Moving Beyond the Local Campaign? Unraveling the Complexities of Critical Social Analysis in Youth Activism

• In Event: Social Movements, Learning Sciences, and Possibilities for Transformation

Abstract

Purpose
The International Youth Organizing study documents how young people from oppressed social groups take action to address power and oppression in their lives. Through an ethnographic case study of the Solutions Not Suspensions campaign, led by urban youth in community organization in California’s Northern Bay Area, this poster addresses the following: a) What sociocultural learning practices and processes, within the community organizing context, facilitate a critical social analysis among urban youth from communities of color? b) How do young people situate their personal and collective community organizing experiences in relation to broader movements for social justice within and beyond the local campaign?

Perspectives
Sociocultural learning theory (Rogoff, 1990; 2003; Vygotsky, 1978) and critical social analysis are two perspectives that inform the theoretical framework for this work. Within sociocultural learning theory an emerging literature has focused on understanding how youth learn to become activists (Ginwright, Noguera, & Cammarota, 2006). Yet in the process of becoming activist, young people are also developing a critical social analysis.

Critical social analysis (CSA) involves young people moving from a place of relative a-criticalness and in-action, to collective social action by facilitating youth’s opportunities to learn to see – how history and knowledge is constructed and reproduced to perpetuate structures of power – and to act against systems of oppression (Hopper, 1999; Watts, Williams, & Jagers, 2003; Watts, Griffith, & Abdul-Adil, 1999). Yet this process of learning, to see and act, is embedded within the community organizing context, which serves to construct youth’s CSA and the lens through which they conceptualize their social worlds.

Methods and Data
To address these questions we analyzed data from a two-year ethnography of Coleman Advocates’s youth-centered grassroots organizing group, called Youth Making a Change (YMAC). YMAC’s mission is to support and promote the sociopolitical and leadership development of urban youth from communities of color. Data includes ethnographic field-notes of YMAC meetings, community events, and campaign related activities, including rallies and public actions, as well as semi-structured interviews with core youth, who were actively involved and who often took leadership roles in the campaign.

Results
Preliminary results suggest that CSA is characterized by several process and practices that are interconnected and iterative. These include young people: 1) situating themselves within historical, social/cultural, political and economic structures, 2) reflecting and interrogating structures of power, and 3) acting collectively toward liberatory socially just change.

Significance
Critical social analysis is an iterative and ongoing process of situated learning that considers the historical, social, cultural, political and economic factors that shape conditions of everyday life. Lacking within CSA, however, is an explicit theorizing of how learning and knowledge is co-constructed by being in relation with others; those who are in immediate proximity and actively involved in the campaign, and those who are part of a broader global activist community, organizing in solidarity to address similar social issues and injustices. This poster engages with these, as well as other issues centered on unpacking the complexities of CSA and sociocultural learning.

Author

• Jesica Siham Fernandez, Santa Clara University