Mapping Agency Through Aesthetic Production: Producing and Enabling Youth as Civic Subjects

Abstract

This paper reports on a recently completed research study that sought to trace or map the ways in which youth develop or enhance their civic agency as an outcome of their engagement with two different forms of aesthetic production. Using digital cameras and computer software or popular theatre technique, the participating youth explored issues of social concern to themselves and the community. By focusing on the ways the youth used, altered or ‘took up’ particular cultural tools (Wertsch, 1991, 19978) this study considers how the affordances and constraints of aesthetic knowledge production shapes the development of civic subjects and subjectivities.