Resilience Beyond Risk: Youth Re-defining Resilience Through Collective Art-Making
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Resilience Beyond Risk: Youth Re-defining Resilience Through Collective Art-Making Trish Van Katwyk1 · Yukari Seko2
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2018
Abstract There is a strong parallel between the discursive construction of youth and the definition of resilience, with shared characterizations of deficit, risk and adversity. The purpose of this study was to explore the possibility of redefining resilience by incorporating youth’s own conceptualizations and experiences through collaborative art-making. Twenty-three youth (16–29 years old) participated in art-making workshops guided by six youth researchers, who also assisted with data collection. While youth participants were strongly impacted by external forces imposing a normative assumption of ‘successful youthhood,’ they actively sought out both unique subjectivity and solidarity to counter the negative forces threatening their well-being. The findings suggest that these young people perceive resilience as a crucial component of identity management. Acknowledging youth perceptions of resilience as an intersubjective process of identity negotiation, rather than a personality trait or a buildable capacity for coping, may provide valuable guidance to social work professionals. Keywords Youth · Resilience · Risk · Arts-based research · Participatory action research Critics have argued that an elaborated focus on risk throughout society is born out of the neoliberal mechanism of manufactured uncertainty (Giddens, 1994; Beck, 2005; Kelly, 2000). Manufactured uncertainty is the process of a societal occupation “with debating, preventing and managing risks that it itself has produced” (Beck, 2005, p. 332). Beck (2005) draws on a power analysis to describe manufactured uncertainty as the mechanism by which a society’s most powerful actors exploit the distribution of risk so that those with least power live with the greatest risks of the progress. Within the context of manufactured uncertainty, youth have emerged as the new “underclass” (Giroux, 2013), a distinctly underprivileged group defined only in terms of social inefficiency. In his considerations of the impact of neoliberal ideologies on societal structures such as education, Giroux (2013) has suggested that the rootlessness of the * Trish Van Katwyk [email protected] 1
School of Social Work, Renison University College, University of Waterloo, 240 Westmount Rd N, Waterloo, ON N2L 3G4, Canada
Transitions Strategy, BRI Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital, 150 Kilgour Rd., Toronto, ON M4G1R8, Canada
2
youth underclass is bolstered by three levels of war that are being waged against young people. The first level, soft war, refers to the process of commodification that engulfs youth with messages aimed at them through media that they are most valued as consumers. The next level, hard war, refers to the criminalization of youth, where the corrections/corrective system begins to supplant social support and education as a response to youth experiencing dif
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