Youth Archiving in Action Project

Youth Archiving in Action Project


Wendy Luttrell

The Youth Archiving in Action Project is a digital collaborative workspace and living archive that brings young people, researchers and teachers to work together to organize and jointly analyze visual and written texts created by youth participants in Wendy Luttrell’s longitudinal, collaborative visual ethnography Children Framing Childhoods.  The research engages young people from the age of ten through eighteen in photography and video-making as a means to explore their evolving identities, and to document their family, school and community lives in low-income urban communities. YAAP will include a digital space and interactive tools for the young people to curate exhibitions of their images in a public access virtual museum and a social networking space for young people to dialogue with each other about their lives and literacies that are not easily recognized in school.  The content of the archive will evolve as new youth-centered research projects are conducted, and will provide a prototype and set of strategies for doing participatory archiving.

YAAP will have multiple uses:

  • To support the training of doctoral students across disciplines to become multi-modal scholars.  The YAAP password protected collaborative workspace will allow hands-on engagement with visual, dynamic and interactive media in conjunction with visual research seminars offered at the Graduate Center;
  • To facilitate virtual access and collaboration among various centers and initiatives dedicated to youth-centered visual research within the CUNY system, nationally, and internationally; and
  • To increase public access to a living archive of youth visions, cultures and visual texts about growing up in low-income communities so these materials can be re-purposed for use in teacher professional development and educational practice more broadly, challenging deficit-oriented and stereotypical views about urban learners.
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