Art as counternarratives: a/r/tographic understandings of black youth’s conceptualizations of nature

ABSTRACT

Like race, ‘nature’ is a social construct with meanings and conceptualizations that shift with time, context, and power. Dominant ideas of nature in the U.S. are often centred around whiteness and white preferences are normalized. To make these ‘invisible’ white preferences opaque, I (Alayna) use nature (with strikethrough) to indicate placing the concept of ‘nature’ under erasure and create openings for alternative meanings. Using a/r/tography, Black Feminist Theory, and Critical Race Theory, I asked Black¹ youth in Asheville, North Carolina to create and share their artful counterstories of nature in our city. In my role of researcher-as-curator, I gathered and organized youth’s art into a public art zine which challenges viewers to consider how racial identities can influence the ways we each conceptualize nature.

Résumé

Comme la race, la « nature » est une construction sociale dont les significations et les conceptualisations évoluent selon l’époque, le contexte et le pouvoir. Les idées dominantes sur la nature aux États-Unis sont souvent centrées sur la blanchité et les préférences des Blancs sont normalisées. Pour rendre opaques ces préférences blanches « invisibles », je (Alayna) utilise la nature (avec du texte barré) pour indiquer que le concept de « nature » est effacé (Derrida, 2016) et créer des ouvertures pour des significations divergentes. En m’appuyant sur l’a/r/tographie (Schultz & Legg, 2019; Springgay et al., 2005), la théorie féministe noire (Collins, 2000; hooks, 1994; Lorde, 2007) et la théorie critique de la race (Delgado et al., 2017), j’ai demandé aux jeunes Noirs d’Asheville, en Caroline du Nord, de créer et de partager leurs contre-histoires artistiques de la nature dans notre ville. Dans mon rôle de chercheuse-conservatrice, j’ai rassemblé et organisé les œuvres d’art des jeunes dans un zine d’art public qui incite les spectateurs à réfléchir à la manière dont les identités raciales peuvent influencer la façon dont chacun d’entre nous conceptualise la nature.

KEYWORDS:

• counternarrative
• a/r/tography
• black feminist theory
• critical race theory

Mots-clés:

• contre-récit
• a/r/tographie
• théorie féministe noire
• théorie critique de la race

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. I use Black throughout this study to describe the population. It is an emic term used by the organization I partnered with: Artéria Collective. While the study was developed to include multiple racial identities, all the youth who chose to participate in the study identified as Black.

2. For this paper, ‘children’ and ‘youth’ are interchangeable and left intentionally vague, can be synonymous with ‘young people’, and generally refers to those under 19 years old.

3. Redlining also occurred in Asheville, NC where this study took place (City of Asheville Sustainability Department, n.d.).

4. I introduce my research site in detail later. Unlike the program, I capitalize Black per the American Psychological Association (APA) style guide. Conversely, I go against APA style guide to use Brown because the program does and I capitalize it in recognition of the importance of this socially constructed identity in Appalachia. I leave white lowercase in resistance to white supremacy culture. For more on these conventions, see The Appalachian Editorial Board (2020).

5. ‘Wilderness’ is now often referred to as ‘biological diversity’ (Cronon, 1996).

6. Importantly, equitable access to nature is not the same as equal access to nature. Equality is about everyone getting the same access to resources regardless of need. Equity considers need and acknowledges that not everyone is starting from the same place.

7. We critique IRB for restrictive methods of consent that protect the academic institution while disenfranchising racially marginalized communities (see Schmidt et al., 2023).

8. We discuss how ‘researcher as curator’ may offer a helpful role-shift for critical qualitative leisure researchers using arts-based data, analysis, and representations in another paper (see Schmidt & Schultz, 2023).

9. A zine is a small self-published work used as a vehicle for social, political, personal and/or artistic expression that often features illustrations, graphic design, photography, mapping, and various forms of printmaking.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alayna Schmidt

Alayna Schmidt, M.S. (she/they), is a Ph.D. student at Clemson University and a Graduate Research Assistant in the Race, Ethnicity, Youth, and Social Equity (REYSE) Research Collaboratory at Clemson. Their research interests are entangled in the interconnections of social justice, youth development, arts, and the environment.

Callie Schultz

Callie Schultz, Ph.D. (she/her), is an Associate Professor at Western Carolina University. Her major research interests include leisure and new media, leisure and social justice, and the performance of gendered subjectivities in leisure spaces; she is particularly interested in methodologies that do “edgework,” challenging what “counts” as “research” in the field.

Jeremy Schultz

Jeremy Schultz, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor at Western Carolina University. His passions revolve around communicating the value of leisure in society through experiential, critical, community-based classrooms. Having personal pursuits based mostly in natural resource recreation, he is continually an academic and community advocate for conservation and recreation in the outdoors.

Brandi Hinnant-Crawford

Brandi Hinnant-Crawford, Ph.D., currently an Associate Professor of Educational Leadership at Clemson University, is a self-described motherscholar, critical pragmatist, and liberation theologian. Crawford’s scholarship focuses on equity and inclusion for marginalized students across the P-20 pipeline as well as how research, particularly improvement science, can be leveraged as methodological tools to catalyze justice.

Maria Baron Palomar

Maria Baron Palamar, D.V.M., Ph.D., originally from Argentina, has worked for wildlife conservation in academia, government, and private industry. She co-founded Resolve Conservation to help conservation organizations implement new methodologies to change organizational culture, grow leadership capacity, address complex conservation problems, and be more inclusive and representative of the people they serve.