"We See a Portal": World-Building Role-Play Toward a Maker Counter-Space

• In Event: Research in Informal Learning Environments During COVID-19

Abstract

Objectives
We explore youth maker roleplay online during the COVID-19 multipandemic. As our multi-year afterschool STEM maker program, where we teach together, transitioned from in-person to online during the COVID-19 multipandemic, we noted an emerging theme. Youth were sharing a passion for world-making together through roleplaying anime and shōnen manga characters and themes that occurred mid-session. Continuous, multi-layered character roleplay took on increasing centrality, depth, and multimodality with each session. This went beyond talk. For example, youth changed Zoom names multiple times per session to represent particular characters depending on situation and expressive need/use, and several youth requested in-session time for peer feedback on expanding galleries of anime-inspired self-portraits/self-reimaginings. In this study, we consider this roleplay activity as a repertoire of world-building engagement towards peer counterspace co-construction.

Perspectives
We connect youth ideas and engagement to literature on Japanese anime/manga (e.g., Lee, 2011; Denison, 2015); speculative fiction more broadly, in both theory and practice (Butler, 1989; Balagun, 2006; Okorafor, 2015; Streeby, 2020); world-building (Hassler-Forest, 2016; Samutina, 2016; Boni, 2017); counterspaces (e.g., Case-Hunter, 2012); and roleplay (Derrida & Bass, 2001; Manifold, 2021), acknowledging limited prior research on youth efforts in each of these areas.

Methods & Data
Using critical participatory ethnography with six participating BIPOC youth (ages 12-14), data include recorded Zoom sessions, Zoom chat logs, interviews, focus groups, informal dialogue with youth and parents, and 2020-2021 youth-produced artifacts. Data also included participant-observation and co-viewing (multiple sessions involved peer debates about what character traits fit program adults, with three authors following youth recommendations to watch particular anime).

Results
Findings explore youth roleplay as developing shared experiences of transformative world-building within a complex context of extreme social isolation layered on continued antiblack violence, economic injustice, and additional forms of danger/risk in the 2020-2021 multi-pandemic. For example, youth incorporated original character (“OC”) design and roleplay as dimensions of maker projects, co-opting coding and digital animation as opportunities to explore themes that mattered to youth in quarantine including dystopia, relationships (from rivalries to “shipping”), super/powers, danger/violence, and queer identitites (e.g., gender “bending”/“flipping”). We develop transformative world-building roleplay as a central youth tool of co-constructing alternative presents for expanded futures. As youth STEM maker program member Finn explained, “It lets me escape reality when I'm dreaming and go to a whole different universe.” Member Louise added, “And almost anything can happen… I mean, like, you could be what you want to be, you don't have to just be one thing.” We consider how youth and adults participated in supporting, learning from, and shaping/being shaped by world-building roleplay.

Significance
We consider broader implications of recognizing such peer co-construction-through-roleplay efforts, reported in this study as a common youth practice during quarantine, both for youth learning and development and for program design in a multi-pandemic-informed future.

Authors

• Day W Greenberg, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

• Melissa Renae Perez, University of Michigan

• Chandler Turner

• Angela Calabrese Barton, University of Michigan