’Magazines make me uncomfortable’: discomforting, disruptive, and productive affects with youth in an urban after-school program

Abstract

ABSTRACT The purpose of this paper was to re-visit data from a nine-week scrapbooking project, with Black and Latinx youth, in an urban after-school programme, using an affective lens. To examine the entanglement of human and non-human bodies, I (White, woman, researcher) returned to week three of the nine-week project, during which the youth and I explore health and fitness-related magazines. I explicate how affect, using feminist new materialism, drew me into three affective moments, which took place during and after the project had officially ended. In looking at these non-linear moments, I explain the ways in which the participants, materials and, perhaps, most importantly, myself became affected by a co-constitutive entanglement of human (youth, adult) and non-human (scrapbooks, images, texts) bodies. These moments generated affects that were uncomfortable, disruptive, and productive. I end the paper by urging researchers, educators, and practitioners to continue to engage in critical scholarship with youth, particularly in the United States. While this is a modest beginning, it is also a point to pause in discomfort and disruption which can, in turn, produce possibilities for youth and adults to destabilise traditional hierarchies in research and practice and learn from each other.