Youth, Education, and Marginality: Local and Global Expressions

Chapter 1: Humanities-Infused Praxis by, with, and for Youth: Esoteric Hope

chapter 1 18 is, try to imagine a prosaic North American youth voice without J.D. Salinger, Janis Joplin, Bob Dylan, TuPac, Nirvana, and so forth. The confines of abundant experience were freed up, and social/political analysis became increasingly possible. We see this move as humanities-infused praxis to suggest the deeper influence of the full range of philosophical, artistic, theatrical, photographic, linguistic, visual, literary, and narrative gifts that the humanities have begun to bestow upon a few renegades in social sciences. The academic study of young people is moving nicely towards this influence, and thus these improvements are taking hold. The offerings are endless: anthropology and fine art/film have presented the power of the visual; philosophy, english, theatre, and psychoanalysis the strength of the story; and sociology the dance between human experience and its social/political meaning and organization. And then there is music and dance and so on. This kind of study with, for, and by young people provides a space to illustrate their abundant lives and the concerns they hold and negotiate in public education and wider society. The reasons for the paradoxical encounter between the death of liberal arts alongside a growth of humanities-infused praxis are unclear and perhaps unimportant for this chapter. Rather, we stridently use this space to invite young people into the conversation. This chapter, like the book, floats through the re-collision of humanities and social sciences to make more evident the esoteric hope and liminal experiences of youth in a public educational system in decline. Sometimes it’s hard for me to tell my parents how I feel going through my everyday life; they have their own problems and I don’t want to burden them … but it’s true, I never feel good about keeping things in, that’s why I tell my stories through dance. (Sandeep, 19)1 Honestly, when I write poetry, yeah it’s art, but really it’s like my diary and if I’m moved to, I can share, and that’s how I talk about it or whatever … usually that’s enough for me. (Wennie, 18) These lives are brought to bear by the humanities and liberal arts traditions, and these disciplines coalesce in youth studies. We argue that humanities-infused youth studies have the same power and place to make plain, and “trouble up,” experiences and witnessing of social marginalization. Historically, art has been reputed to uncover and expose more readily the many layers residing within any given subject—in this case, the strata of youth-lived experiences. Theatre, music, dance, poetry, graphics, paintings, and visual art are but a few art forms that are being recognized in the community as a means to teach and learn— in short, to communicate with the youth of today. Grounding research in the Humanities-Infused Praxis by, with, and for Youth: Esoteric Hope 19 everyday worlds of young people, especially those who have been made socially marginal, is an epistemological approach where knowledge is grounded in mutually determined experience and conversation. Carroll (2006) suggests that youth studies could itself be praxis: Such a critical perspective proceeds from the recognition that social life as we know it is marked by inequities that are deeply structured yet contingent features of human organization. As a systemic knowledge of the social, sociology is inevitably caught up in these inequities ... As praxis, sociology makes a commitment to understand the deeper, systemic bases of the problems we face, whether social, psychological or ecological, which often means understanding the interconnections between allegedly separate issues and problems as in the intersections of race, class and gender that constitute lived realities. (As cited in Frampton et al., 2006, p. 234) Youth studies are emerging in this way, and both lived realities and social/ political analysis are incubated in arts-infused ways of knowing. Such methodologies are critical in the sense that the work implies “a sort of critique, is democratic in nature, and can root out the underlying connections, issues, joys, and troubles as experienced in many contexts by youth” (Tilleczek, 2011, p. 40). The current complication of structural inequalities, and of the forms of self-narration through which they are actively contested and reproduced, clearly requires more sophistication and empirically grounded accounts ... If we are to do justice to what is at stake in young people’s lives, we have to find new ways of integrating empirically grounded and...