Chapter 12: How do we Heal Together?: Unlearning Trauma in a South Asian, Diaspora, and Indo-Caribbean Youth– Adult Partnership Space

Formal education spaces can be contentious and systemically violent toward youth of color (Jordan, 1988; Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995). This is true for South Asian, Diaspora, and Indo-Caribbean (SADIC) youth who experience nuanced discrimination like alienation, orientalism, invisibility, Islamophobia, and policing. Out-of-school spaces can provide alternative learning environments for youth who experience marginalization in traditional contexts. Within these spaces, youth–adult partnerships can be useful tools for deconstructing hierarchical models of learning and re-centering youth experience.

This chapter focuses on East Coast Solidarity Summer (ECSS), a summer program for SADIC youth across the East Coast of the United States. We describe the left-radical pedagogies that have framed ECSS’s work and examine ECSS as a youth–adult partnership program that aims to serve SADIC youth via a nonhierarchical, agency-building model.