Public pedagogies of street-entrenched youth: New literacies, identity and social critique

Abstract

In this chapter we describe a project in which we investigated the ways street youth engage in public life through informal educational opportunities in one urban centre in Canada. We explore the contradictions and complexities of these engagements, particularly when youth might be understood as living with “precarity”—a condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support. Such precarious subjects, Butler argues, struggle to be legible and recognizable within established societal norms. Our work asks how, as scholars, educators and community members, we might reconsider ways to support these youth in their efforts to become legible and recognizable citizens through complex discursive participation in civic life.