Hope Against Hope: A Critical Poetic Inquiry With Youth of Color in a Community-Based Organization

• In Event: Centering Hope, Joy, and Love in Literacies Research With Youth of Color

Abstract

This proposal describes a one-year qualitative study on how youth of color in one community-based organization, Durham Community Youth, used poetry and narratives to speak to the complexities of growing up as adolescents in urban communities. Inspired by the participants’ writing, the authors utilize a critical poetic inquiry methodology to examine how youth convey the spatial, temporal, and relational boundaries of adolescence, adultism, and adultification through poetic expression. The students’ writing spoke back against societal expectations of adolescence, challenges faced by youth of color, and assumptions of youth in urban communities. The proposal offers implications of how poetic analysis can illuminate how youth in urban communities offer “hope against hope,” the imagined and realized possibilities of youth’s hopeful futures.

Authors

• Crystal Chen Lee, North Carolina State University

• Jennifer C. Mann, Duke University

• Lonnie Manns, North Carolina State University

• Ja'Bria Barber, North Carolina State University