Portals to Just Local Futures: Exploring the Speculative Civic Aesthetics of India and U.S.-Based Urban Migrant Girls

• In Event: Speculative Civics Learning Through Artistic Creation and Performance

Abstract

This paper examines how India and U.S.-based urban migrant girls used artmaking to envision more just civic futures in a practitioner study (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009). As girls from marginalized transborder communities in two of the worlds’ largest and most unequal democracies, they face contextual, yet comparable barriers to civic belonging. These include the marginalization of their civic meaning-making and artistry across settings in the public sphere (e.g., schools). Accordingly, the wider study on which this paper is based explored how critical civic education featuring invitations for creative expression (including artmaking) could support their civic learning and engagement. This paper, which examines how India and U.S.-based girls leveraged their aesthetic resources for speculative civic meaning-making, advances understandings of how educators can support urban migrant girls’ aesthetic civic dreaming across unequal democracies.
To conceptualize urban migrant girls as civic meaning-makers, this paper draws on transnational girlhoods (Vanner, 2019) – that is, a theoretical lens foregrounding historically marginalized girls worldwide as critical sociopolitical actors. To theorize the artistic practices (e.g., drawing, poetry) through which they speculated towards more just civic futures, it draws next on Mirra and Garcia’s (2020) concept of speculative civic literacies – that is, “expansive, creative forms of meaning making and communication aimed at radically reorienting the…purpose of shared democratic life toward equity, empathy, and justice” (p.297).
Data for this paper consisted of session recordings from two separate India and U.S.-specific virtual inquiry communities facilitated by me, an Indian American scholar-practitioner; girls’ artwork; and my field-notes. To analyze how girls engaged in speculative civic art-making across the inquiry communities, I used deductive coding informed by my theoretical framework (noting how youth leveraged their experiential and aesthetic resources as multiply marginalized girls to speculate towards civic futures). In later rounds, I wrote analytic memos to distill cross-case themes.
This paper will highlight two themes pertaining to urban migrant girls’ speculative civic aesthetics – that is, their artistic visionings for civic transformation that were rooted in their embodied, contextually situated knowledges of democratic life in India and the U.S. The first was how youths’ art-making (e.g., art, poetry) reflected their strivings towards local democratic ideals – that is, how their various works reflected their desires to move beyond inequitable democratic realities in their local contexts. The next theme was how they envisioned empowered future identities –that is, how they used art-making to imagine their future contributions as locally embedded change agents.
In highlighting U.S. and Indian urban migrant girls’ speculative civic aesthetics, this paper will help us understand the unique artistic and experiential resources these youth possess for envisioning more just local civic futures. This can help the field grasp their significance as civic actors across borders. Finally, in providing recommendations for how U.S. and Indian educators can support the cultivation of urban migrant girls’ speculative civic aesthetics, this paper will contribute to the AERA 2025 theme of promoting democratic renewal and repair through education.

Author

• Ankhi Guha Thakurta, Boston College