Dark Themes in Youth Creative Production: Exploring the Deeper Realities of Minoritized Youth Experiences

• In Event: Conviviality, Coloniality, and the Making of the Other

Abstract

Purpose
Our research explores how minoritized youth draw on dark themes to (re)present their lives in creative production. We propose that community-based arts programs contribute to “radical healing” (Ginwright, 2010 p. 82) by supporting youth to respond to “socially toxic environments” (ibid. p. 82) Our inquiry explores two research questions: How do minoritized youth engage dark themes that disrupt discourses of conviviality as harmonious coexistence in re-storying their lives? Why is a curriculum of darkness important for radical healing?

Perspectives
We draw on theories relating to radical healing (Ginwright, 2010), imagined violence (Halberstam, 1993), and community-based arts programs as sites for youth to develop identity and critical consciousness (Authors) to analyze and theorize a curriculum of darkness.

Modes of inquiry
This research includes a multi-year, multi-site ethnographic project focusing on how community-based arts programs serve minoritized youth by developing culturally relevant pedagogy. Three sites within an urban center in the Midwestern United States serve as the basis for study: a summer visual arts residency program for low-income, highly mobile youth (June-August, 2016); a theatre program serving Hmong immigrant youth (August 2013 to mid-January 2014); and, a summer media arts residency in partnership between an arts organization and an urban school district (May 2018).

Data sources
Our data sources include detailed descriptions of each research site, such as the setting and participants, as well as fieldnotes documenting learning activities and dialogue/conversations between participants. We also collected related artifacts (student artwork, photographs), conducted participant interviews, and gathered audio/video recordings of activities. We identified themes and subthemes which contributed to our analysis (Boyatzis, 1998) as we “interact[ed] with the data” (Patton, 2002, p. 453).

Results
As a result of our research, we conclude minoritized youth engage in dark themes to re-story their identities and experiences “as an act of asserting the importance of one’s existence in a world that tries to silence subaltern voices” (Thomas & Stornaiuolo, 2016, p. 314). Creative renderings generated during program experiences (including a painting, a scene in a play, and a stop-motion film), illustrate participants’ iterations of destruction as a form of re-telling and re-presenting lived experiences. We believe their choice to take on dark themes engenders a counternarrative to motifs perpetuating the “disposal and containment of youth who do not fall in line with logics of efficiency” (Pyscher & Lozenski, 2014 p. 532). Incorporating personal experiences into the creative process also functioned as a mechanism to disrupt convivial notions of a harmonious, equanimous society. Importantly, these youth were not simply rebelling, nor did they utilize violence as a destination, but rather engaged with dark themes to protect themselves from socially toxic school environments where harmful pedagogical practices disproportionately hurt minoritized youth. Doing so provided an opportunity to “intervene in issues that shape their daily lives” (Ginwright, 2010, p. 89).

Significance
This work significantly contributes to research on ways schools can support minoritized youth as they grapple with inequities writ large and create counter stories that re-present and re-imagine their lives and experiences.

Authors

• Betsy Maloney Leaf, University of Minnesota
  Presenting Author

• Diana Chandara, University of Minnesota
  Non-Presenting Author

• Bic Ngo, University of Minnesota
  Non-Presenting Author