Description: This book explores how arts-based programs designed to reconnect young people with learning and work provide brief, sometimes profound, re-engagements and productive identity shifts. It aims to support youth pushed to the edge of formal education and entangled in structural social and cultural inequality. The researchers, artists, activists, and youth organizations developed process-oriented practices with young people, enacting new creative methodologies building on agentive possibilities to disrupt misrepresentation and invisibility. The book positions arts-based practices at the edge, examining complex systemic issues around youth disengagement and possibilities of collective creativity to navigate broken systems and inform futures. Enacting arts-based methodologies with young people at the edge through co-design shares navigation out of locked trajectories in collaboration with those who listen deeply as allies in their journey of re-presenting themselves to the world. The final section reflects on arts-based practices at the edge eliciting standpoints of young people at the edge.
https: //link.springer.com/Review Quotes: "A key strength of this book is the clarity with which it advocates for greater consideration of the agentive and transformative possibilities opened up by creative methodologies that involve young people. The contributions offer inspiration for researchers and topics for further discussion and debate. ... this work has utility for critical analysis and dialogue about the challenges in countering negative and homogenising representations, while at the same time inviting readers to consider transferable methodological models." (Naomi Berman, Journal of Applied Youth Studies, Vol. 6, 2023)