“And Now it's Just, Like, Crap:” Considering Youth Wellbeing Through Aesthetic Encounters in Sites of Learning and Leisure

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Abstract

Combining post-structural perspectives conceptualizing ‘wellbeing as an assemblage’ (Coffey, 2022) in youth studies, and theories of aesthetics from non-Western epistemologies (Saito, 2007, Meneses, 2019), this paper explores the connections between the wellness of young people and the aesthetic qualities of everyday spaces. Drawing from a drama-based ethnography unfolding in Toronto with middle and high school students, this paper engages with ‘enhanced’ and ‘diminished’ wellbeing assemblages in four key sites: the videoconferencing platform, the drama classroom, the basketball court, and the public library. The paper suggests that exploring wellbeing as it is assembled via the aesthetics of the everyday can offer up a more emplaced account of how wellness is encountered for different bodies, across the socio-economic spectrum, inhabiting a space.

Author

• Christine Balt, University of Toronto Schools