Latinx Youth Theorizing Back: Resistance Through Digital Storytelling

• In Event: 64.088 - Sheraton Roundtable 12 - Osgoode Ballroom
  In Roundtable Session: 64.088-1 - Space and Place: Embodied and Performed

Abstract

This paper describes an effort to generate identity-affirming, consciousness nurturing, action-oriented spaces for Latinx youth in the Midwest through bridging an existing resiliency-based summer camp curriculum designed to affirm students’ identities and reduce rates of depression. We sought to intervene by centering an analysis of race and identity, interrupting colorblind frameworks and practice. We implemented a digital storytelling project to initiate critical perspectives to contextualize structural inequalities based on stratifications due to race, social class, gender, and ethnicity that influence their identity development. Re-imaging the possibilities of curriculum development requires a focus on resiliency as an individualized strategy to overcome life stressors but reframed in collective understandings of possibility beyond Eurocentric colonial constructions of identity, mental health, curriculum, and educational research.

Authors

• Alycia M. Elfreich, Indiana University - Indianapolis

• Monica A. Medina, Indiana University - Indianapolis

• Rebecca A. Alexander, DePauw University