Multimodal Cosmopolitanism: Cultivating Belonging in Everyday Moments With Youth

Abstract

This article explores the idea that everyday moments hold cosmopolitan potential wherein such recognition can reorient educators and youth toward one another in meaningful and generative ways. Found in the quotidian practices of young people are indicators of their affiliations, their proclivities, their interests, and their curiosities. Educators, should they choose to take these practices seriously, will find ample fodder in the wide range of youths’ communicative and expressive practices for making connections across differences and to move toward lowering barriers of participation for youth in institutional spaces. Data from an ethnographic study of a theater project housed within an alternative to detention program are reanalyzed using a lens of multimodal cosmopolitanism to explore everyday and often fleeting moments of interaction to render visible the ways in which participants expressed and experienced belonging in myriad ways—belonging to the project as well as to one another. A discussion following two ethnographic vignettes of the theater program offers recommendations for how a multimodal cosmopolitan orientation can support educators to approach curriculum and enact pedagogy that nurtures belonging with and among youth every day.