Uncovering Youthspaces - Activist Voices, Materialist Methodologies, and Social Inquiry - An Introduction

Oct 15, 2026

This article advances a new materialist conception of youthspaces to explain how youth agency, relationality, and resistance are produced in literal, relational, and symbolic spaces. It reframes youth activism and youth studies by showing how minoritized youth make sense of education policy and practice while cultivating positive identities and affinities. The introduction also outlines new critical, participatory, and materialist methodologies and situates youthspaces within education, social justice, and neoliberal educational contexts.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages8

Reading Time20 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction

Youthspaces and their definitions

New materialism and research frameworks

Methodological and theoretical concerns in the special issue

| | Uncovering Youthspaces: Activist Voices, Productive, | | --- | --- | | | Materialist Methodologies, and Social Inquiry: An Introduction | Sophia Rodriguez, University of North Carolina at Greensboro Abstract This article expands the discussion on youth activism, arguing for a new materialist conception of youthspaces. Centering this article around the concept of youthspaces, a term that refers to the agency, relationality and resistance engendered in youthspaces, the article urges that a new materialist understanding of youthspaces and youth studies, in particular, opens up new opportunities to observe how minoritized youth are making sense of education policy and practice as well as cultivating positive identities and affinities among each other in the context of education and social justice efforts. Keywords: youth activism; new materialism; youthspaces; qualitative inquiry Introduction The focus of this issue of Critical Questions in Education (CQIE) is on the materiality and relationality of youth-generated spaces—what I term youthspaces. This concept is defined as spaces that are literal, relational, or symbolic, that produce meaning for youth in regard to their experiences of education, identity, belonging and social justice. This concept of youthspace is influenced by new materialist notions of agency, relationality, and resistance (Fox & Alldred, 2017) . To this end, this editorial introduction provides a brief explanation of new materialism, its influence on research related to youth studies, and how it provides the framework for the articles in this issue. This special issue of CQIE is dedicated to new understandings of materialist, critical and participatory methodologies in educational research on youth studies with particular attention to youth from minoritized communities, or with youth that occupy marginalized identities (Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003). This call defines “minoritized communities and identities” by drawing from Gutiérrez and Rogoff’s (2003) work that posits that the practice of labeling students’cultural differences with individual traits such as being “low-income,”“at risk,” or any “othering” language is part of the institutional, ascription process of identity that allows for hierarchies in schools and society (Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003) . This ascription process also sets the conditions for positive and negative academic trajectories for minoritized youth and contributes to thereproduction of inequality in society. Youth identity, particularly minoritized social identities and identities related to race, class and gender and their interactions with student achievement, have been widely studied (Bettie, 2003; Cammarota, 2004; Carter, 2004, 2005; Chikkatur, 2012; Critical Questions in Education (Special Issue) 8:4 Fall 2017 335 Conchas, 2006; Davidson, 1996; DeJaeghere & McCleary, 2010; Dimitriadis, 2003; Eckert, 1989; Ferguson, 2001; Flores-Gonzalez, 2002; Fordham & Ogbu, 1986; Ghosh, Mickelson, & Anyon, 2007; Morris, 2006, 2007, 2008; Nasir, 2004; Noguera, 2004; Pascoe, 2007; Taines, 2011; Valenzuela, 1999; Wortham, Mortimer & Allard, 2009); however, this issue offers approaches to uncover youthspaces that experiment outside the normative socio-cultural, dualistic paradigms of previous research. Given the resurgence of youth activism and larger youth-generated social movements against educational injustices (Rodriguez, 2017b), this special issue expands notions of agency, identity, empowerment, and resistance within the context(s) of neoliberal ideologies that govern much of the current education policy and reform climate (Giroux, 2014, 2015; Fabricant & Fine, 2012) and globalization. As it stands, neoliberal ideologies provide the context for youth activism (Kirshner, Gaertner, & Pozzoboni, 2010), where neoliberalism is defined as a set of political ideologies and practices (Harvey, 2005) . Neoliberal ideologies have been applied to educational research (Lipman, 2011) to und

FAQs

What does the article mean by “youthspaces”?

Youthspaces are spaces that are literal, relational, or symbolic and that produce meaning for youth regarding education, identity, belonging, and social justice.

How does new materialism shape youth studies in this introduction?

New materialist notions of agency, relationality, and resistance provide the framework for understanding how youthspaces operate and how youth-generated spaces can be studied.

Why is youth activism important within this special issue’s focus?

The introduction connects youth activism to movements against educational injustices and explains how agency, empowerment, and resistance develop within neoliberal and globalization contexts.

Oct 15, 2026

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