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“We Share Our Stories and Risk Losing It All”: Activist‐Storytelling as Edgework in the Undocumented Youth Movement
Author(s) -
Cabaniss Emily R.,
Shay Heather
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
symbolic interaction
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.874
H-Index - 47
eISSN - 1533-8665
pISSN - 0195-6086
DOI - 10.1002/symb.503
Subject(s) - storytelling , psychic , immigration , sociology , public relations , psychology , criminology , social psychology , political science , gender studies , narrative , law , medicine , philosophy , linguistics , alternative medicine , pathology
Most research on edgework has focused on how individuals manage voluntary risk‐taking. Few scholars have examined the process by which groups work together to construct and mitigate these activities. Our research, however, shows how undocumented youth activists collectively leveraged cultural capital to encourage risky forms of public storytelling by positioning those who participated in this strategy as especially courageous and entitled to the psychic rewards of edgework. Movement leaders bolstered the strategy by teaching new members to see their fluency in English, high levels of education, and assimilation into white, middle‐class American culture as qualities that enabled them to successfully tread the border between order and disorder, and to overcome fears that kept most other undocumented immigrants from engaging in such risky forms of activist‐storytelling.