Utilizing an Aesthetics of Destabilization to Read the Public Pedagogy in Young People's Community-based Social Justice Artworks

This paper uses a "threeing" structure (Thompson, 2002) to reflect on the author's encounters with artworks created by marginalized, minoritized young people that destabilize current social dominance paradigms. As a performative, critical, creative structure, "threeing" asks an actor (teachers and students, artists and audiences) to consider their personal relationships to the causes and effects of the social dilemma posed in the artwork and reencounter those artworks through the layers of subsequent texts and multiple perspectives with which these encounters intersect. Yet, it is the aesthetics within the artworks themselves that, in part, educate a desire (Thompson, 1977) for audiences to become active, to be destabilized from contentment, complacency, or certainty into investigation.