By Lauren Heidbrink and Michele Statz
As anthropologists, we conceptualized Youth Circulations from a shared commitment to make our discipline more publicly relevant, and to create accessible, dynamic resources for ourselves and others who teach on migration and global youth. The site was also fueled by a mutual frustration with so many static depictions of young im/migrants as victims, threats, economic migrants, or model minorities. Indeed, the strength and urgency of our collaboration emerged from what at times felt a heretical position, namely our deep impatience and even reproach for how these depictions are commodified for the sake of political agendas, media clickbait and even altruistic causes by institutions and actors tasked with – and often celebrated for – “caring” for young migrants.
Now in our 100th post and with an international audience of over 50,000 discrete viewers, Youth Circulations has truly exceeded our expectations as a collaborative and participatory site. In the six years since launching Youth Circulations, we have learned from the rich and diverse perspectives of scholars, activists, artists, and youth. These are lessons that have meaningfully shifted how we engage with wide publics as scholars and advocates. Acknowledging that we are still learning about how to conduct research with – and effectively represent the experiences of – youth, we offer some modest reflections on Youth Circulations as a creative experiment.
Lessons learned
.Statue of What. Artist: Bo Thai
First and foremost, there is a pressing need to engage young people as ethnographers of their own lives. As the experts of these lived experiences, youth are critically and dynamically equipped to reflect on the varied structures, institutions, discourses, and social forces that shape their everyday realities and the communities where they live. In contrast to the disparaging ways that young people of color generally, and young migrants specifically, are discussed, we enlist an asset-based approach that resolutely affirms youths’ resources and skills as they meaningfully negotiate—and thereby shed light on—local and intersecting realities of inequality, legality, and belonging. As an example, a 2017 Youth Circulations blog features the compelling artistry of Bo Thai, a young man who immigrated from Thailand to the United States at the age of 13. In his mixed-media series, aptly entitled “(B) C(o)nscious,” Thai narrates the story of a young boy as he grows up and reflects on his immigration to the United States The series engages in an intimate yet simultaneously social process of healing by calling viewers to reflect on how people from different backgrounds share similar journeys, sorrows, and thoughts. “[I] use my art as a healing process by expressing [my] emotions, ideology, identity, and stories,” he explains.
By facilitating the explicit recognition and regard for youths’ lived experiences in the United States —and in Thai’s case, for youths’ masterful artistic and poetic expressions of these experiences—Youth Circulations effectively democratizes expertise. That is, it enables us as scholars of global youth to harness our privilege and platform to advance the unmediated voices, critiques, and causes of young people. In so doing, youth demonstrate their capacities and concerns not only to an expansive public but likewise to community leaders and policymakers.
“Our response must also employ the experiences and expertise of the communities with which we work to address or even bypass the detrimental outcomes of these policies and practices.”
Of course, it is not enough to critique the intended and unintended consequences of public policy and institutional practice. Our response must also employ the experiences and expertise of the communities with which we work to address or even bypass the detrimental outcomes of these policies and practices. As Youth Circulations evidences, community members can be critical guides to conducting socially relevant and culturally appropriate research and mobilizing findings to affect social and structural change. For instance, Heidbrink’s multilingual series “Migration and Belonging: Narratives from a highland town/Migración y Pertenencia: Narrativas de un pueblo del altiplano” features her collaborative, community-based research with an interdisciplinary team of Guatemalan and Guatemalan-American scholars. Over eight unique posts, these individuals share their diverse personal and professional experiences of conducting community-engaged research in a town called Almolonga. The series offers a unique way of conducting collaborative research and likewise showcases the voices of Guatemalan scholars, many of whom remain excluded from the largely English-only academic presses.
The series has since blossomed into an interactive art exhibit featuring photography, narrative, a güipil (traditional garment) woven by one of Almolonga’s master-weavers, and an interactive Maya ceremony circle crafted by a local spiritual guide. From conceptualization to dissemination, these efforts link individual and community-based experiences to larger structural, institutional, and discursive processes. And, by scaling up and beyond the virtual space, we are experimenting with alternative modalities to share relevant research locally, internationally, and virtually.
Image from Migraiton and Belonging Art Exhibit. Photo credits: L. Heidbrink
As we have found, anthropologists are uniquely poised to challenge and expand the narrow parameters by which young migrants, their parents, and their cultural contexts are covered in the media. At its best, this is a truly collaborative endeavor. In our individual experiences as researchers and together as co-editors of Youth Circulations, we work within – and consistently benefit from – an international network of colleagues conducting critical and timely research around and with global youth.
Youth Circulations is a manifestation of our deep commitment to translate our teaching and research into accessible and timely formats that reach broader and more diverse publics—and that likewise facilitate, or perhaps demand, new ways of evaluating professional “success” and credibility. These include blogs, podcasts, photo journals, digital stories, art exhibits, public lectures, and engagements with popular media. With an audience size and geographic span well-beyond our imagination, this now includes policymakers. To that end, we have extended our work to op-eds in the Los Angeles Times and in professional association publications such as AnthroNews; organized collaborative webinars for scholars and activists working with undocumented students and immigrant communities; and co-edited a series on “Im/migration in the Trump Era” that showcases the transnational and community-engaged efforts of scholars, students, and activists.
Taken together, what we know and what we do must be presented as rigorous and creative across diverse platforms. Indeed, it is this final aspiration, namely to steadily, collaboratively, and differently create that continues to motivate our work. Recognizing that research alone cannot confront the pressing global issues of our time, we deeply affirm the reflections of Mohammed, a 17 year old youth from Afghanistan who arrived unaccompanied in the United States: “Activism is not just reacting or dismantling the current system. We must use our imaginations to create.”
About the authors
Lauren Heidbrink is Associate professor in Human Development at California State University, Long Beach. She is author of Migrant Youth, Transnational Families and the State: Care and Contested Interests and Migranthood: Youth in a New Era of Deportation. She is co-founder and editor of Youth Circulations.
Michele Statz is Assistant Professor in the Department of Family Medicine and Biobehavioral Health at the University of Minnesota Medical School, Duluth campus. She is author of Lawyering an Uncertain Cause: Immigration Advocacy and Chinese Youth in the US. She is co-founder and editor of Youth Circulations.