The Crossroads Collaborative is committed to bringing together stories and numbers to offer a richer, more complex understanding of youth, sexuality, health, and rights (YSHR). Our collaborative is made up of scholars in rhetoric and composition as well as critical youth studies and developmental science. We engage in mixed-methods and participatory research practices with youth to learn from the creative ways they express their distinct needs, dreams, and desires. We are committed to research practices that are informed by the multimodal literacies at play Our deliberate engagement with the concept of PLAY in our work is a demonstration of the resistance we practice at the Crossroads Collaborative to the imagined and rigidly imposed divisions of an adult–youth binary. In other words, we take play seriously. Our working definition of play is informed by Ken S. McAllister’s (2004) Game Work: Language, Power, and Computer Game Culture, in which McAllister demonstrated the ubiquity of play as a term and a practice describing our social and cultural activities and productions. Following Londie T. Martin (2013) in The Spatiality of Queer Youth Activism: Sexuality and the Performance of Relational Literacies through Multimodal Play, we understand play as a rhetorically significant and often relational mode of critical and creative meaning making. When understood and approached as serious work, as we believe it should be, play can illuminate both the joyful and the unjust. in and across youth communities and that are, therefore, particularly meaningful to youth with whom we collaborate. We are deliberate in describing such literacies as (and also put into) play by young people. We take play seriously at the Collaborative. Informed, in part, by the work of Ken S. McAllister, such as Game Work: Language, Power, and Computer Game Culture (2004), and following Stuart Brown, the founder of the National Institute for Play, we understand play to be a critical, creative, and generative modality of social engagement and cultural production.
Funded by the Ford Foundation, the Crossroads Collaborative engages in action-oriented teaching and research with academics, youth-serving organizations as community partners, and community youth as collaborators and co-researchers, to develop knowledges, We deploy the term KNOWLEDGES rather than “knowledge” to be explicit about the different—sometimes competing, sometimes complementary—knowledges that circulate in the communities in which we are engaged. These range from academic knowledges across disciplinary boundaries, to youth knowledges, to broader community knowledges. Recognizing that different knowledge systems are at play in from distinct locations, we can also recognize that such knowledges are valid and can inform our research. When we position ourselves as learners who can be informed by the lived knowledges guiding everyday decisions, we open ourselves to deeper understandings of youth practices, interests, needs, strengths, dreams, and desires. In the Crossroads Collaborative, we also work to ensure that differing knowledges are translated, so that those of us involved in local collaborations are legible to one another as collaborators who share interests around youth, sexuality, health, and rights. amplify youth voice, and share what we learn with the broader community (for more on transdisciplinary collaboration, action-oriented research, and public scholarship, see Licona & Russell, 2013). We are committed to working with youth and youth-serving organizations to change the conversation around YSHR through learning about what youth know, what they want to know, how they are conducting their own inquiries, and how and where they are expressing what they know.
We approach the performance of youth slam as a rhetorically meaningful mode of civic engagement and critical discourse that reveals youth concerns and contributions. Multimodal literacies and practices have emerged as rich and compelling sites of our inquiry into participatory youth media productions. The texts we consider here offer a testament to simultaneous reflection and praxis. Thus, we have brought together slam poems, quantitative and qualitative coding of themes, and youth poets’ reactions to these themes, as well as action-oriented participatory practices. Parts of this webtext will reveal how we, as a collaborative, experienced and understood slam poetry and performances. We understand our engagement with the performances as having its own rhetorical situation—a context, purpose, and audience that is different from, though intimately related to, the rhetorical situation of the slam poets in the midst of their craft and performances. Through our community research and engagement with the slam performances (both in real time and through YouTube videos of the performances), we became aware of the relational dynamic between slam poets and their audiences and have come to understand this dynamic relationship as crucial to slam. Slam poets both influence and are influenced by a live, performative space. This is the context within which we learned from young poets about the issues they experience and express as most pressing, and from which we have worked to develop both qualitative and quantitative analyses.
We hope that such inquiries can lead to concrete changes related to legislative policies and community practices. As Dolores Delgado Bernal (2002) reminded us, “[. . .] educational structures, processes, and discourses operate in contradictory ways with their potential to oppress and marginalize and their potential to emancipate and empower” (p. 109). Many Tucson youth slam poets are channeling the potential Delgado Bernal refers to as a way of resisting formal educational constraints, and as a way of self- and community-centered education.
The Tucson Youth Poetry Slam (TYPS) formed in the wake of what six United Nations experts referred to as a “disturbing pattern of legislative activity hostile to ethnic minorities and immigrants” in Arizona that impinges on the rights of (and obstructs access to information and resources for) a number of constituencies, including people of color, immigrants, youth, and queers (“Arizona: UN experts warn,” 2010). K. Tsianina Lomawaima (2010), professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Arizona, referred to HB 2281, Arizona’s ban on Ethnic Studies, as one part of a “regressive suite of legislation” that emerged throughout 2010. The legislative “suite” or context in Arizona—kicked off by a conservative legislature during a period of significant anti-immigration sentiment with the establishment of HB 2281 (the "ethnic studies" bill which targeted a Mexican-American studies class in Tucson Unified School District), SB 1070 (Arizona's anti-immigration bill, commonly referred to as the "papers please" law), SB 1309 (the "Parents Bill of Rights" that allows parents to determine the access a minor may have to care and education regarding sex and sexuality), and Proposition 107 (the amendment that banned affirmative action programs in Arizona)—challenges youth rights and access to relevant knowledges and necessary resources. In response to this regressive climate, Crossroads scholars have worked with youth to explore action research practices as important tools for building and valuing community knowledges as powerful counterstories (Martin & Licona, 2012). As a continuation of this work, we witness here a local youth slam group practicing and showcasing the rhetorical practice of poetry, as well as identifying slam poetry’s role in social justice. These youth not only produce and perform but also constantly recruit other youth to the monthly performances and work within the community performing and training others about slam.
We have attended TYPS meetings and performances since the Collaborative's inception in 2010, and this attendance has grown into collaborative projects and interviews. These observations have supported our understanding of slam poetry’s rhetorical force and function: as a mode of civic engagement as well as creative and critical expression. Amy Briseño’s poem from the April 2011 Tucson Youth Poetry Slam championship is an example of civic engagement and critical expression. “If I Am What You Teach Me” was performed at a particularly pressurized moment in Arizona’s Ethnic Studies controversy, arising from the passage of AZ HB 2281, which has interpreted classes that focus on Latin@ histories and cultures as, for instance, conspiring against the U.S. government. The poem expresses a public yearning for the right to knowledges and a strong response to authority figures who prefer a narrow, linear educational narrative that does not engage with the complexities of marginalized groups. As you listen to the poem, you will hear Briseño being encouraged with shouts and claps; she responds with a confident performance. One of the most crucial elements of TYPS is this encouragement, the feeling that we are in this together. Youth get up on the mic and spit about HB 2281, or they spit about divorce, or abuse, or racial injustice. The subjects vary but the support doesn’t. This type of youth community is important for our research in no small part because it affirms the significance of not simply listening to youth but placing significant value on youth voices as much as other voices in the processes of social movement and transformation.
Amy Briseño’s poem, “If I Am What You Teach Me”
Briseño’s poem converses with the local context in Arizona but is broadened to a global yearning for the multiplicity of stories and experiences that can thread and complicate the tendency toward singular historical narratives. It is narrated from the first-person perspective but is not made explicitly specific to her experiences; rather, the narration is broad, and the addressed “you” is a general figure of authority that can be read as all those who are in a position to mediate formal educational opportunities and texts. The poem identifies the United States as an oppressive regime through both education and war, and beyond the local context is the hum of oppression that has been tracked and expressed outside of most U.S. educational contexts and is constantly undervalued or ignored in textbooks and classrooms. The poem strongly indicates a desire for the right to be educated from multiple perspectives and argues that such an education is closer to the truth than a singular, uninterrupted, or uncomplicated narrative. The transcription is powerful, but the performance enhances this power. While she implicates the local context of Ethnic Studies’s elimination, the technique is enthymematic, so that the audience at this moment of the performance does not need this context rehearsed; they are already living it and responding to it, as is Briseño.
Background images in this section from mural and grafitti photographs by Steev Hise.
As an interdisciplinary collective, we are called to acknowledge how research has historically (and to some extent presently) examined adolescent development in a “risk” framework: early understandings of adolescence were dominated by discourses that suggested it was a time of “storm and stress” (Cote & Allahar, 1996). However, in the last twenty years more scholars have incorporated a positive youth development perspective into their work; this approach has emerged from academic research and youth voices (Benson, 2003) to describe the shift from understanding adolescence as a troubled period of life to a conceptualization of youth as resources that can be developed (Roth & Brooks-Gunn, 2003).
In much the same way that Steev Hise's photograph (featured here as our background image) of two youth engaged in a street transaction calls us to critique the rhetorical ways of seeing that shape how adults re/produce risky narratives of youth, so too are we called to an asset-drivenASSET-DRIVEN discourses and practices are rooted in the belief in the strength and value of all human beings. This approach is committed to recuperating and teaching the value and potential of lived individual, home, and community knowledges, particularly including culturally relevant knowledges. González, Moll, and Amanti’s (2005) concept of funds of knowledge can inform such an approach. perspective. In Hise's photograph, what do we assume these youth are doing? Selling drugs? Trading arms? Given our Arizona context, perhaps they are trading in other incendiary commodities: the books that Tucson Unified School District banned from classrooms following HB 2281 and the dismantling of Tucson High School's Mexican American Studies program, maybe. An asset-driven perspective on youth and youth culture compels us to question the ways in which our assumptions about youth result from racialized, classed, and gendered rhetorics. Moreover, considering the strengths and assets that youth possess in terms of their development is a central tenet of the positive youth development perspective (Lerner, Brentano, Dowling, & Anderson, 2003; Lerner, Almerigi, Theokas, & Lerner, 2005). Thus, contemporary scholars are conceptualizing adolescence as a period characterized by both the potential for risk and the potential for successful development; with this approach, we can observe the opportunities for youth to excel (Lerner, Brentano, Dowling, & Anderson, 2003).
Because of the historic focus on risk, scholarly as well as public understandings of adolescent sexuality and health have typically emphasized negative outcomes: Health becomes defined as disease (and the avoidance of it), and sexuality is defined as a problem. We want to intervene in pathologizing, deficit-drivenDEFICIT-DRIVEN discourses and understandings of non-dominant others have been reproduced across disciplines and community contexts. Such understandings are rooted in dominant, and often stereotypical, assumptions about knowledge, learning, desire, behavior, and aptitude. They are negatively framed through stigmatizing and even pathologizing discourses of risk that ignore the place and potential of social and cultural capital, particularly in and from non-dominant contexts, as well as the force and function of structural inequalities. Academics and activists interested in disrupting deficit-driven discourse look to funds of knowledge that can point to an altogether different perspective and line of inquiry based first in asset-driven understandings of difference and of marginal and marginalized communities., and therefore limited understandings of youth. Following contemporary scholars such as Deborah L. Tolman and Sara I. McClelland (2011), we urge a reinvention of the ways in which youth and youth development are framed. We are inspired by scholars who question, contest, and even re-imagine what is meant by development (see Lesko & Talburt, 2012; Talburt, 2004). These scholars call our attention to the ways in which development models can function to produce adults-in-process as normalized and normative subjects in the making. We are interested in the rhetorical function of such models and conceptualizations, particularly for queer and gender non-conforming youth across contexts of race, class, and immigration status. We are interested, too, in the rhetorical strategies these youth invent in response to the imposed limitations of such models and conceptualizations. Their responses might be considered a form of sideways growth, a phrase Kathryn Bond Stockton (2009) coined to describe how some young people “grow sideways as well as up . . . in part because they cannot, according to our concepts, advance to adulthood until we say it's time” (p. 6). In Stockton’s conception of youth development as a sideways motion, we find a more capacious perspective through which young people's desires, fears, joys, and dreams might be engaged without relying on normalizing and linear arrangements of development and maturation. It is through these perspectives and frameworks that we work to understand and make meaning of the lived experiences of Tucson youth as they are expressed through slam poetry productions and performances; we work to consider youth voice and vision in new conceptualizations of youth that include their expressed needs, interests, and desires.
Informed by a critical localismOur work in the Collaborative is informed by Steven Goldzwig’s (1998) concept of CRITICAL LOCALISM. This concept is one that calls us to know the communities we work in deeply and to continually consider what a commitment to local knowledges might look like in terms of our research. Research practices are made locally relevant, responsive, and meaningful when they are informed by critical localism. Critical localism, then, is a term that informs our way of doing research in that it commits us to listening to and learning from the discourses and practices that circulate in the local communities within which we work. that emerges from multiple disciplinary and community perspectives, we know that youth are and can be intimately engaged in the production and extension of knowledges. Their poems are changing local conversations about YSHR in spite of ongoing regressive politics. In the spirit of Amy Briseño’s poem, we designed this piece in the implicit notion of multiple and messy narratives. As evidenced in Briseño’s poem, funds of knowledgeOur use and understanding of the concept of the FUNDS OF KNOWLEDGE derives from the work of Norma González, Luis C. Moll, and Cathy Amanti (2005) titled Funds of Knowledge: Theorizing Practices in Households, Communities, and Classrooms. This work informs ours at the Crossroads Collaborative as well as the inquiry and analysis we practice and perform. Our approach to youth emerges from an understanding of them as knowledgeable and of their perspectives and experiences as valuable. Such an approach means we are interested in the everyday practices in which youth are engaged and how their lived experiences inform their critical and creative discursive productions, especially as these speak to their confrontations with inequalities and injustices as well as their successful navigations of social worlds. Following a funds of knowledge approach, we are interested in disrupting oppressive perceptions of non-dominant youth and their home communities by focusing first on their strengths and assets. that are often possessed by students of color—from lived experiences, histories, and languages—have been too frequently overlooked in educational contexts. In “Critical Race Theory, Latino Critical Theory, and Critical Raced-Gendered Epistemologies: Recognizing Students of Color as Holders and Creators of Knowledge,” Dolores Delgado Bernal (2002) used a Critical Race Theory (CRT)Our work at the Collaborative and in the community has been informed by scholarship identified as CRITICAL RACE THEORY, CRT, which emerged in the context of critical legal studies in the 1970s. This theoretical intervention began with an acknowledgement of racism and its relationship to white supremacy and resisted colorblind discourses, practices, and assumptions that emerged in the post-civil rights/post-Jim Crow era. CRT begins with the understanding that racism is historic and ongoing in the United States with implications across social, cultural, academic, and legal contexts. To understand the effects of racialized injustices and inequalities, CRT scholars are committed to the stories from below, or to those lived experiences that counter dominant discourses and assumptions. Like the asset-driven approach described here, CRT is also committed to considering and making visible structural inequalities and interlocking and intersecting systems of marginalization and oppression. and, more specifically, a Latina/Latino Critical Theory (LatCrit)Latina/Latino Critical Theory, LATCRIT, arose from CRT and critical legal studies with an emphasis on the implications of racial and racialized, as well as other structural inequalities, for Latin@s across contexts with a particular emphasis on legal and educational contexts. It serves as a theoretical intervention to the erasures of Latinidad that are affected by Black/White binaries and therefore contributes to a more complicated understanding of race and racialization. framework to demonstrate that students of color are not only keepers of lived and learned knowledges, but are also producers of knowledges. Our understanding of youth, and particularly youth of color, as producers of knowledges can intervene in pathologized representations that dominate mainstream media as well as educational discourses and legislative decisions about educational policy. Such a critical lens asks us to particularly value those perspectives that have been devalued and to intervene in pathologized representations. And interventions such as this can happen even as youth may be experiencing and understanding stratification in ways that those of us interested in educational and rhetorical contexts are still not always capable of recognizing, or that we do not often enough give students and youth credit for critically identifying. Briseño not only laments the loss of multiple perspectives but also the harmful degree to which narrow perspectives can reproduce insensitive and violent attitudes and activities from those who learn such perspectives without a critical or humane lens. Briseño implies the value of critically engaging with the fluidity of experience and identification and the potential of pedagogies and practices that explicitly feature the involvement of youth.
Informed by Briseño's insistence on multiplicity, in our work with youth and youth organizations we attempt to listen, learn, act and simultaneously reflect. We try to figure out what relevant research means in the kairotic prism of Tucson, a complicated political space of multiple and co-mingling truths and histories.
Background images in this section from mural and grafitti photographs by Steev Hise.
The Tucson Youth Poetry Slam (TYPS) takes place every third Saturday of each month, with a championship each April. Logan Phillips and Sarah Gonzales coordinate slam events and other TYPS activities that TYPS youth are also now organizing and coordinating. Through these activities, we have noted the strengthening of youth voice in Tucson, the development of a critical perspective, and the sharing of knowledgesWe deploy the term KNOWLEDGES rather than “knowledge” to be explicit about the different—sometimes competing, sometimes complementary—knowledges that circulate in the communities in which we are engaged. These range from academic knowledges across disciplinary boundaries, to youth knowledges, to broader community knowledges. Recognizing that different knowledge systems are at play in and from distinct locations, we can also recognize that such knowledges are valid and can inform our research. When we position ourselves as learners who can be informed by the lived knowledges guiding everyday decisions, we open ourselves to deeper understandings of youth practices, interests, needs, strengths, dreams, and desires. In the Crossroads Collaborative, we also work to ensure that differing knowledges are translated, so that those of us involved in local collaborations are legible to one another as collaborators who share interests around youth, sexuality, health, and rights. from participating youth.
TYPS began in 2010 and is currently facilitated through Spoken Futures, Inc. On their website, TYPS “advocates literacy, critical thinking, and youth voice through poetry competitions, workshops and community showcases.” The website also indicates the organization's commitment to youth leadership and the fostering of civic literacies. TYPS calls itself “the young voice of Southern Arizona,” which implies a comprehensive representation of the youth of this region, or at least those youth engaged and interested in performing slam poetry. Indeed, Spoken Futures, Inc. does outreach to several schools in the region, and TYPS has attracted a diversity of youth with each year. And the program has expanded its outreach. While TYPS initially involved youth from Tucson schools, it now includes youth from such cities in the region as Casa Grande, Arizona. Moreover, some of these youth have in turn begun their own poetry slams.
Sarah Gonzales facilitates a TYPS exercise before the slam begins
photographer unknown
TYPS and Spoken Futures, Inc., also encourage youth leadership within the organization. The TYPS staff includes the adult co-directors and two slam poets who have moved on to leadership roles in the organization. To emphasize the significance of youth organizing, the youth coordinators are listed before the adult program directors on the website. And the online staff list is not exhaustive, as several youth poets are engaged in such activities as sitting on the board of Spoken Futures, Inc., hosting slams, facilitating slam workshops at various schools in the region, and updating the website with such materials as slam reviews. The TYPS Twitter feed is active with slam commentary, as well as retweets from poets, other youth poetry programs, literary organizations, journals, and TYPS supporters. Overall, the mixture of adults and youth is conducive to the ongoing project of contributing to the development of critical community literacies, in part by encouraging youth to view the slam as an opportunity to not only perform poetry but to gain experience in leadership roles that help sustain the objectives and relationships that arise within and among communities.
We are interested in the critical and creative ways these youth poets respond to the social climate influenced by legislation. The poetry slam, among other creative spaces for youth in Tucson, provides local and larger possibilities for youth intervention in and disruption of dominant fictions and deficit-drivenDEFICIT-DRIVEN discourses and understandings of non-dominant others have been reproduced across disciplines and community contexts. Such understandings are rooted in dominant, and often stereotypical, assumptions about knowledge, learning, desire, behavior, and aptitude. They are negatively framed through stigmatizing and even pathologizing discourses of risk that ignore the place and potential of social and cultural capital, particularly in and from non-dominant contexts, as well as the force and function of structural inequalities. Academics and activists interested in disrupting deficit-driven discourse look to funds of knowledge that can point to an altogether different perspective and line of inquiry based first in asset-driven understandings of difference and of marginal and marginalized communities. assumptions about youth knowledges and rights, particularly at the intersections of education, racial and economic justice, sexuality, and health. These moments of youth intervention highlight issues of urgency, hold the potential to build community, and provide the opportunity for coalitional action addressing the material circumstances of youth in Tucson.
Background images in this section from mural and grafitti photographs by Steev Hise.