In this paper we invite for a discussion of how to conceptualize transformative pedagogy in leisure pedagogical settings that transgress divisions between youth work as either leisure or educational but rather as both/and. Our aim is theoretical: to build on recent findings to conceptualize a transformative pedagogy that points to new ways of establishing conditions for participation, co-creation and mobilizing of agency. We analyze this as youths’ creative descriptions of othering, discrimination and racialization in their everyday life and how a pedagogical framework can establish conditions for this to be expressed in various forms of subjective and collective counter-narratives that are shared in the local and wider community.

Transformative pedagogy is about taking the young people’s own experiences as a starting point and creating spaces where counter-narratives can unfold – where voices that are otherwise marginalized can challenge the dominant narratives of the school and wider society.

Our theoretical framework combines readings of key elements in the critical pedagogy of Freire, as a practice of freedom as discussed and further developed by hooks adding an emphasis on mutuality in vulnerability between educators and youth in safe spaces as crucial. We also draw on Berry’s critique of hooks in her argument of moving beyond the classroom by introducing the social pedagogical concept of the common third by Lihme and Tuft as elaborated by Nielsen & Schwartz.

This illustrates how oppression today often consists of silence and exclusion of certain voices – and how transformative pedagogy can create new opportunities for recognition, hope and change.

Minoritized youth face significant challenges in education, employment, and social inclusion in an unsafe world. Research shows that leisure activities can play a crucial role in fostering meaningful communities and offering spaces where young people can process experiences of discrimination and racism. Studies on aesthetic forms of resistance demonstrate that marginalization may give rise to non-violent, artistic practices, which is why the pedagogical potential of art-based co-creation has gained increasing attention in research.

This paper emerges from the research project Youth Pedagogical Transformative Work – How Can Community-Building Contribute to Overcoming Ethnic Othering and Discrimination? Drawing on arts-based research (ABR) and critical pedagogy (Freire; hooks) the project examines aesthetic co-creation through songwriting and performance with minoritized youth in their leisure time, exploring how such processes may contribute to what Stetsenko conceptualizes as collective transformative agency.

Based on cases where youth use and create poetry and songs this paper analyzes how aesthetic co-creative processes—where participants actively share and collaborate on counter-narratives— potentially can challenge power structures in marginalized urban areas. Applying theories of affect and discomfort (Ahmed; Boler), the paper focus on how to pedagogically co-create safe, brave, and accountable spaces that can support difficult and dilemma-filled dialogues with youth, and how discomfort in encountering racism can serve as a potential resource for understanding and transformation. The paper suggests that transformative youth pedagogy in dark times involves creating spaces to share discomfort and shift attention from individual experiences to the structural conditions sustaining racism as an emancipatory practice.

In a dynamic ontology, subjects are constituted in collective practices with artifacts, which - some more directly and intentionally than others - represent them. The implication is that such representations co-create subjects, who are thus presented as emerging, rather than depicted as pregiven. Stenner refers to this as re-/presentations, key co-constitutive aspects of how selfhood evolves in intersubjective relations, not least since they mediate the dynamics of participation, recognition and positioning.

With this in mind, we present and discuss a project of producing a documentary video about scenarios and forms of re-positioning of clients at “U-turn”, a counseling facility for young drug users in Copenhagen City. U-turn continues a long tradition of experiments inspired by theories of positioning (interactionism, systems theory, narrativity, critical psychologies), including aesthetic re-/presentations. These experiments inevitably intervene in welfare state politics, about how to approach addiction and broader social problems. Beginning from a premise of ethical universalism (cf. Ranciere), a variety of practices of repositioning have been developed - and re-/presented.

As the documentary video re/-presents this work, its method is at once tool and result (Vygotsky); it seeks to reflectively perform what it depicts. Our discussion will thus move between the activities of re-positioning and various aspects of the video genre and technology - and segments of the video itself.