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Aesthetic Practices and Youth

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  • First Online:
The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Critical Perspectives on Mental Health

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Definition

Youth aesthetic practices are an ensemble of production and consumption practices that young people engage with in everyday life. In this entry, we situate youth aesthetic practices in relation to historical understandings of aesthetics, mental health, and wellbeing. The intent is to engage with the everyday aesthetic practices in youth lives and consider how they impact their wellbeing in an adult-dominated world that often positions youth through deficit lenses. Bringing together a diverse range of theoretical and empirical work, we illustrate how young people draw on a wide range of modalities and approaches to create, consume, and curate. Occurring across spaces, including digital ecologies, youth’s everyday aesthetic practices speak to their individual as well as collective identity negotiations and wellbeing. For some, aesthetic practices afford opportunities to assert justice-centered stances while challenging and disrupting deficit ideologies and practices. As...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Education, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA

    Vivek Vellanki

  2. Department of English, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

    Lauren Elizabeth Reine Johnson

Authors
  1. Vivek Vellanki
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  2. Lauren Elizabeth Reine Johnson
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Counseling & Educational Psychology, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA

    Jessica Nina Lester

  2. The Greenwood Institute, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK

    Michelle O'Reilly

Section Editor information

  1. Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, USA

    Tran Templeton

  2. Teacher Education & Administration, University of North Texas, Denton, TX, USA

    Tran Templeton

  3. Rhode Island College, Providence, RI, USA

    Victoria Restler

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Vellanki, V., Reine Johnson, L.E. (2022). Aesthetic Practices and Youth. In: Lester, J.N., O'Reilly, M. (eds) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Critical Perspectives on Mental Health. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12852-4_19-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12852-4_19-1

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-12852-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-12852-4

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