Critical Youth Studies

Alternative education provides different and powerful opportunities for learning. In this article, the author focuses on students who resist stereotypes that are produced and maintained by dominant powers and ideologies, and who share their knowledge and experiences with systemic marginalization. Drawing from classroom videos, qualitative interviews, and a class-produced YPAR project, the author highlights the experiences of ten continuation high school students who speak back to the deficit framing of alternative education students. The students' research project, which is now a public video documentary, has implications for school accountability reformers, educators, and practitioners.

Current conceptualizations of youth impact the ways in which youth are
understood and shape and limit the questions and policy solutions that
educational theorists, practitioners and researchers can envision. This
article asserts that critical arts pedagogies can create more expansive
possibilities for research and practices aiming to support youth and
allows for a focus on young people’s knowledge production, systemic
analysis and ways to support their transformative agency. Examining
concepts from critical youth studies (CYS) scholarship and a framework
for social justice arts education, this article applies these concepts to a
research vignette of a youth participatory action research (YPAR) project
that incorporates social justice art-making practices to present an
example of a new way to counter dominant ways of thinking about
youth. This article presents a multidimensional critical arts education
framework that contextualizes conceptions of youth and youth practices
in relationship to wider institutions, structures, and systems.

Common typologies frame youth participation as something that exists at different hierarchical, or linear, levels or stages. In these models, non-participation is positioned as something negative or not addressed at all. Scholars have critiqued these typologies for ignoring contextual specificities and complexities, nuances, and power dynamics inherent in participatory processes. In this article, I draw from narratives of young people to productively theorize what non-participation might engender for thinking about and enacting participatory processes. In this study, I asked stakeholders at a youth-led HIV prevention and harm reduction peer-education program to take and discuss photographs that reflected their ideas about youth engagement. I provide a thematic analysis of how young people understood and navigated their participation in complex and self-determined ways. I put their narratives in dialogue with critical scholars’ writing on settler-colonialism, neoliberalism, and willfulness to tease apart why and how young people’s comments on non-participation offer a sophisticated counter-hegemonic understanding of the “call to participation” and its discursive and material effects. Last, drawing on the work of Indigenous theorists who advocate for a politics of refusal, I argue that young people’s refusal to participate (or to participate on their own terms) may be an act of resistance – especially for young people whose bodies are regulated on a daily basis. I conclude by making a case for non-participation as a conceptual tool to disrupt and refuse hegemonic, linear theories of change and invite practitioners working with young people to do the same.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03626784.2020.1766341

In this article, Robert Petrone and Nicholas Rink propose a repositioning pedagogy framework for teacher education. They maintain that a repositioning pedagogy disrupts power dynamics by bringing secondary-aged youth into teacher education courses as compensated consultants and experts to teach future teachers about learning, classroom management, teaching, and other issues pertinent to schooling and the development of pedagogical practices. A repositioning pedagogy responds to the absence of youth voices in teacher education by centering youth and their perspectives in preservice teacher education. In laying out this framework, Petrone and Rink report the findings of a qualitative study in which Native youth attending an alternative high school on a reservation were hired to teach future English teachers about ways to build relationships and curricula to engender success for Native youth in schools. This research explains both the experiences of the youth consultants, which proved to be “transformative,” as well as the structures of a repositioning pedagogy that facilitated this outcome. The article also addresses several areas for further research and consideration to ensure reciprocity and safeguard against undue harm to youth consultants, particularly those for whom schools have historically been unsafe places.

"ENGLISH: Based on governmentality studies, this article sketches out a genealogy of the “youth at-risk” category in contemporary youth studies. A convergence of risk society, sites of dissemination for youth research, state priorities in research funding, and institutional structures that frame research practices serve to create a unique historical moment for the emergence of regulatory “youth at-risk” language. As part of a critical reflexive approach to youth research, this article underscores youth scholars' responsibility to challenge this problematic language and pins down some of the difficulties this project faces in the academy.

FRENCH: Se référant aux études sur la gouvernementalité, cet article propose une généalogie de la catégorie des “jeunes à risque” dans les recherches sur les adolescents et les jeunes adultes. La société du risque, les lieux de diffusion des savoirs scientifiques, les axes prioritaires du financement public et les structures institutionnelles encadrant la pratique des chercheurs forment une conjoncture singulière où a pu s'élaborer un véritable langage des “jeunes à risque.” Fruit d'une démarche de réflexivité critique, l'analyse souligne la responsabilité des chercheurs dans la légitimation de ce langage problématique et les défis que comporte le projet de le transformer."

This article investigates how a contemporary urban vernacular (CUV) called Ortensvenska is used for social positioning at a prestigious inner-city Stockholm school. Previous studies have indicated that CUV is often a feature of those on the societal margins, but little research has focused on prestigious spaces where high-achieving students challenge these stereo- types. Drawing on linguistically oriented ethnographic fieldwork among students at a prestigious school, we show how Ortensvenska is used to construct space, class, and identity in everyday school life. It was found that the use of Ortensvenska maintains social asymmetries between class, ethnicity, and place among students at the school. The paper also shows how these linguistic practices blur a fixed separation between languages, styles, and places. We suggest, therefore, that space plays an important role in the analysis of youths' language practices.

This study considers the complexities of living a cross-cultural curriculum within the multicultural contexts of Canada through following the experience of some first generation immigrants in a project that employs the multi-dimensional space of the Internet and cyber social communities within a vocational public school in Ontario. Disrupting traditional conceptions of students’ production of literacies, the project seeks to re-work the boundaries that define multiculturalism as a series of homogeneous hyphenated spaces from which students who are racialized as non-white are expected to speak. Here we consider, “what is at play in the hyphen?” and “how might the networked classroom space be considered a hyph-e-nation?” To explore these questions, we begin with an overview of multicultural education in Canada. We then employ a reading of Third Spaces and quantum physics to reread how students might open up dual Third Spaces through self representations in a social networking space: first through the social network as a Third Space and second, as certain kinds of learners caught in the hyph-e-nated middle of Canadian multiculturalism in an Ontario classroom. The case studies are followed by a discussion that problematizes discourses of comparison between cultural communities of which students with many cultural backgrounds and experiences are members.

Grounded in Critical Youth Studies and English education scholarship that examines the consequences of conceptions of adolescence on English teachers' thinking about pedagogy, this chapter highlights two ways English teacher educators can facilitate pre-service English teachers' interrogation of dominant discourses of adolescence/ts so they might be better positioned to create pedagogical practices aligned with more comprehensive understandings of secondary students. The first focuses on teaching a Youth Lens in the context of a Young Adult Literature course, an approach that helps future teachers learn about adolescence as a construct and the linkages between this idea and English pedagogy. The second focuses on integrating youth into English teacher education coursework as guest speakers on a range of English and schooling practices whereby they are " re-positioned " as experts and contributors to English teacher education. Together, these points of intervention provide ways to re-position youth systemically throughout English teacher education programs.

In this article, Susan Weinstein and Anna West embark on a critical analysis of the maturing field of youth spoken word poetry (YSW). Through a blend of firsthand experience, analysis of YSW-related films and television, and interview data from six years of research, the authors identify specific dynamics that challenge young poets as they participate in YSW-related activities. Participants discuss the risks of being overly identified with the subject matter of the poems they perform, the tendency of some YSW communities to create a "star" system among youth poets, and the implications of the intensified public gaze trained on youth poets by growing media attention to YSW. Weinstein and West argue that risks and tensions are intrinsic to the nature of a deeply social youth arts context but that the field's long-term sustenance depends on all participants' willingness to have honest, ongoing discussions about such challenges.

This critical ethnography investigates the pedagogical spaces constituted within a youth-led, participatory theatre production, Surviving in the Cracks (Wager et al., 2009).  The popular theatre production documented the lived experiences of eight street-youth, including their struggles to survive in the face of cuts to public health resources in Vancouver.  As an applied theatre study, this theatre project is defined as a messy and rich site of pedagogical inquiry that is examined through multiple theoretical and methodological frameworks.  It draws on critical feminist pedagogy, critical youth studies and theatre and literacy research with the purpose of revealing how drama and theatre spaces provide “anomalous” (Ellsworth, 2005) learning places, or out-of-the-ordinary learning spaces, that youth and researchers collectively embodied during the applied drama and theatre process and production. 
Analysis of ethnographic data generated before, during, and after the theatrical production of Surviving in the Cracks suggests how drama and theatre with street youth opens up embodied pedagogical spaces.  Two different methods of analysis bring multiple perspectives to this work through exploring how meaning was collectively constructed, how multimodal literacy practices were used in critical ways, how power was negotiated, how desire was manifested through imaginaries, and how safe spaces were generated by this community of youth within selected pedagogical moments of resistance during the theatre process.  Specifically, the script is analyzed with a youth participant, followed by the analysis of particular moments of resistance during performance creation and production. 
This research advances knowledge of how informal learning spaces and youth resistances within education become crucial parts of pedagogy and should be considered as future foundations and expansions of education.  Implications include using multiple methodological lenses in order to work alongside, for and with youth, as well as being able to reach larger audiences of youth, communities, educators, and scholars through different analytical perspectives.  By examining how theatre provides a space for marginalized youth to engage in dialogues about complex social issues, this research contributes to the fields of critical and feminist pedagogy, language and literacy education, drama in education, critical youth studies, and collaborative methodological studies in qualitative research.

This edited collection brings together scholars who draw on phenomenological approaches to understand the experiences of young people growing up under contemporary conditions of globalization. Phenomenology is both a philosophical and pragmatic approach to social sciences research, that takes as central the meaning-making experiences of research participants. One of the central contentions of this book is that phenomenology has long informed critical empirical approaches to youth cultures, yet until recently its role has not been thusly named. This volume aims to resuscitate and recuperate phenomenology as a robust empirical, theoretical, and methodological approach to youth cultures. Chapters explore the lifeworlds of young people from countries around the world, revealing the tensions, risks and opportunities that organize youth experiences.

This article is based on a plenary held during the Child & Youth Care in Action VI Conference: Moving Through Trails and Trials Toward Community Wellness, held in Victoria, British Columbia in April 2019. It explores how we can re-imagine child and youth care practice with African Canadian youth. This emerging paradigm aligns with child and youth care politicized praxis as well as trauma-informed and strengths-based approaches in the field's literature. We highlight the importance of mobilizing critical and transformative theoretical frameworks along with an Africentric worldview to substantially support youth of African descent with a strengths-based approach. Moreover, the protective role of Black-affirming spaces is developed and articulated.

Grounded in the threepart literary concept of the narrator, the narratee, and the implied reader, this article provides teachers and students with a heuristic for uncovering, attending to, and critiquing assumptions about youth found in the first-person narrative form that predominates in young adult literature.

Adapting and rebranding general market memoirs for the young adult literature market is a growing trend in the publishing world. Grounded in Critical Youth Scholarship, this study explores this trend through an analysis of two general market memoirs of Navy SEALs and their revised and repackaged youth market counterparts. Using a systematic approach we call Critical Comparative Content Analysis (CCCA), this study found that the youth adaptations were substantially altered to produce worlds stripped of complexity, offering sanitized versions of military action, heroism, and humanity. We argue that through content changes, youth readers are denied access to complex portrayals of the world, as well as questions that might arise with and through them. Instead, youth readers are constructed as needing explicit life lessons and reductive depictions of lived experience. For scholars and teachers, this study demonstrates the importance of inquiries that not only critically approach the content of YAL, but also foreground and trouble limiting conceptions of youth readers themselves. This study also highlights the value of comparison as a conceptual and pedagogical tool for carrying out this work. Further, this study recommends continued methodological innovation oriented toward genre-specific qualities of young adult literature, including its production and marketing.

In this article, the author is concerned with the ways conceptions of adolescence and sexuality take hold in and beyond the English curriculum. Through a classroom vignette, she considers some of the ways teachers might make more of moments when sex comes up and when planning interactions about sex with youth.

Advocacy is an integral part of child and youth care workers' roles and a significant component of child and youth care politicized praxis and radical youth work. Drawing from the qualitative data of a mixed-methods study conducted in 2019 at a Canadian metropolitan university, this study seeks to unpack how the pedagogy of the lightning talk can foster advocacy skills to effectively and spontaneously speak out with and on behalf of children, youth, and families in everyday practice when an unforeseen systemic challenge or barrier arises. A purposive sample of 70 undergraduate students was recruited in two child and youth care courses, both of which required students to present a lightning talk. Participants completed an online questionnaire with closed-ended and open-ended questions in order to share their perspectives of the pedagogy of the lightning talk. The findings show that the lightning talk fosters twenty-first century and metacognitive skills and, most importantly, advocacy skills.

The late Dennis Carlson uses the alternative nature of the Burlington, Vermont-bred band, Phish, and the larger impact of rock an’ roll to look at youth and revolutionary music culture. A History of Progressive Music and Youth Culture is designed for those who work with or teach young people to understand the nature and origin of musical commitment and devotion. For academics, the book traces a cultural study of rock which is unlike any other discussion of music or musicology published.Edited by Robert Lake, Michael B MacDonald, Shirley Steinberg

In the form of a case study of the training and implementation of the Junior Youth Spiritual
Empowerment Program (JYSEP) by the Magdalene Carney Bahá’í Institute (MCBI), this study
contributes to the development of critical youth empowerment which emphasizes community
building and sociopolitical transformation rooted in a worldview that recognizes the oneness of
humanity. The underlying philosophy upon which the JYSEP organizes its structure, action,
reflection, and materials is the idea that our view of reality, human nature, human relationships, and
purpose of life shape mold individuals’ and humanity’s state of being. This study, therefore, sought
to explore: 1) how conceptions of human nature and the capacity of 11 to 15 year olds impact the
structure and implementation of a junior youth empowerment program, 2) how developing a culture
of learning based in individual and collective acts of service contributes to an evolving process of
community building, and 3) how an understanding of the interconnecting relationships of individual
action, social discourse, and social structures may give rise, through the JYSEP, to an action-based
process aiming to systematize a framework of learning, unifying discourse processes, and social
spaces that create, legitimate, and perpetuate the forces of unity, justice and collective advancement.
Through the lenses of the content and pedagogy of the JYSEP training and education
materials, models of experiential- and service-learning, Jabri’s critical analysis and structuration
theory, and insights from other youth empowerment researchers and practitioners, this study had
significant findings for not only youth empowerment programs but for all those engaging in efforts
to transform society as well. What this study offers, therefore, through an ontological inquiry and
epistemological analysis is one example of how the implications of the conception of the nobility of
human nature, the real possibility of the unity of humanity, and the insight into the inherent and
necessary capacities that youth possess for the advancement of the human family - dynamic and
regenerative capacities to overcome the individualistic, unjust, materialistic, and divisive forces of
society - shape a unique grassroots framework of service and learning for collective conflict
transformation and social change.