Creating the Conditions for Meaning-Making and Collective Power: Creative Participatory Research Practices

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session 5
  In Roundtable Session: Contributions to Qualitative Methodologies: Autonomy, Collective Power, and Autoethnography

Abstract

This work conceptualizes youth as cultural producers to open space for considering how young people encounter, negotiate, resist, and appropriate spaces for their own meaning making. Using a critical feminist conceptual framework, I describe and analyze two creative participatory analyses designed to center youths’ experiences within a praxis of embodied reflection, creative writing, and dialogue for meaning making. I argue that creative research practices designed to recognize and uplift young people as experts on their own learning experiences while building relationships can create the conditions for places of possibility to emerge. Places of possibility support youth activists’ ability to negotiate hegemonic structures in ways that provoke a greater sense of personal and collective power.

Author

• Kristen P. Goessling, The Pennsylvania State University - Brandywine