Cultural Production and Participatory Politics: Youth, Symbolic Creativity, and Activism - Paperback

by Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández (Editor), Alexandra Arráiz Matute (Editor)

This book addresses the conceptual lapse in the literature regarding the relationship between cultural production and participatory politics by examining their connections in a range of national and political contexts.

Each chapter examines how youth engage cultural production as part of their political participation, and how political participation is sometimes central to, and expressed through, cultural production. The contributing authors provide examples of the intersections between youth cultural production and participatory politics and bring together a range of approaches to the examination of these intersections, providing illustrations of the complexities involved in these processes. Each of the chapters takes up different kinds of practices - from street art to video production, from online activism to installation work. They also examine a range of political contexts - from students striking at the University of Puerto Rico to activism in community arts centres and university classrooms. The book considers what becomes evident when close attention is paid to the intersection of cultural production and participatory politics: what does participatory politics help people to see about cultural production and how does cultural production expand how people understand participatory politics?

This book was originally published as a special issue of Curriculum Inquiry.

Author Biography

Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández is Professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Canada, and Editor-in-chief of Curriculum Inquiry. He is Director of the Youth Research Lab and Principal Investigator of the Youth Solidarities Across Boundaries Project, a participatory action research project with Latinx and Indigenous youth in the city of Toronto, Canada. His theoretical work focuses on the relationship between creativity, decolonization, and solidarity.

Alexandra Arráiz Matute is Assistant Professor of Childhood and Youth Studies in the Institution for Interdisciplinary Studies in Carleton University, Canada. Her research and pedagogical interests lie at the intersections of identity, culture, race, migration, and (de)colonization. Her past research has focused on the importance of relationships in teaching and learning, as a site of healing and resistance for marginalized communities.