Ethical Dilemmas In Resistance Art workshops With Youth

Abstract

In 2017 and 2018 The eQuality Project organized two transnational youth resistance art workshops with young people aged 15-22 who were interested in social justice activism. These educational and outreach workshops provided participants with background information about online social justice issues and explored ways to use art to push back against technology-facilitated violence and surveillance in networked spaces. Both during the design phase and the implemention of the workshops themselves, we were confronted by three dilemmas associated with these sorts of resistive social justice art projects. This article explores these dilemmas, which include how facilitators of youth art workshops can enable the production of digital art in a manner that is attentive to intersectional issues of digital literacy and access; respond to artistic appropriations of sexually explicit, discriminatory or hateful speech and their relation to cultural appropriation; and protect youth participants from liability for contravening defamation, privacy, copyright or trademark laws as part of their artistic appropriations. Throughout, we present examples of how the legal frameworks in our two jurisdctions (Canada and Puerto Rico) shaped the resistance and social justice opportunities available to our youth participants. We also discuss the decisions we made in consultation with our youth participants about how to navigate the law, and provide a list of suggestions for addressing these dilemmas for those who may wish to facilitate or engage in youth resistance art workshops in future.