This book explores how youth appropriate the arts, media, and literacy as resources that enable them to express their identities and engage in social and cultural engagement, and implications for critical and media-based literacy pedagogies in schools. "It's time to move beyond the new literacies rhetoric. Theresa Rogers and her colleagues' intervention models how new public pedagogies can make a difference for homeless youth and for their urban Canadian communities. It is grounded, powerful and politically important work". Allan Luke, Emeritus Professor - Queensland University of Technology, Australia "The authors should be commended for shedding light on the passion and desire to address social inequalities of marginalized youth through civic engagement and popular culture while embracing a multidisciplinary approach to critical literacy practices of contemporary youth." Laurie Henry, University of Kentucky, USA "The arts change the world by bringing to voice one person, then another. Soon, one hopes, we will all be singing?. We are lucky these young artists are speaking and that the authors have made it possible for us to hear them." Therese Quinn, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA