Youth in Solidarity Across Boundaries
is a participatory action research project with Indigenous youth and youth from specific minority/immigrant communities in Toronto, in collaboration with the Toronto District School Board.
Following the model developed with
Proyecto Latin@
, the proposed project will bring together youth from different communities to engage in both research as well as cultural production projects that examine questions of difference, diaspora, indigeneity, and solidarity. The project challenges conventional notions of the arts and proposes an alternative set of ideas informed by contemporary cultural studies. A central aspect of the argument for thinking about the arts in education through the lens of cultural production is that youth should be given opportunities to engage in the production of self-representations through a wide range of media. Based on these concepts, the project will bring together youth to explore whether and how solidarity can develop across differences through projects of cultural production that are centred on inquiry and a dynamic conception of social and cultural difference. This project will make a direct contribution – from a youth-centred perspective – to contemporary debates on the social, cultural, and political configurations of racial inequality.