INTRODUCTION: Radical Imaginations and Youth Resistance in Education

Youth Resistance for Educational justice shows how resistance, especially among minoritized groups, is an increasingly crucial dynamic of social and educational transformation. It illustrates the ways in which young people are conceptualizing and asserting more socially just educational futures through participation in social movements. In doing so, this volume affirms the need to understand hope and dreaming as concomitant to concepts of youth resistance and educational change. Rather than focusing on top-down solutions to educational and social inequality, this book centers on grassroots and community-centered examples of resistance and social change within diverse educational settings. Featuring a wide range of U.S. and international case studies, this book showcases the ways in which racially minoritized young people develop into social and historical actors by engaging in collective activism and organizing, as well as daily forms of individual and interpersonal resistance, within schools and other community-based contexts. These case studies bring together empirically driven narratives that highlight a range of racialized communities and gender diverse communities, in a variety of contexts (urban, suburban, and rural), to show the ways that youth create imaginative resources that interrupt dominance and envision alternative futures in these sites. With chapters focused on theory and praxis, this collection interrogates the structural barriers to educational justice, as well as the cross-cutting factors and practices that resonate across disparate contexts and communities. With a focus on real-life actions inside schools, community learning environments, and the media, this book provides insightful conceptual tools and examples that are important for critical educational policies and practices. It will therefore be beneficial to postgraduate students and scholars in critical education, educational policy and politics, social justice education, and multicultural education.