Cosmopolitan Literacies of Belonging in an After‐school Program With Court‐Involved Youths

This article focuses on the concept of belonging as an embodied practice that is expressed by adolescents in multimodal ways and that can be nurtured inside and also beyond schools, such as within afterschool programs. We explore belonging in an afterschool program designed for court‐involved youth. Our research is theoretically framed by educational cosmopolitanism and multimodal literacy and we situate our analysis within a discussion of cosmopolitan literacies of belonging. The research reported in this article is part of an ongoing, multi‐year study, and our initial analyses suggest that youth seek out and create opportunities to experience and communicate a sense of belonging through play, in fleeting moments, during structured curricular moments, and through both verbal and non‐verbal modes. Our article concludes with recommendations for how practitioners might build on adolescents’ cosmopolitan literacies of belonging within institutional contexts.