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Amplifying Latina/x Youth “Voces” Through an Exhibit Co-Design After-School Program (Poster 3)

Fri, April 12, 4:55 to 6:25pm, Pennsylvania Convention Center, Floor: Level 100, Room 118B

Abstract

Objectives
While museums offer powerful learning opportunities, they also tend to represent communities of color though colonial lenses, resulting in inauthentic narratives and/or cultural erasure (Blackwood & Purcell, 2014; Hooper-Greenhill, 2000; Martinez, 2020; Seitz, 2012). For example, museums may inaccurately contextualize Latinx artworks or lack heterogenous representation, which can generate feelings of exclusion and irrelevance (Acevedo & Madara, 2015; Zamora, 2007). In response, we began a multi-year community-based project to increase representation of Latina/x youth in museums. We partnered with a local middle school, a university art museum, and an entrepreneurship-focused nonprofit to develop a multilingual after-school program. In this poster, we present theoretical developments and practical findings about the first two years of the project, including impacts on participants and visitors.

Perspectives
We employed “epistemic injustice” as an analytical lens for examining how epistemologies of Latina/x youth are represented in museums. Epistemic injustice can cause harm by “privileging certain knowledge that maintains inequities, dismissing particular forms of participation, and confining the lenses through which children learn to see the world” (Stroupe, 2021, p. 2), including in museums. To address this, exhibit design teams should actively partner with communities of color when conceptualizing and constructing exhibits so that marginalized perspectives and funds of knowledge are fully incorporated (Conaty & Cartner, 2005; González et al., 2006).

Methods
We employed Participatory Design Research (PDR; Bang & Vossoughi, 2016) as a theoretical and methodological framework for (re)designing an after-school program that was responsive to participants’ goals, interests, and knowledge (and respectful of occasional resistance). Participants included a total of 14 middle-school youth in the U.S. Midwest who self-identified as Latina/x and spoke English, Spanish, Q’anjob’al, and/or K’iche’. We facilitated 10 after-school sessions each fall that centered on participants’ identities, interests, and knowledge. Exhibits resulting from these sessions were displayed at the university art museum in spring semesters.

Data
Data sources included video of after-school sessions, semi-structured interviews, program artifacts, exhibit artifacts, and visitors’ written responses to exhibits (see Figures 3a-3b). Combined, these data allowed us to trace how participants’ generation and sharing of exhibit ideas became realities that impacted visitors. We used coding strategies as described by Saldaña (2013) for multiple analyses, briefly summarized below.

Findings
To date, we have analyzed how Latina/x youth use multimodal expressions to navigate and transform academic and social spaces (Authors, 2023a) and create exhibits that foster feelings of belonging in museums (Authors, 2023b). We are currently examining how our project embodies liberatory “pedagogies of risk” (Wilson, 2022) and recognizes the many ways heterogeneity exists in Latina/x youth culture. We are also identifying practical “lessons learned” for after-school program design, such as navigating partnerships and balancing pre–planned and emergent activities.

Significance
This project demonstrates how co-design partnerships with Latina/x youth can transform museums, and particularly visitor experiences, by explicitly centering Latina/x identities, interests, and knowledge in exhibits. Given participants’ and visitors’ positive reactions, we hope to share our experience with others to extend this approach toward sustainable replication.

Authors