Boundary Crossing and Line Stepping as Ingenuity

• In Event: 56.035 - Seeing Learning Anew: Shifting the Gaze Toward Ingenuity of the Everyday

Abstract

Objectives/Theoretical Framework:
This poster advances line-stepping as a new way of seeing ingenious boundary crossing in action: the playful resistance which occurs at the time that an ideational and/or material boundary line is acknowledged and engaged. As a part of the domain of ingenuity, line-stepping and boundary crossing attend to horizontal dimensions of learning, highlighting the everyday ingenuity in movements through and across domains of practice (cf. Bang & Vossoughi, 2016; Engeström & Sannino, 2010; Jurow & Shea, 2015; Vossoughi & Gutiérrez, 2014).

In our study we center the hybridity and the counter-scripts that help characterize agency, transformation, and openings for those navigating cultural, affective and cognitive borderlands (cf. Anzaldúa, 1999; Gutiérrez, Rymes, & Larson, 1995). Further, through the work of queer scholars of color (Anzaldúa, 1999; Muñoz, 1999, 2009), we gain insight into the pliable nature of boundaries and where these blur, blend, rupture, and bleeding across ecologies. These perspectives inform our conceptualization of how youth engage the material and ideational boundaries erected by family and broader society.

Our use of the term line-stepping was inspired by a sketch on comedian Dave Chappelle’s television series, Chappelle’s Show. In a segment titled “Charlie Murphy’s True Hollywood Stories,” Chappelle portrays musician Rick James as a “habitual line-stepper” who regularly “step[s] across the line[s]” of decorum; recklessly disregarding others’ personal boundaries.

Methods/Data:
Our analysis developed within the context of a larger multi-­sited ethnography (Marcus, 1995) of 14 families, focusing here on data from three families. Data sources included home video recordings, family interviews, and surveys of members’ perceptions related to health, education, energy, and social media. Open-ended and thematic codes (Bogdan & Biklen, 2007; Dyson & Genishi, 2005) of these data were developed. Data were further reduced through analytic memos and research meetings that helped identify salient themes across focal families.

Findings
Our emergent analysis highlights youths’ ingenious, subversive, and rebellious acts of boundary crossing as attempts to present more authentic, often liminal, selves. Focusing on youth’s everyday practices allowed us to see line-stepping as gradual progressions--characterized by the queering of norms--toward the crossings of boundary lines. We saw line-stepping as instances of deliberate and conscious pushes against society’s ideological constraints. Further, we have found that line-stepping, as with other forms of ingenuity, manifested as a distributed activity (McDermott & Raley, 2011) in the home.

Absent of the entitlements that enabled the aforementioned Rick James to blatantly disregard societal norms, we saw that youth had to tread familial and societal boundaries with a much lighter touch than the musician. Line-stepping emerged as a form of transgression that was processual, methodical, executed with deftness and predicated on an intimate awareness of the boundaries and the potential consequences for crossing them.

Significance
Our study presents line-stepping as an avenue for youth to: 1) transcend reality through the engagement of the playful imagination; 2) move the lines that are used to demarcate “appropriate” behavior; and 3) creatively re-define themselves and the worlds they inhabit. These findings have implications for envisioning and designing learning environments rooted in everyday sociocultural practices of youth from non-dominant communities.

Authors

• Patrick Johnson, University of California - Berkeley

• José Ramón Lizárraga, University of California - Berkeley

• David Philoxene, University of California - Berkeley

• Krista L. Cortes, University of California - Berkeley

• Kris D. Gutiérrez, University of California - Berkeley