Colette Daiute

Youth Perspectives on Violence and Injustice

This introduction presents the theoretical, methodological, and practical rationale for “Youth perspectives on violence and injustice,” a special issue of the Journal of Social Issues. Our approach to youth violence research raises questions about what counts as normative youth behavior and broadens the nature of inquiry so that understandings and goals of young people, especially those from discriminated groups, contribute to re-defining the problem and its analysis. We also underscore how the articles in this issue illuminate youth perspectives via novel theoretical and methodological tools. After presenting the organizing themes of social justice and development: youth perspectives through history, culture, and community, youth confronting public institutions, and youth transformations through relationships, we preview themes in the integrative summary. Questioning “Violence” and “Youth”

Online Coming-Out Communications Between Gay Men and Their Religious Family Allies: A Family of Choice and Origin Perspective

Gay men use social networking sites and blogs more than heterosexual men (Harris, 2010). However, little is known about how they communicate online while coming out. Yet, coming out often results in a loss of social support for gay youths from religious backgrounds, suggesting that alternative supports such as families of choice and online networks may be particularly beneficial (Saltzburg, 2007). The present study addresses this gap by focusing on how gay emerging adults (N = 23) and their religious family allies (N = 15) utilize Facebook to make sense of their experiences by communicating with families of choice and origin. Narrative analysis suggests that gay participants primarily make sense of familial and religious challenges by developing online peer supports (i.e., families of choice) in contrast to their family allies’ focus on strengthening existing family-of-origin relationships via online information exchanges. Participants’ reported online sociorelational benefits largely contradict recent research indicating that Internet use may lead to negative mental health outcomes (Kross et al. 2013; Krämer & Winter, 2008). The present study therefore highlights the need for further research to assess the generalizability of online sense-making benefits to other cultural, religious, and sexual minority groups that may be confronting coming-out challenges.

Sunni-Muslim American Religious Development During Emerging Adulthood

Islam is one of the fastest growing religions in America, with approximately 6 to 7 million Muslims living in America within the past decade. However, there has been little psychological research conducted focusing on the development of the Muslim American self. This inquiry addresses that gap by focusing on how familial religious affiliation during childhood and the everyday environmental activity systems of emerging adulthood impact religious practice and the construction of the religious self among Sunni-Muslim American emerging adults (N = 63, 18-29 years) via the development of diverse mediational strategies. Utilizing an applied cultural historical activity theory–based analysis, the authors found that participants’ religious development emerged as a diverse and dynamic process developing in relation to the interacting activity systems and sociorelational contexts of emerging adulthood.

Negotiating Violence Prevention

Evaluation research typically treats standards of violence prevention programs, like other curricula, as unquestioned values of a good society, while identifying youth as the problem to be solved. This article explains how the evaluative gaze can, in contrast, be critically fixed on the interpretations of various stake holders in the violence prevention enterprise, including curriculum authors, teachers, and youth, whose social values are often under-represented. In the context of a year-long literacy-based violence prevention curriculum focusing on racial and ethnic discrimination in 3rd and 5th grade urban classrooms, 5 teachers, their classes, and 36 individual students from these classes expressed contradictory and conforming values, suggesting to us the need to invite negotiation of social values as part of democratic education.

Critical Narrating by Adolescents Growing Up in War: Case Study Across the Former Yugoslavia

These narratives, by adolescents living in the aftermath of the 1990 s wars that fractured the former Yugoslavia, express adolescents’ focus on issues in their now diverse societies. The generation of 12-21-year olds who were babies or young children during acute phases of war is growing up with its consequences. The material and symbolic remnants of war across each context become embedded in adolescents’ narratives of their everyday lives and, thus, their development toward adulthood. In his narrative, for example, Rudy in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) focuses on tensions among adults in public life, tensions also noticed by his peers who explain that these tensions result from “problems from the past” and serve as “stress releases.” Characteristic of her ex-Yugoslavian country of Serbia, I.S., in contrast, focuses on divisions in her society, in this case between the “last century’s mentality” and the implied new one which allows for argumentation. Feniks, like most of his Croatian peers, uses this observation of conflict among adults to mention future possibility, while Krusko, a refugee of mass destruction in Bosnia, turns nostalgically to the past and her family’s ongoing difficulties. In this chapter, I present a case study with these and other adolescents positioned differently around a war to explain how they use narrating to mediate development of individuals in society.

Clinicians’ Perspective of the Relational Processes for Family and Individual Development During the Mediation of Religious and Sexual Identity Disclosure

Although the psychological literature regarding gay men from religious families is continually expanding, it is also limited in that few studies focus on the use of therapy in the negotiation of the interrelated systems of religion, sexuality, and family. Utilizing a cultural historical activity theory-based process of analysis, this study focuses on the narratives of 12 clinicians discussing 230 conflicts and how those conflicts are mediated in both productive (e.g., seeking secular support) and unproductive ways (e.g., bringing one’s son to an exorcist) by gay men and their religious families independent of and at the advice of their therapists.

What is Shared? - A Pedagogical Perspective on Interactive Digital Narrative and Literary Narrative

This paper builds on our analysis of interactive digital narrative (IDN) and traditional literary narrative (LN) to address issues relevant to theory and pedagogy of narrative technologies. We discuss pedagogical problems with narrative design and introduce an interdisciplinary experimental course (in computer science and psychology) to increase understanding of complementing and conflicting qualities of IDN and LN. This perspective extends recent debates about protostory [1] elements, processes, and specific micro-structures unique to and possibly shared [2] across these forms. Our practice-based research addresses students’ development of narrative design skills and the question, “What is shared across narrative forms?”

Hopes, Misunderstandings and Possibilities of Narrating for Inclusive Education

Narrating can be a means of social inclusion, but educators and researchers seeking this result must address the social relational nature of the narrative process. This chapter explains narrating as a social relational process in the context of a contemporary social inclusion project in the United States – the community college.

Tensions of Plot in Interactive Digital Storytelling

This paper focuses on plot as a mediator of interactive digital storytelling (IDS). Drawing on a theory of narrative applied to IDS, the paper focuses on the manifestation of plot across three different IDS contexts. After defining plot, plot elements, and plot analysis, I explain the sampling of the three IDS types considered with plot analysis in this inquiry. The plot analyses of 116 IDS entries by youth and young adult participants within and across those IDS types revealed patterns of stability and variation of plot elements. The foundational nature of plot and its sensitivity to context outside as well as within the narrative scene are evident as participants in complex narrative systems used plot elements to communicate and to innovate. Future research can test and extend plot analysis for further application to IDS research and design.

Interactive Imagining in Interactive Digital Narrative

This poster presents cross-disciplinary theory to identify inter-dependent processes of digital and human systems involved in Interactive Digital Narrative (IDN). Extending previous research on IDN design affordances and Human Development (HD) capacities, the project explores theory with a method for understanding reciprocal person-program synergies. The poster defines this program-person synergy as “interactive imagining” and sketches a research approach for studying such shared processing. This illustrative research method involves the think-aloud protocol method adapted to foster IDN designer-player dialogue around problematic, surprising or otherwise interesting IDN episodes, indicated in previous pilot gameplay. The poster outlines a think-aloud study to examine the nature and impact of interactive imagining among student designer-players in an interdisciplinary college setting. The goal of this inquiry is to expand the definition of IDN as an inter-subjective process including the meta-reflections of designer and player, thereby advancing IDN theory and practice.