Epilogue: (re)membering and witnessing youth knowledge

In this edited volume, readers are presented with a series of vibrant and contemporary research articles that at once invite us to re-invigorate and learn from youth, their social locations in the world, and the sometimes wobbly partnerships in which they engage with adult researchers. If you’ve gotten this far in the volume, I hope you’ll go a bit farther with me about what qualitative research, as a field, can learn from the intersections of art, youth, and society.

As I engaged in each piece and across them, I found the need to turn to poetry and young adult literature, two vehicles through which, as literacy educator, I have, and I believe many of the youth that I have partnered with, have enjoyed so many pathways and bridges to understanding each other through poetry and young adult literature. What does the world always have to learn from youth-led social movements, youth as a created category (Patel Stevens et al., 2007) and their lived experiences, and how to also prioritize youths’ needs vs. those of adult researchers? Poetry and young adult fiction have been an anchor for me and continued to be while I read these fine articles. I did so while reading Jacqueline Woodson’s (2019) Red at the Bone, in which the protagonist reveals the quickening of time, generations, and shadows when she says, “As we dance…I am not my parents’ once illegitimate daughter—I am a narrative…Remembered.” (p. 80).

I was also reminded of Joan Didion’s (1990) advice from Slouching Towards Bethlehem:

I think we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. (p. 139)

Let’s put it out on the table: adult researchers have priorities and lived realities different than youth, from, always, a variety of personal identities and social locations (Rahmanian et al., submitted). They may have not, despite Didion’s warnings, kept a familiarity with themselves that was the/ir truth in their youth. This need not be a stopper to intergenerational partnerships and learning, but it can never be forgotten. One of the reasons why youth participatory action research is crucial, as reported in many of the articles in this volume, is that as adults, particularly salaried researchers, we simply don’t move in the same circuits, to riff a bit from Ruglis and Fine (Fine and Ruglis, 2009), as youth do. This fact becomes more intense as racialization, gender, class, sexual identity, and [dis]ability are parts of the calculus of living, being, and doing. While adults are no less immune to the circuits of dispossession, they do not operate in the same circuits of young people, particularly those who have been cast on the underside of humanity (Wynter, 2003). With this in mind, I draw attention to, signal boost, and trouble some key ideas that are used in many of the articles of this issue.

Turning away from tales of pain

Many of the articles, and more precisely the projects that are reported on in this issue, delineate the need to move away from tales of pain. Greene, Fox, Kinloch, Graham, and others all purposefully draw attention to the ways that youth story themselves in many nuanced ways. While so many calls for proposals grants that are focused on youth, particularly framed as at-risk, the focus is on their pain or lack. Across the articles in this issue, we see the bare and always present fact that when they are given the space to tell their own stories, the range far exceeds the single note of pain, or as Eve Tuck wrote in 2009 about Indigenous communities, a damages-based view of themselves. Fox, in particular, pays attention to the ways that youth participatory research disseminations are appreciated and apprehended, with all of its many meanings, by primarily white, monied audiences. However, even Fox does not push to the theory of change that these encounters might yield beyond retrenching of known colonial social lotions (Pratt, 1991).

In fact, many of these articles cite Tuck’s (2009) piece on “Suspending damages.” While this citation is appropriate and necessary, there is an important argument from this Tuck’s essay that is not brought or discussed explicitly in many of these articles, and that is the question of change – who can change this, who gets to, and who bears the fruit of change. Tuck’s essay calls for a suspension of a damages-based framework of how peoples and communities view themselves, not only because of the limitations from tales of pain and boundless appetite that dominant cultures have for single tales of pain and overcoming, but also for the implications of who can fix, alleviate, and even understand, that is to research, that pain. Fox’s contribution to this volume most sharply draws into contrast, artistically and literally, the different ways that one person’s story, particularly a young person speaking to white, monied adults, is received. That point, and the centrality of art to actualizing one’s story is appropriately pervasive in this volume.

Dreaming Possible Futurities (and Presents) Requires Art

The editors noted in their call for submissions to this themed issue that youth have currently and historically been at the vanguard for social change to improve conditions of life itself. As a necessary tool, art has been a mainstay in social change. Although Nikki Giovanni has reminded us several times that poetry is not a luxury, high stakes assessment and a collective rush to read and do math early have edged out room for poetry and poets themselves to emerge. As Damya, a co-researcher with Kinloch, Burkhard and Graham notes: “We tell our stories and imagine what could be different.” Those ten powerful words speak deeply to the ways that the arts enliven our imaginations vis-à-vis our lived realities, provoke us to be a bit different within our own bodies, so that we might be ready to be ‘citizens of world that does not yet exist’ (Harding, 2011).

This is, in essence, much of the Black history freedom research and writing that Robin D. G. Kelley has provided, another appropriate citation in many of these articles.

Moreover, art has been used in so many social movements to accomplish a decidedly different goal than what can be reported from a traditional, W.E.I.R.D. (Western, Education in Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic Societies), and that is to move people to experiencing themselves and their ideas about the world differently. Jose Salgado’s art brings to the surface of our skin that ways that being undocumented and queer are both beautiful and bold in the face of a heteropatriarchal settler society. Their art is conversation with the work by Ansloos and Wager (this volume), as they most directly address the ways that Indigenous youth being a significant portion of made-to-be-homeless youth reflect the larger settler society’s desire to erase Indigeneity. It is decidedly harder to claim rightful ownership when people who have been stewarding and been in relation with said land for millenia are still alive. These are places in which qualitative research, with story as an anchor, can alter the known and dreamed freedoms yet to be.

Art as necessary for transforming sociogeny

Identities, social locations, ideas of who we are – all are complex, subject to categorical classification, self-determination, and rarely static, as noted by Wright and most scholars of social constructs of categories and stratification. We need social movements to snap back into awareness of the everyday violence that occurs through coloniality. Youth are, at times all of the following: shy, loud, quiet, confronting, reclusive, and demanding. It is little wonder that youth take up this charge regularly, as through both their haphazard socializations of what it means to be child and adult, they are regularly discarded or counseled as young people (Patel Stevens et al., 2007). To alter one’s sociegeny, the very taken-for-granteds of social hierarchy and resultant relations, cannot occur without art. Art, in its various forms, seeks to unite, re-unite, and agitate how we makes sense of ourselves, each other, and our relationships. Art, be it poetry, visual art, installations, pop-up interactive spaces, asks no less than the jumbo-sized task that we leave the interaction changed, even if for a moment.

Crawley’s (2016) writings on ‘otherwise,’ also a wonderful fit for this volume and referenced several times (e.g., Goessling), calls us to pay attention to the everyday small moments of otherwise, because they are actually enormous. Some years ago, I asked my mother a question. She was reared in a highly traditional agrarian and middle management caste space in India and married as a form of barter. There is no doubt that patriarchy pulses through her existence, even today, as she is no longer the sole and only caretaker of my father. The question I asked her, when she and I were talking about the ways in which she had been raised and then further trained to be subordinate to all others around her…the question I asked her was: Mama, how do you think things this got to be this way? It was a question about coloniality and ordering of humanness. She said, “well, I don’t know. Maybe they [men] just got there first. But all of this could be different. You never know. I could have been a completely different person.” It was, to me, one of the most clarifying expressions of what Crawley refers to as otherwise. Otherwise may not need result in immediate structural change, but its existence as breath, air, spoken and unspoken sentiments, carries tremendous power.

Epilogue: Keep on Movin’

I don’t have ways to ‘move forward’ that are befitting this collection, in no small part because they remind how intertwined past, present, and future are. We must keep on movin’, keep on knowing each other, check our academic selves in the pursuit of a journal’s deadline, and remember that relationships do not end after the funding ends.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.