in the seven articles in this special issue are not just vehicles for participation, but rather constitute their own modes of participation, participation in politics is not just a venue for displaying what youth create, but rather it constitutes a mode of cultural production. In other words, the kinds of participatory politics described by the authors in this issue are also implicated in the process of creating not just artifacts, but also the very identifications and voices that are being expressed through participation. Indeed, as the authors make evident directly or indirectly, participatory politics is always about processes of identification and the production of particular views and positions. Using the lens of cultural production, we are able to see how participatory politics is a form of identification, conceptualized as a process. Participants create their voice as members in a society as they demand change.

For Kuttner, this process is key for becoming justice-oriented cultural citizens, as this requires a process of critically reflecting on the conditions that shape social life in the production and dissemination of cultural artifacts. Yet, participation is also about creating the very terms of engagement with the state, as expressed in the ways in which Rosario describes how Puerto Rican students challenged the police presence in the University campus. And as Desai explains, this challenge is even more fundamental when the state withdraws the rights of citizenship through the “state of exception”, as in the case of Palestinians in Israel. Thus, whether as a way to resist the state, redefine the conditions for engaging the state, or engage the opportunities that the state makes available, participatory politics always requires the cultural creation of identifications, a process that becomes most evident when it involves cultural production.

These identifications are, of course, always in relationship to projects of nation building, as they pertain to how youth see themselves in relation to or in rejection of the state. In the context of the colectivos in Venezuela, for example, Jaramillo points to how the youth's cultural production is “a means to establish social relationships and uphold the ideas and beliefs of popular power that they associate with their struggle for collective humanization” (p. 101). It is through this process that the youth represent “the emerging class of political actors in a country undergoing a reconfiguration of the relationship between the underclasses of society and the state” (p. 97). Furthermore, cultural production is a means through which participants create these voices, as well as a way for them to imagine what is possible.

Conclusion

It would not be possible to understand what is at stake in the wide range of responses to the failure of the state to hold police officers accountable for their violence against Black men in the USA without attempting to make sense of how these responses constitute both a form of participatory politics as well as cultural production. For example, the kinds of political exchanges that have spread in response to the emergence of hashtags like #CrimingWhileWhite, #ICantBreathe, and #iftheygunnedmedown, require an understanding of “connected civics,” to draw on Ito and her colleagues, that does not only view such hashtags as vehicles, but as both modes of participation and creation. Likewise, as Recollet clearly demonstrates, the practice of flash mob round dances in public spaces is not simply about creating a moment of protest, but also about the very possibility of reconstituting Indigenous/settler relations toward decolonization. And as Desai makes clear, “shooting back” through video production is not just about documenting violence in order to participate in politics, but it is about new forms of cultural resistance that declare a political subjectivity in the face of a brutal state that seeks to eradicate life.

The educational implications of the analysis and of the projects discussed in this special issue are varied and may be more or less evident for different readers of our journal. For scholars in the fields of civic and citizenship education, the insights presented in these articles provide entries for making sense of a wider set of practices through which young people engage in political participation. But such a broad conception of participation also has implications for how we think about engagement through cultural production, as well as how we come to view certain forms of creative expression as worthy modes for doing politics. We agree with Jocson, who draws on the important work of the late Jean Anyon (2009) to declare that, like the rest of the authors in this issue, her work is “moved by the potential of participatory politics not only as voluntary, but also as pedagogically operational in critical education” (p. 31). Together, the authors in this special issue of CI invite us to see beyond the surface appearance of dwindling participation and to recognize that cultural production is a key site for/of participatory politics.

This special issue also marks a new moment at CI, as we move to a new publisher with Taylor & Francis, under the leadership of a new Editor-in-Chief, with Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández, along with continuing Associate Editors, Sardar Anwaruddin and Alexandra Arráiz Matute, new Assistant Editors, Shawna Carroll and Neil Ramjewan, and the continued support of Gabrielle de Montmollin, as Editorial Assistant. We also have a newly reconstituted International Editorial Board with both veteran and emerging scholars in the field, to whom we express our gratitude for agreeing to support the work of the journal. With this editorial and this special issue, we wish to send a clear message that CI is not only interested in articles that deal with broad issues related to curriculum studies, but that we want to encourage articles that raise critical questions, engage controversial topics, and break new ground in critical areas of curriculum and pedagogy. As a form of participatory politics, academic scholarship should take up the pressing issues that we face today and present radical possibilities that invite readers to imagine things otherwise.