Youth Community Arts Experiments and Theories of Change

This dissertation asks: how do diverse emerging artists engage community arts in public space to express and enact place and change? It is a case study of the Making With Place project which mobilised youth identifying as QT/BIPOC (queer, trans, Black, Indigenous and/or of colour) to create public art activations. This work began amidst transformations of personal and public space mandated by orders to contain Covid-19, and growing awareness and organising to address anti-Black racism. Grounded in methodologies of participatory action research, I collaborated with the Making With Place youth artist-researchers to engage in cycles of creative sharing, public art experimentation, and reflection and theorizing. The resulting dialogues, artworks and analyses surface underrepresented histories, systems of inequity, internal landscapes of isolation and trauma, and regenerative relationships of resilience and mutual aid. I draw on participant observation, individual interviews, group dialogues, and co-writing to develop a series of academic journal articles and community ‘zine style publications that synthesise and unpack these findings. In these pieces, we discuss emergent creative articulations of place, processes of (re)search, and embodied and affective theories of change. This dissertation deepens understandings of critical pedagogies of place from the margins as a place of radical possibility, with a view towards new, more equitable social relations.