"We Can Be Leaders": Minoritized Youths' Subjugated (Civic) Knowledges and Social Futures in Two Urban Contexts

• In Event: Freedom Dreaming: Black and Latinx Youths' Multimodal Compositions of Future Selves and Literacies

Abstract

Centering minoritized youth voices, this paper problematizes traditional and critical conceptions of civic knowledge. We utilize vignettes from two critical qualitative studies in two urban contexts to suggest that minoritized youths’ subjugated knowledges are a type of civic knowledge and necessary for youth to imagine agentic social futures. These vignettes indicated that the community-based curricular experiences in these studies illuminated and tapped into youths’ racialized experiences and embodied knowledge of gentrification, immigration, and racism. As youth expressed and built upon this embodied knowledge, they discussed policy solutions and remedies to the injustices they identified, developed a deeper sense of belonging and solidarity with people in their communities, and articulated a desire to “become leaders” and future agents of civic and social change. We offer implications for research and call for civic education anchored in the insurrection of subjugated knowledges and youths’ race conscious imaginations of more just and participatory "social futures."

Authors

• Sophia Rodriguez, University of Maryland - College Park

• Kristin Sinclair, Georgetown University

• Timothy Monreal, University at Buffalo - SUNY