UC Santa Barbara

Young people of color face considerable obstacles to racial, educational, economic, and social equity, yet the remedies to these problems rarely involve attention to the insights and experiences of youth themselves. This introductory chapter argues for an approach to supporting racialized young people that emphasizes youth agency in challenging the ideological and material processes of racism. In particular, the chapter calls attention to the importance of affect-defined as embodied cognitive, emotional, and perceptual encounter with the material world-as a component of teaching and learning around the issue of race. The chapter presents the concept of affective agency and discusses its role in the experiences of Latinx youth in a special academic outreach program with a social justice focus. The program was guided by the principles of sociolinguistic justice, culturally sustaining pedagogies, and accompaniment. The chapter concludes by summarizing the individual contributions to the edited volume in relation to the issues of language, race, ideology, and affective agency in the lives of Latinx youth.