Futurist World-Building in an Out-of-School Literacy Program

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 21
  In Roundtable Session: Worlds, Narratives, and Stories: Adolescents' Space-Making

Abstract

Drawn from a larger two-year study conducted with an out-of-school literacy program for young women and non-binary youth, this work points to the complexities of constructing social worlds through thirdspaces (Soja, 1996). This work contends that futurist environments designed by youth reflected their vast imaginative capacities and values, but this presentation also points to the potential constraints on adolescents’ representations of social worlds when the current one is informed deeply by structural violence and authoritarian tendencies. These products revealed not any deficiencies in students’ thinking but reflected the inherent challenge of conceptualizing an unrealized world — a tension that is endemic to broader liberatory projects in the advancement of novel possibilities that lack precedent.

Author

• Ah-Young Song, Vassar College