-SME Place Attachment & Community Building: Identify and address issues, plans, and projects that impact young residents in the Salt Lake City, Rio Grande Neighborhood, centering homelessness, as a humanitarian challenge and crisis.-SME Children's Geographies & Rights: Advise on children’s experiences in neighborhood spaces with concentrated street camping and related crime.-SME Youth Citizenship: Advise on Geographies of Hanging Out, where young people reflect on spaces and practices of hanging out, as they produce new understandings of their home city.

I am interested in youth point of voice or the ways young people actually transform their own personal trajectories, their cultural narratives, and the social institutions and spaces, which structure their lives. Together, we have used art forms, like the visual parts of the comic book page, to negotiate the messy political boundaries in youth rights justice, migration, and homelessness, in the contexts of social theory, policy, and political practice

Presenter, author, specialist:-Cosmopolitan or out-of-school literacies. I look at embodied practice that is expressed by adolescents in multimodal ways that can be nurtured beyond schools and cultures.-Visual literacies and urbanism, especially interested in the ways that aesthetic forms, negotiate, co-produce, and re-border urban youth spaces. I bring together a wide range of approaches to researching and representing urban spaces through visual practice.-Affective and material dimensions of literacies, which move power structures. I look at ways comic book art articulates affect, especially in the context of youth mobilities and migration.-Signatory Oxford Declaration

I am a specialist in child/youth political and civil rights seen through the lens of creative youth geographies and mobilities, including experimental approaches to the production of social spaces, together with children and youth. As a Pioneer Park Coalition (PPC) member and subcommittee chair, I was and still am deeply involved in those practices, which advance understanding of the spatial and social dynamics of youth homelessness.I am also a university-based advocate & ally, to Rio Grande neighborhood migrant children and youth artists/co-researchers. I have used collective participatory arts-based methodologies to advance our ethical understanding of the role of spatial production (boundaries and borders) tighter with migrant youth. We struggled to create a democratic and sustainable existence, for children and youth especially in homeless shelters. Youth artists/researchers have published a brief in the "Ethics of Research with Children and Young People," with professors from Oxford University and the University of London. They also presented their nascent ideas at an international meeting of the Royal Geographical Society and the Oxford World Literacy Summit, via Skype. These same artists and researchers were very concerned about their Pioneer Park neighborhood peers. Some youth who are forced to have sex for money and drugs and are currently experiencing homelessness because of the same. Youth researchers are brainstorming ways to found a Think Tank, modeled after the European Union Youth Parliament Think Tank (http://eyp.org/projects/eyp-think-tanks/), as one means to create collective solutions to youth homelessness in the Rio Grande neighborhood.

The Pioneer Park Coalition has united the community of local residents, businesses, service providers and public officials in response to the rapidly deteriorating conditions of Pioneer Park. This unique blend of public and private partners is dedicated to revitalizing Pioneer Park and neighborhood to make it family-friendly.The neighborhood council helped to identify and address issues, plans and projects that impact Pioneer Park and the larger Rio Grande neighborhood. We were especially focused on the transitioning families with children out of the mixed and disruptive shelter facilities that recently existed in our immediate neighborhood.

I have collaborated with transnational scholars from wide-ranging disciplines, including Philosophy, Human Geography, Comics Studies, Border Poetics, Critical Youth Studies, Mobility Studies, and Fine Arts, to better understand the ways cultural interconnectedness and mobility across space, are experienced by youth within the context of migration. My related arts-based dissertation is informed by that collective work, yet hones in on and expands aspects of it, i.e., Border Aesthetics, or the role of comic book art in constructing and tracing borders; Creative Geographies or experimentation with inventive notions and practices that are inherently geographical and artistic, e.g., “BorderXing,” & edge mixing; a/r/tographical practices, which helped to create slack or a flexible space where transmigrant youth could explore ways the comic book gutter, the border of the 'formal' edge of the panel, had the power to create and re-distribute their sensible world.* Transmigrant Youth: transnational homeless, and special populations of refugee youth(© 2017 Dr. Á. Clotilde Houchon)