Abstract
Dystopias—societies organized around deep inequalities—have existed in the context of Atlantic Canada since colonization. In this article, we seek to center the concept of dystopia as an important sphere of inquiry through participatory visual research with six 2SLGBTQ+ young people (14–17) in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada. Using an intersectional lens (Crenshaw, 1989), we consider how intersecting power structures—gender, race, class, and disability—produce unequal impacts in relation to social and reproductive justice issues in Atlantic Canadian contexts. In this paper, we highlight DIY media-making—as a multiliteracy practice—with 2SLGBTQ+ youth to explore social and reproductive justice. As early as 1994, Julian Sefton-Green and David Buckingham wrote about the importance of acknowledging the situated nature of people’s local literacy practices and of examining the ways that people make meaning through multiple texts in order to instigate social change. Other scholars working within a multiliteracy framework (see, e.g., Barton and Hamilton, Literacy practices. In Barton D, Hamilton M, Ivanic R (eds) Situated literacies: theorizing reading and writing in context. Routledge, pp 25–32, 2005; Rowsell J and Pahl, The Routledge handbook of literacy studies. Routledge, 2015) argue that an understanding of multiliteracies includes modes of processing, producing, analyzing, and meaning-making. Centering 2SLGBTQ+ youth agency, we position DIY media-making as a multiliteracy practice through stencil production and drawing. Through a close reading of three youth-produced images, and an interdisciplinary inquiry into dystopias present and future, we seek to make visual an ethical place of belonging among the dystopic.
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Notes
- 1.
Drawing on the activism and scholarship of Eve Ewing (2020), we explicitly capitalize Black and White as the “seeming invisibility [of Whiteness] permits White people to move through the World without ever considering the fact of their Whiteness…White people get to be only normal, neutral, or without any race at all” (para. 8).
- 2.
Our context, Fredericton, New Brunswick, is situated on the unsurrendered and unceded traditional lands of the Wolastoqiyik peoples. Signed in 1725, the Peace and Friendship Treaties established Mi’kmaq and Wolastoqiyik title over these lands and provided rules for ongoing relations between nations. We acknowledge the land and the unhonored Treaty of Peace and Friendship, as an example of the existing dystopic conditions that exist within this territory. New Brunswick was founded on stolen land and provides the geographical and societal context for our inquiry.
- 3.
Rumors of the Clinic’s impending closure began in August 2019. The Clinic was put up for sale in June 2020 and effectively closed in September 2020 (Bell, 2020).
- 4.
Kristy and Scott are pseudonyms. Raven is a participant-chosen pseudonym. Casey is non-anonymized.
- 5.
See our work from our Queer Cellphilms NB project, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXORsJs60OVKJ7TSDnEl6xg
- 6.
Agender is a nonbinary gender identity that means that a person is without gender (Pulice-Farrow et al., 2020).
- 7.
See exceptions, including an August 2020 Radio Canada, Ici Nouveau-Brunswick interview with Monique Brideau: https://ici.radio-canada.ca/nouvelle/1728657/clinique-avortement-chirurgical-nouveau-brunswick-lections-recours-collectif
- 8.
See Araujo, N. and Burkholder, C. (2020). Gender affirming care: Save Clinic 554. [cellphilm]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91MRZVNe5OI
- 9.
See Chase, A. and Burkholder, C. (2020). Lesson plans. Queer histories matter: Queering Social Studies in New Brunswick . [website]. https://www.queerhistoriesmatter.org/lessonplans
- 10.
Pride/Swell is an art, activism, and archiving project Casey is engaging in with 2SLGBTQ+ youth and collaborators Dr. Katie MacEntee, Dr. April Mandrona, and Amelia Thorpe.
- 11.
See Casey’s selfie and facemask at https://www.instagram.com/p/CGpT0EYD01E/
- 12.
See Casey’s doll and tiny protest sign at https://www.instagram.com/p/CG42K4rjchznTPYthZ9gTGZPcd1d57Idau3SRo0/
- 13.
See Dryden, O. (2020). Racist responses to Covid-19 place us all at greater risk. The Chronicle Herald, September 3. [Viewed December 15, 2020]. Available from https://www.thechronicleherald.ca/opinion/local-perspectives/omisoore-dryden-racist-responses-to-covid-19-place-us-all-at-greater-risk-492256/
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Acknowledgments
We would like to send our heartfelt thanks to the participants in the workshop and the collaboration of Amelia Thorpe, a PhD Candidate at the University of New Brunswick and a co-facilitator to many of the 2SLGBTQ+ youth workshops. The research described in this paper was supported by the University of New Brunswick’s Young Scholar Award (2019), a SSHRC Insight Development Grant (2018–2020), and a New Brunswick Innovation Fund Emerging Projects Grant (2019–2020).
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Burkholder, C., Aladejebi, F., Thompson, J. (2022). Engaging DIY Media-Making to Explore Uncertain and Dystopic Conditions with 2SLGBTQ+ Youth and Allies in New Brunswick, Canada. In: Lee, C., Bailey, C., Burnett, C., Rowsell, J. (eds) Unsettling Literacies. Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education, vol 15. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-6944-6_11
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