In and out of the Light: Locked Doors Transformed

• In Event: Arts-Based Research: At-Risk Youth and Special Populations

Abstract

With the rapid proliferation of digital media technologies into everyday life, reality has been usurped and reconfigured as an ongoing aesthetic project propelled into the realm of a hyper-reality where the imagination reigns supreme, less so as a means for escaping the real, and more as a means for challenging dominant discourses propagated across mainstream channels of mass communication. Through discourse analysis and ethnographic methods, this paper examines a multimedia performing arts project conducted in a juvenile detention center. The authors argue that providing at-risk students with such an opportunity can be transformational as these students hybridize and transform discourses by way of unique adaptations of language and other modes of expression developed within their own counter-cultural life worlds.

Authors

• Sean Gregory Turner, University at Buffalo - SUNY

• John Michael Scott, University of California - Berkeley