About The Crossroads Collaborative
The Crossroads Collaborative is committed to bringing together stories and numbers to offer a richer, more complex understanding of youth, sexuality, health, and rights (YSHR). Our collaborative is made up of scholars in rhetoric and composition as well as critical youth studies and developmental science. We engage in mixed-methods and participatory research practices with youth to learn from the creative ways they express their distinct needs, dreams, and desires. We are committed to research practices that are informed by the multimodal literacies at play in and across youth communities and that are, therefore, particularly meaningful to youth with whom we collaborate. We are deliberate in describing such literacies as (and also put into) play by young people. We take play seriously at the Collaborative. Informed, in part, by the work of Ken S. McAllister, such as Game Work: Language, Power, and Computer Game Culture (2004), and following Stuart Brown, the founder of the National Institute for Play, we understand play to be a critical, creative, and generative modality of social engagement and cultural production.