(Re)presenting Spaces of/for “At‐opportunity” Urban Youth

Abstract

Dimitriadis, G. (2008). Studying Urban Youth Culture Primer. New York: Peter Lang.

Deutsch, N. L. (2008). Pride in the Projects: Teens Building Identities in Urban Contexts. New York: New York University Press.

Gallagher, K. (2007). The Theatre of Urban: Youth and Schooling in Dangerous Times. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press.

Davies, B., & Gannon, S. (2009). Pedagogical Encounters. New York: Peter Lang.

Notes

Notes

1 With Catherine Camden Pratt, Constance Ellwood, Katerina Zabrodska, and Peter Bansel.

2 The four ideas and their corresponding texts being considering the terms we use and setting research in broader contexts (Dimitriadis); looking outside the school and how identities are formed in relation to context (Deutsch); the arts and drama classroom as a specific learning space for understanding students and their communities (Gallagher); and understanding moments of disruption or interruption as “pedagogical encounters” (Davies and Gannon).

3 Such identities can be unexpected as youth engage with popular cultural texts or formats (such as hip‐hop) that are often used to define them as “urban youth” and use these to explore their own situated identities, be critical of stereotypes applied to them, and express their personal experiences creatively. As he continues “work on contemporary youth culture is moving in several directions at once, opening up multiple and complex notions of identity as it is lived in the everyday. In particular, this work looks toward the ways in which young people are navigating their everyday lives using popular cultural texts—including the ones marked as ‘urban’—in complex and unpredictable ways. None of this work reduces the lives and experiences of these youths to tight subcultural boundaries” (p. 123).

4 As they explain: “The practice of collective biography involves researchers as participants, over several consecutive days, meeting and talking about their chosen topic, telling their own remembered stories relevant to that topic, and writing them down. … Through listening and questioning each other on the remembered, embodied, attentive detail, each story becomes imaginable with/in the minds/bodies of everyone. After telling stories, and listening to stories, and talking together about these stories, they are written, avoiding clichés and explanations. Each story is then read out loud to the group, registering the images now in the written form, and heard again in the modality of voice….” (p. 9).

5 To develop this concept of space as framed by lines, Davies references Woodward (2007), Hickey‐Moody and Malins (2007), and Deleuze and Guattari (1987).