ABSTRACT
During five months of fieldwork in an urban junior high school in the Southwestern United States, chapter author Meenakshi Gigi Durham became aware of the radical reflexivity with which low-income teenagers of color understood themselves and the world in which they sought to survive and even thrive. Yet the acuity of their critique could not alter the structural barriers they yearned—but were largely unable—to change. Recognizing the contextual, cultural and socio-political factors that put people at risk means that as scholars, we cannot lightly privilege the notion of “agency” as the antidote to vulnerability. Rather, it is imperative to consider those factors carefully and conceptualize effective strategies with which to challenge and dismantle them, in solidarity with our research participants. Durham draws on the lessons she learned from her teenage informants to illuminate the complex dynamics of vulnerability and resistance. She reflects on how these dynamics mobilize a feminist ethics of care that highlights “the importance of morality for challenging the legitimacy of distributions of power” (DesAutels & Waugh, 2001, pp. ix–x) and the epistemic imperative of vulnerability as a catalyst for progressive research in feminist media studies.
