Performing God: Creativity, Religion, and Youth Cultures

• In Event: 32.077 - Contemplative Approaches to Transforming Education: Engagement in Awake-Dreaming, Spiritual Activism, De/colonial Perspectives, and Mindfulness

Abstract

Purpose
It has been argued that the meta-narrative of secularity in this age masks a range of diverse experiences and relationships with the mundane, the divine, and cultural formations and social practices of praise (Taylor, 2007). Dimitriadis and Weis (2008) have written extensively about the “contested terrain of education, urban youth and globalization” (p. 81), which includes popular culture, public pedagogies, and creative expressions of cultural and racial identities, as well as education equity like AERA’s conference theme calls us to consider.

Perspective(s)
Building upon the southern postcolonial scholarship of Smith (2006), Asante (2008), and Connell (2007), this paper highlights perspectives and practices specific to the Asia Pacific (including Australia), as culturally, creatively, and spiritually diverse sites of modernity. This presentation considers the ways in which these social practices and diversities continue to evolve in emerging global digital cultures where young people perform and encounter creative role models, multiple community-building, and material and spiritual aspirations (Pollock, 2008; Mitias, 1985).

Methods/Data Sources
This study and book it draws from (Author, 2016) unpacks a 10-year long ethnography’s unique focus on the ways that performance, creativity, and the arts both construct and simultaneously undermine the intersecting cultures of religion, spirituality, and youth. These two youth communities - Samoan and South Sudanese - show the ways in which for these young people, religion is not the constraining dogmatic institutional presence it may have been to their parents. For these young people, their creative activities represent a kind of post-political engagement in which aspiration can be both grounded in lived experiences and communities (including families, church groups, cultural groups, and global youth movements), while at the same time are representative of a ‘capacity to aspire’ (Appadurai, 1996; 2004) that offers them possibilities beyond their current circumstances.

Since as far back as Stein (1953), scholars have tried to typify and measure creativity and its relationship to culture (Niu & Sternberg, 2001). Others more recently have highlighted the exciting potential in new and emerging social science methods and methodologies (Giri, 2004; Banks, 2005; Mason & Dale, 2010; Spencer, 2011), including performative and digital ones. The co-constitutive identity-building work of music, performance, and drama for Samoan and South Sudanese youth in church contexts has given rise to new considerations of diversity, cultural identity and the religious practices and rituals that inform them. The author’s text takes an intersectional approach to the multiple subjectivities of race, gender, sexuality and religion that play a deep role in these young lives. For these youth invested in performing their faith through church-based youth groups, spiritually-homogenous communities of practice are the most effective place to start. They are not without civic engagement agendas at all; they draw their power base through religious rather than activist practices, yet for them faith is wholly political. In this paper, I share some of the youth-created artworks as well as my own co-creator’s reflections and analysis.

Author

• Anne M Harris, Monash University