Visual Perspectives on Majority‐World Adolescent Thriving

Abstract

This paper offers socio‐ecological, situated perspectives on adolescent resilience derived from an application of interpretive visual methodologies to deepen understanding of adaptive youth development in diverse majority‐world cultural contexts (South Africa, Thailand, China, Mexican migration to Canada). The research is not “cross‐cultural”; by contrast, it situates youth engagement contextually, using local perspectives, especially perspectives of adolescents themselves, on “growing up well” under adverse circumstances, to interrogate conceptions of resilience in cultural context. Participants are viewed as members of cultural communities: observations with a small number of individuals are not generalized to national groups. Rather, knowledge gained by these methods is employed to enrich knowledge of the processes of majority‐world youth thriving despite such adversities as poverty and social displacement.

The response of youth to racial discrimination: implications for resilience theory

“…Informed by this articulation, we conducted a participatory qualitative study to understand the experience of youth of colour not only in encountering racial discrimination but also in healing from this experience (Kumsa, Chambon, Yan and Maiter 2014). This understanding is congruent with a group of resilience researchers whose social constructionist perspective supports the idea that interpretive qualitative methods are more suitable for capturing the cultural meanings of resilience than quantitative measures are (Cameron et al 2013). In this paper, we present the key findings of the participatory qualitative study we conducted in one-site of a larger multi-sited study on youth violence and healing in three major immigration cities in English Canada.…”

Scaffolding one Thai youth’s drawing toward resilience

“…These include his emotional security (Cameron, Lau & Tapanya, 2009), his cultural roots in resilience and his daily experiences in cartooning , his expression of multiple identities on several ecological levels (Chen et al, 2012), and our visual perspectives on his thriving in the majority world (Cameron et al, 2013). The following additional themes of strength emerged from the data with specific respect to his drawing and are here described in the context of his other strengths.…”

“…The definition of resilience most broadly accepted today is one that highlights it as a process or a constellation of processes (Cameron et al, 2013;Masten, 2013;Sameroff, 2010) that effectively enhance the potential for an individual to surmount adversity. Processes associated with the concept of resiliency have notably focused on individual difference variables.…”

“…But the long history of the study of the developmental capacity for surmounting adversity has moved from explorations of personal strengths in isolation or in interaction with each other to the investigation of such positive assets deeply embedded in ecological context. Interactions are now seen as transactions (Cameron et al, 2013;Sameroff, 2010), and rather than risk factors, investigators seek to investigate such promotive variables as those that potentiate thriving 'against the odds'. While there are now known to be many individual difference factors associated with psychosocial thriving, the search is increasingly to locate thriving in ecological context.…”

Saying It Like It Is? Power, Participation and Research Involving Young People

“…This is particularly important in relation to research with individuals and groups who do not have the necessary cognitive or verbal skills or confidence to take part in conventional qualitative methods. However, these benefits are not unique to child participants, and their value can stretch across generations and contexts (see for example Aldridge, 2016;Cameron et al, 2013;Wickenden & Kembhavi-Tam, 2014).…”