Cultivating Belonging Through Multimodal Practices of “Everyday Cosmopolitanism”

• In Event: Cosmopolitanism and Cultural Creativity

Abstract

Youth occupy contested spaces in our social imaginations, caught between discourses of victim and perpetrator and viewed as a group to be simultaneously protected and feared (Lesko, 2000). These dichotomies ring especially true in the research and policy concerning court-involved youth, whose cultural affiliations and economic realities place them at the margins of social institutions (Fine, 1991; Muncie, 2005; Schiraldi, 2004). However, the affiliations of these young people are more far reaching than the circumscribed realms of crime, gangs and violence, and can be explored as creative endeavors that are reflective of transnational movement and transcultural communication (Lam, 2006; Maira & Soep, 2005). The cultural practices – a ‘curriculum writ large’ that includes poetry, dramatic performance, storytelling, and singing – that court-involved youth cultivate in their everyday acts of affiliation is the focus of this presentation.

The presentation will feature ways that youth participants (ages 18-23) in an alternative to incarceration program (ATIP) sought out and created a sense of belonging through multimodal practices of affiliation within two curricular electives: a digital media workshop and a theater program. The five-year study on which my discussion is based explored literacies, media practices, and education within ATIP through an ethnographic approach that included interviews, participant observation, visual documentation, and participant-produced multimodal artifacts. In order to investigate the terrain of affiliation enacted by court-involved youth, I fuse a focus on belonging, as conceptualized through the lens of cosmopolitanism, with an emphasis on multimodal expression.

When viewed through the prism of cosmopolitanism (Appiah, 2006; Hansen, 2010), practices of participation that youth enact as they navigate institutions are suggestive of the ways they might be “receptive to the new and yet not in a way that abandons or negates the local” (Hansen, 2010, p. 15). One recent study explored the “everyday cosmopolitanism” – or the "micro-moments of online intercultural exchange" (Hull, Stornaiuolo, & Sahni, 2010 p. 360) – evident in the enactment of cultural citizenship among marginalized youth who used the “self” as a text through which to examine their relationships to their community, social norms, and institutions. The lens of multimodality highlights the use of multiple modes – e.g., visual, gestural, aural – and modalities – e.g, a pen for writing, the body for gesturing, video editing software for making movies – in practices of communication and representation that may be overlooked or dismissed (Jewitt, 2008).

Building on the concept of "everyday cosmopolitanism," the acts of affiliation that youth express multimodally will be analyzed for how they reflect an active negotiation between new and familiar concepts, practices, and texts. For instance, plaster masks produced by participants for the theater program and music tracks selected during media workshops are examples of creative artifacts that signify youths’ affiliations. When exploring the lives of court-involved youth, a multimodal analysis framed by a cosmopolitan orientation is especially helpful in making visible and interpreting their acts of collaboration, participation, and attachment, which are suggestive of youths’ creative capacity to cultivate a sense of belonging within institutions and communities (Smith, 2000).

Author

• Lalitha M. Vasudevan, Teachers College, Columbia University