ABSTRACT
In the past 10 years, young people have begun utilizing community-based arts spaces to express their political views, their concerns, and hopes for the world. Against public views of young people as passive and apolitical citizens or as self-interested commercial consumers (Herbst-Bayliss, 2007; Kinder, 1999; Paterson, 2007; UNESCO & UNEP, 2000), youth from diverse backgrounds publish passionate art works that argue their desire to be engaged, activist citizens. Reading and analyzing their art works is one way of valuing young people’s agency in public spaces. For this author, young people’s stories are in their struggles and the struggles are their stories. And these struggles/stories are pedagogies that ask audiences to see the world anew through the art itself.
