CAREER: Mapping the Role of Somatosenses in Youth-Based Creative Activity and Community Engagement

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This project will analyze the role of the physical body in motivating youth to participate in creative social activities that positively influence their lives and the lives of their communities. The project will focus on the somatosensorial system - the complex system that enables feeling in the human body - in order to understand how the body's capacity for feeling matters to the motivation of youth as well as to the outcomes of their social activities. The research and pedagogical programs of this CAREER project integrate international, participatory and student-driven research on youth-based, creative action groups (e.g. dance, theater, and clown troupes, urban gardeners, community musicians) in Philadelphia, PA and Colombia, South America. Both locally and abroad, the project will attend to at-risk or violence-afflicted youth, and will generate valuable linkages between youth-based groups and university students and researchers. Youth participants in the research will be respected as co-collaborators of the project and will be involved in research activities that enhance their intellectual and social capacity for attending to their communities. Through their creative social activities, youth often engage various corporeal capacities of sense, including: auditory senses piqued through music, kinesthesia roused through the movement of limbs, and other widely varied forms of sensorial and intero- or visceroception. The research program seeks to answer the following four questions regarding the role of the sensorial body in youth-based creative social activity: (1) What are the types of somatosensorial perceptions that are roused through diverse creative social activities? (2) How do these seemingly individual perceptions matter to the development of creative social projects that address the needs of others? (3) How does diversity and difference influence the physical experience of participation in creative social activities? And (4) can multi-scalar mapping of these dynamic activities help to explain spatial variation in the ability of youth groups to work affectively and effectively with their communities? The research program will proceed through a series of focus groups, mapping workshops and mapping surveys, coupled with extended participant observation with youth networks in Medellín and Bogotá, Colombia as well as course-based research activities in Philadelphia, PA. The project's in-depth, participant-driven methodology will provide detailed understanding of how youth are motivated to partake in creative social projects in and through their bodies, including how sensations like movement (kinesthesia) and observations of others' body movements and reactions enable non-verbal communication and cooperative interest, how embodied activities shift youth's sensation and perception of their internal material self (interoception), and what limitations exist to motivation and collaboration via the sensorial body.