Rethinking Youth Studies and Research: Indigenous, Immigrant, and Islamic Youths’ Ambivalent Belonging in Multicultural Vancouver and the Making of Activist Research

Session Submission Type: Invited Session

Abstract

This session addresses a dual reconceptualization of certain youth as inherently agential and research as activist, with both having considerable potential for troubling the local trope of celebratory multiculturalism and the supposed neutrality of the research exercise. Greater Vancouver is a decidedly multicultural space, both in the sense of having a rich sociocultural diversity and in the sense of having multiculturalism in operation as social and educational policy and as everyday heuristic for living with difference. However, the marginalized identities of certain subjects such as Indigenous, Muslim and racialized immigrant youth and their ambivalent identification with the city (and indeed the nation), serve to trouble Vancouver’s multiculturalism and its attendant veneer of tolerance and social cohesion. Indeed the articulation of these youths’ identities and the youthscape they co-construct and operate within reveal them as always already political and agential. Relatedly, while it is supposedly possible to undertake neutral research, investigating the lives of youth marked as different and providing them with the opportunity to come to voice in a context like Vancouver necessarily renders research political. The essays in this session provide articulations of Indigenous, Muslim and racialized immigrant and refugee youth identities and address the ways in which both their identities and research with them extend youth studies by troubling aspects of education such as educational ethnography, multicultural education and citizenship education.

Sub Unit

• AERA Sessions

Chair

• Handel K. Wright, The University of British Columbia

Papers

• Coast Salish Youth and Resistance to Multicultural Education: Transnational Identities and the Reinscription of Indigenous Cognitive Geographies - Michael Marker, The University of British Columbia

• Social and Cultural Experiences of First- and Second-Generation Turkish Immigrant Youth in Vancouver - Dilek Kayaalp, The University of British Columbia

• Picturing Oppression: Vancouver Seventh Graders Making Movies to "Talk Back" to Racism, Sexism, and Class Discrimination - Ozlem Sensoy, Simon Fraser University

• Theatre of the Oppressed and Online Protests: Immigrant and Refugee Youth Learning Citizenship and Canadian Multiculturalism in Vancouver - Handel K. Wright, The University of British Columbia; Maryam Nabavi, The University of British Columbia