ABSTRACT
The first section of this book is devoted to the Samoan young people who perform their creativity first and foremost through their youth group at the Wesleyan Methodist Samoan Church in Melbourne, and share those performances more widely through social media. This and the Section Two introduction offer a brief overview of the approach and conceptual framings that have helped me think through the work of each youth culture here, and to which I think their particular creative expressions contribute. They also importantly disrupt the way scholarly work in those particular cultural ‘spaces’ has been done. In this first section concerning the Samoan youth, I use their work to think newly about creativity scholarship (O’Connor and Gibson 2014; Runco 2014; Collins 2010; Manning 2009; Barone and
Eisner 2011), youth and education studies (Anita Harris 2013; White and Wyn 2013; Youdell 2012; Weis, Fine and Dimitriadis 2009; Dolby and Rizvi 2008; Fine 2008, 2004), and feminist (Ringrose 2015; Braidotti 2013) and critical race scholarship (Singh and Doherty 2008). But each introductory section also shares a bit about my relationship with the young people, as this is intentionally a creative and personal narrative, as well as a scholarly one. Our mutual and sometimes-collaborative work demonstrates the conceptual complexity that can be at the heart of both popular creativity and of “writing-as-research, and the creativity of theorizing our own lives” (Harris and Gandolfo 2013, 3), by jointly exploring these narratives of culture, creativity, and faith through the young people’s commentary, creative writings, images, utterances, and my own.
