Mixing Scales for Communal Futurity: Analyzing Immigrant Youths’ Production of an "Ideal Community"

• In Event: Precarious Places: Navigating Educational and Social Challenges for Latinx Communities

Abstract

In this paper, I show how Indigenous Latinx immigrant youth in a community-engaged after-school program imaginatively mix a number of geographic boundaries - neighborhoods, cities, and countries, in their creative design of an 'ideal community' map. I employ video discourse analysis methods to analyze how the youth interact with each other and with adults to produce a map unfettered by the limits imposed on them by adults and by spatial realities. The resulting map is important evidence of how Indigenous Latinx youth story their futures and how we can design future learning spaces to encourage more imaginative, futurity-oriented thinking.

Author

• Jackson Gzehoviak, University of California - Los Angeles