Producing Authenticity: Urban Youth Arts, Rogue Archives and Negotiating a Home for Social Justice

Abstract

Social justice needs a home, a place where it can be found, especially for young people growing up in fragmented and increasingly inequitable societies. Community youth arts organizations have secured a certain prominence in this context over the past three decades and are now part of the urban infrastructures that shape connected learning networks in highly industrialized nations. In this capacity, youth arts organizations regularly engage a language and aesthetics of authenticity and trust as part of how they call out, represent and make a home for children and youth. This paper examines how authenticity in youth culture and youth cultural expression is negotiated by arts organizations and how organizations locate their own trustworthiness as allies of young people through the curation of online media archives. The analysis draws on the internet media archives of two youth arts organizations in Canada’s largest English-speaking cities. The Oasis Skateboard Factory (OSF) in Toronto, ON is an extension program of the Toronto District School Board that enables participants to create their own brands and learn to run a skateboard or professional design business. ReelYouth (Vancouver, BC) started in Vancouver in 2005 as a community media empowerment project, and now delivers programs across Canada and internationally.The claims to youth authenticity articulated in each media archive reveal how authenticity and trust are negotiated ideologically by each organization and how organizations mark their ontological status, as a home from which young people can think and respond to an unjust world. I examine how youth authenticity is produced by analyzing how discourses of youth identity, connection and trust are deployed across each archive. Whilst showcasing how authenticity is negotiated by each group, I show how the production of authenticity discourses by OSF and ReelYouth simultaneously convey a deeper reality: the way youth arts groups operate as care structures (Scannell, 2014) that offer ontological security (Giddens, 1991), and places of increasing “awareness of previously unnoticed interconnections” (Frosh, 2019, p. 16) for youth. In this way, they operate as sites of border work, places of routing from which the work of social justice can be borne.