We Are Not Only What You Think of Us: Re/Orienting Positive Youth Development through Counternarratives and Power-Sharing

Positive youth development (PYD) is a socio-developmental-ecological framework that centers on relational components to foster resiliency and empowerment in young people. PYD operates from the premise that all young people, regardless of risk factors or problem behaviors, have the potential to thrive. In PYD, young people are encouraged to build upon identified strengths and expand opportunities that enhance self-efficacy, capacity, and social capital. Research regarding equity-focused PYD program implementation shows that PYD approaches help young people to identify and hone skills to adaptively navigate their environments, foster positive social connections with peers and supportive adults, and engage civically in their communities to promote collective efficacy and enact social change. Yet, PYD does not explicitly address the critical roles of power-sharing and anti-racism as salient tenets to addressing systemic, oppressive forces that are critically essential to interrupt the perpetuation of racial trauma and foster youthspaces by which young people impacted by racial trauma, and those standing in solidarity, can collectively strategize towards conscientization and liberatory social action. Youthspaces denote praxis as a means for young people to explore and build critical awareness of the sources of societal inequities, to foster counternarratives, and collectively design communicative acts to address these issues. One powerful tool for enhancing PYD is digital storytelling (DST), a participatory arts-based approach that engages dialogue promoting lived experiences with demonstrated evidence-based impact on mental health and trauma. DST is a broad visual medium that includes brief video narratives, photographs, music, and voiceovers to tell a compelling story. DST is a transformative tool that research shows is highly effective in advancing social inclusion, social justice, affinity, and coping skills necessary to mitigate the impact of trauma and mental health to foster healing. DST comprises four domains: i) voice to amplify lived experiences; ii) technology to extend stories; iii) connections to foster relationships; and iv) economy to focus meaningful stories through succinct visual representation. Promoting co-creative, power-sharing youthspaces using DST to foster collaborative storying and counternarratives acts as a foundation for youth civic engagement, social cohesion, transformative creative exploration, and embodied positive youth development. This roundtable will explore youth digital storytelling in an active youthspace and how DST impacts young peoples’ meaning-making about developing a sense of community, collective healing, and counternarratives to foster critical PYD. Presenters will focus on power-sharing and creative counternarratives as core components for growth and collective healing. Presenters include two young artist-activist filmmakers who will examine lived experiences with adultism and how DST acts as an outlet for liberatory counternarratives, the youthspace co-founder who will explore power-sharing and trust as foundational to empowered interventions, and a community-engaged researcher to explore how to re/orient praxis to reflect these liberatory processes and center an anti-oppressive at-promise PYD paradigm. Our goal is to stimulate an engaged dialogue with the young presenters to promote an understanding of how to hold space to foster healing and promote empowerment in spaces where young people can explore their capacity to create and collectively use creative forces to reclaim a sense of community.