Radical Visibilities

• In Event: School Engagement, Artistic Practice, and Democracy

Abstract

Objective: This commentary will draw connections between Why Theatre Matters’ focus on drama space as a rehearsal site for young people’s civic engagement and the author’s use of photography and video as a means to explore with young people their multiple passages --between home country and the U.S.; family and school; and childhood and teenagehood.
Multiple theoretical frameworks inform the author’s longitudinal visual ethnography in ways that dovetail with Why Theater Matters, such as feminist and poststrucuralist; pedagogical and affect theory (Anyon, 2005; Ahmed 2010;) while adding feminist care and justice theories (DeVault 1991; Ehrenreich & Hochschild 2003; Feeley 2014; Glenn 2010; Lynch 2007, Lynch et al. 2009; Katz, Noddings and Strike 1999; Thorne 2011) to offer insight into the symposium topic of how young people come to care in a diverse democracy.
Visual methodologies supplement traditional ethnographic research following the lives and educational trajectories of thirty-six children growing up in urban, poor and working-class, racially diverse and immigrant communities in the northeastern U.S. city of Worcester, MA. The children were given cameras to portray their everyday family, school and community lives at ages 10, 12, 16 and 18. My approach departs from other “giving kids cameras” research because it afforded the children multiple opportunities to make meaning of their own and each other’s images in different contexts, generating both individual and collective insights. (Clark-Ibanez 2004; Clark 1999; author & Chalfen 2010; Mitchell 2011; Orellana 1999; Kaplan 2013; Thompson 2008; Yates 2010;).
Data Sources: The project generated what I have come to call a visual “counter archive” (Tonkiss 1998; Phillips 2013) that includes the following: over 2,000 photographs; sixty-five hours of audio and videotaped individual and group interviews; voicethreads (online annotated visual narratives made by participants at age 16 and 18); and youth-made videos of everyday life. The materials are analyzed through a combination of narrative and inter-textual discourse analyses to highlight how the children show and read signs of care and express multiple identities over time (Author, 2010; Lico & author, 2012; Author, Restler & Fontaine, 2012).
Resonant Findings: The young people in this study express a care consciousness that is neglected, if not denied by the organization of schooling and its over-emphasis on individualization, competition and standardization. A key discovery of the research is the extent of work related to the care and belonging that is required for working-class children to be free to learn. This work is daily performed by their working-poor parents (mostly mothers) and children themselves, yet goes unrecognized, if not punished, by educational policies and practices.
Significance: This research lifts up but does not romanticize the children’s counter-narratives of care and belonging and challenges prevailing deficit discourse about poor and working-class families (Valencia 2010). It places young people’s own images, ideas and values about care and justice into the public realm as a way to build a more democratic imaginary of diverse, working-class childhoods and personhood.

Author

• Wendy L. Luttrell, Graduate Center City University of New York