Youth participatory action research, trauma, and the arts: designing youthspaces for equity and healing

Coming of age in an urban setting presents both opportunities and challenges for development and learning. In this paper, I illustrate the importance of understanding the ways in which marginalized young people respond to, resist, and are shaped by complex traumas stemming from structural oppression as a result of ongoing colonial and racial violence. I offer “youthspaces” as a framework that centers those with direct experiences of oppression as trauma as experts and cultural producers to envision a more socially just future-world and imagine things as though they could be otherwise. Five guiding principles and a living curriculum are offered for co-creating humanizing spaces with youth grounded in radical imagining, belonging, and collective creative inquiry. This work provides researchers, youth workers, young people, community organizers, activists, and educators a toolkit for conceptualizing, designing, and implementing praxis for critical consciousness and more effective, culturally sustaining programming, services and policies.