Resistance and Transformative Possibilities: New York City Youth’s Photo-Narrative Exploration of Belonging and Othering

Understanding the minds and lives of urban youth requires that we determine where they are located in place and how experiences in place affect their perceptions of themselves and their role within larger social structures. This paper presents a participatory action research (PAR) project that attempted to capture and disambiguate complex relationships between sense of belonging, identification with one’s communities, and sense-making about social disparities. In bi-weekly, two-hour workshops spanning an entire academic year, seven Bronx Community College (BCC) students received training in, and engaged with, PAR methodology, photography, and visual analysis ahead of the research team’s photography exhibition, which took place on the BCC campus. Over the course of the project, we saw many examples of how youth from underprivileged backgrounds contest material and symbolic exclusion. First, the young people’s narrating often challenged dominant narratives about their communities (“people think community college is easy”; “people think our communities are hell”). Consequently, as the young people challenged dominant narratives, they began to reclaim and redefine spaces on their own terms through evolving themes of interconnectedness. Over time, we witnessed a shift in the participant-researcher’s storytelling about their communities from reactive storytelling, or implicitly responding to domineering stereotypical portrayals, to asserting greater freedom in making sense about places and communities through proactive storytelling. To foster belonging and promote more hopeful imagining of future selves in a changing world, we call for place-based interventions that meaningfully engage young people with their neighborhoods.