Emotional Counterpublics- Feeling Racial Justice

I am currently turning my dissertation into a book/multimedia project, in collaboration with community-based organizations. Emotional Counterpublics is based on three years of critical feminist, community-engaged ethnography in two Black, Latinx, and Southeast Asian American youth-led, racial justice organizations. Emotional counterpublics are spaces where youth harness emotions to redefine and expansively enact social change: such as expansively re-imagining strategies for racial and educational equity and healing wounds from structurally induced trauma. First, emotional counterpublics encourage youth to recuperate a damaged self by addressing “paradoxes of the personal and political.” Second, youth and staff forge emotional prefigurative norms of interpersonal dynamics that embody care and support. Third,  these practices translate into systemic and institutional transformation that redefine robust schools and cities.  Youth show that emotions are central to forging social relations not wholly defined by injustice. Embracing youth’s emotional knowledge, groups value their complex humanity and create new epistemic paradigms. These emotional counterpublics constitute a paradigm shift unsettling our most deeply held assumptions about what is needed for social change, particularly racial justice.