Naming and Claiming space: Latina/x Girls Transforming Museum Curation and Space

• In Event: Difficult Names: Women and Girls of Color Naming Their Truths

Abstract

Purpose: Latina/x girls are rarely seen as holders and producers of knowledge (Delgado Bernal, 2002) or as curators of transformational spaces, despite the myriad ways they use their language, culture, and knowledge to bring attention to their lived realities (Authors 2021). Within museums in particular, authentic representations of Latina/x girls are often erased (Acevedo & Madara, 2015). To combat deficit views, these spaces must make intentional and explicit efforts to recognize Latina/x girls’ histories, stories, languages, and cultures in humanizing and empowering ways. The purpose of this paper is to highlight how a group of Latina/x middle school girls named their lived realities through the curation of a museum exhibit that focused on their lived realities in an after-school program.

Theoretical Framework: Drawing from a GoC literacies framework, we consider the unique raced-gendered epistemologies central to understanding practices of meaning-making (author, 2020; Muhammad & Haddix, 2016; Author, 2021). Through these theoretical understandings, we look at how practices of dialogue, multimodality, and art-making are reflective of the community and familial practices situated and shaped by geopolitical spaces and border crossing, both metaphorically and physically. Specifically, we aim to understand how Latina/x girls draw on these practices of meaning-making to showcase who they are collectively and individually through designing a public museum exhibit.

Methods: We employed Participatory Design Research (PDR), a theoretical and methodological approach that examines the roles of multiple stakeholders in the process of design and learning. PDR dismantles researcher-participant hierarchies to transform learning contexts (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016). Here, we focus on the kinds of epistemologies Latina/x girls incorporate into their exhibits, disrupting discursively white-centered museums.

Data sources: For this study, we collected audio-video recordings, pictures, artifacts, and semi-structured interviews with the Latina/x girls. We initiated qualitative data analysis with open-coding (Saldaña, 2012) data sources to identify emerging patterns. To follow, we will also implement focused coding (Saldaña, 2012) to confirm patterns across the various data sources.

Preliminary Findings: From the initial analysis, three preliminary patterns have emerged from the data. (1) The girls transformed the after-school space and pedagogy by naming their experiences across formal educational settings, relationships, and social conflicts. (2) Through the process of naming their experiences, the girls curated a multimodal exhibit reflective of their everyday lives, language, culture, and identity; and, (3) The girls' exhibit of Latina/x experiences prompted museum visitors to engage multilingual, cross-cultural, multimodal ways of responding.

Scholarly Significance: Given the marginalization of Latina/x girls in educational and public spaces, including museums, opportunities to amplify the voices of Latina/x girls through the process of naming and designing spaces are necessary to generate transformation. Through after-school programming and the curation of a museum exhibit, these girls were able to bring attention to their lived realities as gender and racialized bodies, while disrupting deficit narratives often reproduced about them across spaces. More importantly, they shared and represented their truths for others to learn from.

Authors

• Monica Gonzalez Ybarra, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  Presenting Author

• Idalia Nunez, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  Presenting Author

• Jiadi Zhang, University of Missouri - St. Louis
  Presenting Author

• Citlalli Garcia, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  Presenting Author