| This research explores how young people utopianize about social justice issues through the arts in community-based settings, a process of critiquing the world and imagining ways that it might be changed based on an understanding of personal and historical oppression and marginalization. This process is examined as it relates to young people's perceptions of their rights and participation in various public spheres, and their use of the arts in a variety of disciplines to express their beliefs and ideas. Specifically, over fifty art works created from 1998-2008 were analyzed from seven community-based arts organizations in the United States, including mural paintings, documentary photography, devised theatre, digital storytelling films, and hip hop music. The research examined the ways that the art works expressed young people's personal experiences of inclusion and exclusion, and related those encounters to historical/material conditions. It raised questions about how utopianizing as an aesthetic process functions to raise hopes and desire in audiences, and to compel their social action (or not). This study found that the art works functioned as local knowledge, through which young people acted as historians retelling their communities' histories and serving as activists and catalysts for their peers' own social action. Finally, the art works emphasized the importance of arts-based criticism as a form of public pedagogy, reflecting key words and themes relevant to young people's lives. |
