“Stories behind their hands”: the creative and collective “actionist” work of girls of color

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to highlight how young people engage in social justice work. This study is guided by the following question: how do students engage in the social justice work of storytelling through art? Design/methodology/approach The title stems from a conversation the researcher had with the four female students about whether they identified themselves as activists. After the students collectively agreed that they did not align with the term “activist”, they continued to grapple with definitions of the word and discussed other terms to describe themselves. The conversation is one of many that emerged from a three-year qualitative research project that focused on youth activism, which included a one-year critical narrative inquiry into a ninth-grade Humanities classroom. Findings This paper positions the artwork as activism, in that the girls embedded multiple narratives into their art to portray a complex narrative about the realities of sex trafficking in their community. Research limitations/implications The paper will conclude with implications that focus on the importance of blurring the boundaries between classrooms and communities, cultivating spaces for young people to develop an activist stance and working alongside youth as they compose political–personal stories about injustice, inequality and inequities in their fights for social change. Originality/value This paper offers a unique discussion of artmaking (collective biography) as a form of socially just youth literacy. As such, interstitial literacies become the acts of speaking, reading, writing and being that youth/students create and engage in as they move between classrooms and communities.