“Looking for Connection”: Arts-Based Photovoice with Youth to Explore Relationships Between Wellbeing, Nature, and Spirituality

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Wednesday 1:45 pm
  In Roundtable Session: Wellbeing, Equity, and Justice: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Teaching and Research in the Arts

Abstract

In the current neoliberal era, the voice of urban youth from historically marginalized groups remains silenced, hidden by dominant discourses of healthism, and their wellbeing, health, and spirituality disregarded by neoliberal systems of oppression, marginalization, environmental dispossession, and poverty. Positioning youth as “community researchers, Arts-Based Photovoice (ABPV) has the potential to encourage reflection, creative expression, and social engagement among urban youth for capturing the (in)tangible aspects of wellbeing as embodied, interconnected, and entangled with/in nature. Framed by the Intersectionality and Interconnectivity together, ABPV provides education researchers with a valuable theoretical framework to embrace human and more-than human voices, enabling urban youth to express their encounters and entanglement with the natural ecosystem in their urban environment for community regeneration.

Author

• Laura Azzarito, Columbia University