The other black box: compiling, co-constructing and composing ethnodrama inside a Zoom screen with Latina/x youth artivist-researchers

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this paper is to provide insight into the challenges and possibilities of compiling, co-constructing, and composing ethnodrama with young people via virtual workspaces. The following ethnodramatic vignettes are constructed from the stories of six Latina/x artivist-researchers in an intergenerational theatre troupe, Estrella Theatre (ET) company. This collection of scripts is based on critical and arts-based qualitative data collected during ET’s arts-based youth participatory action research project. The stories were collected during arts-based elicitation and semi-structured interviews, participant observation, analytic memos, and artifacts over a seven-month period. In addition to illustrating how Latina/x youth in the United States. Southwest embody transformational resistance in their lives as they traverse school, home, and community spaces, I reveal the process, challenges, and possibilities of utilising Zoom towards ethnodramatic authorship with youth.

KEYWORDS:

• Arts-based research
• Latina/x youth
• education
• ethnodrama

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Latina/x signals both female gender and non-binary gender identifying individuals of Latino/Hispanic descent.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Ford Foundation.