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Restorying the Self: Bending Toward Textual Justice
Abstract
In this essay, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas and Amy Stornaiuolo explore new trends in reader response for a digital age, particularly the phenomenon of bending texts using social media. They argue that bending is one form of restorying, a process by which people reshape narratives to represent a diversity of perspectives and experiences that are often missing or silenced in mainstream texts, media, and popular discourse. Building on Louise Rosenblatt's influential transactional theory of reading, the authors theorize restorying as a participatory textual practice in which young people use new media tools to inscribe themselves into existence. The authors build on theorists from Mikhail Bakthin to Noliwe Rooks in order to illustrate tensions between individualistic "ideological becoming" and critical reader response as a means of protest. After discussing six forms of restorying, they focus on bending as one way youth make manifest their embodied, lived realities and identities, providing examples from sites of fan communities where participants are producing racebent fanwork based on popular children's and young adult books, movies, comics, and other media. Situating these phenomena within a larger tradition of narrating the self into existence, the authors explore broader implications for literacy education.
... Extending Rosenblatt's (1994Rosenblatt's ( /2019 theory of transactional reading, Thomas and Stornaiuolo (2016) offer restorying as a bending of texts using social media. Namely, restorying is a process for readers to reimagine and "reshape narratives to reflect better a diversity of perspectives and experiences [as] an act of asserting the importance of one's existence in a world that tries to silence subaltern voices" (Thomas & Stornaiuolo, 2016, p. 314). ...
... For readers from historically marginalized identities (i.e., BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ readers), texts often exclude their backgrounds, narratives, and experiences. Thomas and Stornaiuolo (2016) note that young people are engaging in restorying to bend narratives through digital networks and affinity spaces within social media (i.e., Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, TikTok), taking up "new opportunities to connect, collaborate, and communicate, relationships between readers, authors, and texts" (p. 316). ...
... Restorying reinforces many components of identity-forming actions (Bakhtin, 1981;Thomas & Stornaiuolo, 2016), which place the reader at the center of the textual interpretations, particularly within identities often left out, marginalized, or silenced. Additionally, the orientation of digital construction and reimagining exists as both learning and identity development (Engeness & Lund, 2020;Engeness, 2021). ...
#BookTok, the TikTok sub-community for readers, has reshaped publishing and digital reading trends where marginalized readers find space to promote diverse books and stories beyond mainstream norms. This paper explores how three international #BookTokers with diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds have found community, identity, and activism within this space, highlighting #BookTok’s role in fostering inclusive and affirming literary communities amidst rising censorship challenges. This case study used thematic analysis to analyze participant interviews through open and axial coding to explore #BookTok engagement, framed through affinity spaces, transformative potential, and critical digital pedagogies. #BookTok fosters belonging by connecting readers through niche interests, with the algorithm curating content aligned with identities. Participants reported shifts in reading behaviors and identities, with multilingual users expanding language repertoires to access and engage with diverse, identity-affirming texts. Content creation deepened connections, enabling advocacy for equity and justice. #BookTok is experienced as an affirming community where diverse texts and content creation can foster critical connections and promote justice-oriented actions beyond personal enjoyment of reading.
... To answer our research question, we first reviewed literature on the critical histories and spatialities of play. Then, we thought with concepts of critical play (Flanagan 2013;Flanagan & Nissenbaum 2016), restorying (Thomas 2020;Thomas & Stornaiuolo 2016), and transnational childhoods (Orellana 2009) to make sense of our data. Using a combination of inductive (Strauss and Corbin 1990) and deductive (Azungah 2018) coding methods, we analyzed moments of Roblox play when the participants interacted with Brookhaven's digital playspace in ways that transcended and resisted the spatial constraints of the game. ...
... The following three concepts oriented our analysis of our participants' play on Roblox: Flanagan's (2013) three typologies of critical play, Thomas and Stornaiuolo's (2016) restorying framework, and transnational childhoods (Orellana 2009). Flanagan's (2013) work helped us code and categorize our participants' forms of critical, subversive, and sustaining play. ...
... Flanagan's (2013) work helped us code and categorize our participants' forms of critical, subversive, and sustaining play. Thomas and Stornaiuolo's (2016) restorying framework helped us trace how children bent narrative elements of Roblox's game design to better represent -and story -their real and imagined lives. Finally, transnational childhoods (Orellana 2009) illuminated how our participants' player identities were situated within and across boundaries of cultural and (trans)national belonging. ...
This connective ethnographic case study highlights how three Brazilian immigrant children (ages 6-8) engaged in critical play on an online gaming platform called Roblox. Specifically, we examine how participants navigated and interacted in a Roblox minigame titled, Brookhaven. Brookhaven is a type of virtual domestic role-play in which players perform aspects of daily life with avatars in a digital town. Thinking with theories of critical play, restorying, and transnational childhoods, this paper considers how participants leveraged sociotechnical skills with their transnational experiences and imaginaries to build community in a mononational and ideologically precarious playspace. Our findings demonstrate how the children engaged in glitching and (re)placement practices to forward justice-oriented play across digital and analog contexts. Implications for this study advocate for assets-based explorations of young users' play-based design practices that affirm and value their existence.
... One particular form of speculative design is restorying (E. E. Thomas & Stornaiuolo, 2016), which examines how youth use digital tools to reshape dominant narratives based on marginalized or silenced perspectives. Restorying as a design objective provides a speculative approach to computing education that supports youth in first deconstructing normalized narratives within computing, then reimagining those narratives through designing and programming computational artifacts. ...
... To clarify, the process involves first breaking narratives down to their constituent parts, and based upon youth's diverse lived experiences and historical knowledge, these young people then speculatively reconfigure or restory dominant narratives into fundamentally new stories (E. E. Thomas & Stornaiuolo, 2016). In this way, youth restory the future. ...
... Black storytelling, a capacious and communal practice, can hold the complexities and diversity of time, space, pedagogy and Black beingness. Thomas and Stornaiuolo (2016) discuss restorying the self to disrupt internalized racialized and hegemonic narratives, and thus "narrating the self into existence" (p. 313). ...
... Emplacement has been understood and taken up "as dynamic and constantly in the making," (Takeuchi & Aquino Ishihara, 2021, p. 4) and as means for resistance through place. We tie storytelling with the process of narratives of place as a form of becoming or, as Thomas and Stornaiuolo (2016) call it, the alterverse. This restorying connects to concepts of place and location of stories regarding identity in fan fiction, 2 particularly to redress futures through narratives of Black folks across time. ...
Black education has interrogated race, context, and power questions, yet these practices spanning geographies and learning contexts have not always been valued as spatial knowledge. Further, Black scholars have carved out spaces that honor the communal and spatial sensibilities of Black students, educators, and communities. Black geographies thought can help us reshape how we understand and interrogate issues within education and learning with attention to anti-blackness, futurities, imagining, placemaking, and efforts to create a sense of belonging despite perpetual unbelongingness in dominant educational and learning spaces. Thus, our piece engages with Black Geographies to emphasize the Black radical traditions of space and freedom-making to reorganize our approaches to pedagogy and storytelling. We engage what we call Black Spatial Storylines through our shared and individual stories. We present multiple vignettes and examples to model the ways Black Sound, particularly hip-hop, invites us to engage Black Spatial Storylines as both methodological and pedagogical techniques that start at Blackness. Not only do we highlight and use our own stories as examples, we detail how this process shifts our understanding of Black urban life, and allows us to reorient our educational praxis through Blackness. We conclude with suggested pathways for future applications of a Black geographies framework to education and learning, including the abundance that is the interweaving of Blackness. Thus, we hope to honor and uplift Black communities’ spatial knowledge by formulating our foundational understandings of Black spatial knowledge and the role it plays in education and learning studies.
... future-thinking yet critically reflective constructionist experiences (Holbert, Berland, & Kafai, 2020). In this chapter, we highlight the methodological contribution of the CCD framework and show how this tool can illuminate the thinking, learning, and storying (Thomas & Stornaiuolo, 2016) that happens when learners adapt, repurpose, and remix their personal and communal histories in the construction of speculative artifacts (Jennings, 2017). We illustrate the methodological afordances of the CCD framework by describing two dif er ent implementations of maker workshops aimed at engaging Black teens in speculative design. ...
... Story creation can be an act of resistance during sociopo liti cal periods actively set against those from nondominant communities. Similarly, "restorying" (Thomas & Stornaiuolo, 2016) invites us to reshape existing and create new narratives that better reflect past and pre sent experiences. For young people excluded from popular discourses, this speculative narrative acts as a kind of "testimony" (Toliver, 2020, p. 509) and serves as a way for students to declare or reaffirm their humanity under sociocultural conditions of erasure and epistemic vio lence. ...
In recent years a number of efforts have emerged inviting learners to imagine alternative futures through speculative design practices. However, a challenge for the research community has been empirically documenting the relationship between the design of these speculative educational experiences and learners’ exploration of target topics with diverse media in complex and dynamic construction environments. Critical Constructionist Design (CCD) is a framework aimed at inviting learners to leverage speculative design to construct future-thinking critical artifacts that center their histories, perspectives, and values. In this chapter, we review data produced from two CCD implementations to show how the framework can also offer an empirical trace of how participants’ experiences emerge from their interactions with the design of the workshop. Leveraging a weaving metaphor, we share an “analysis tapestry” that illuminates how students’ past history and present experiences are projected into speculative artifacts, and which key features of the design—practices, materials, people, technologies—mediate participants’ (re)construction of their social, cultural, and political identities.
... Tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs) are, at their core, structures for storying (Thomas & Stornaiuolo, 2016). TTRPGs share many features of fiction and intend to guide the collaborative storytelling of others. ...
Our collective of teacher educators and researchers share the contours of a collaboration on a critical arts-based research project. We attend to the ways we collaboratively composed a table-top roleplaying game, a text intended to support players in co-creating their own speculative fiction. Our game, We Know Something You Don’t Know, was designed in the Belonging Outside Belonging system (Alder, 2018) to support collaborative speculative storytelling in learning settings. Specifically, we aimed to support preservice and in-service teachers’ reflection on how the power structures of schooling frame some children as troublemakers (Shalaby, 2017), and to engage with Shalaby’s call to consider what those troublemakers might teach us about dysfunctional structures of schooling. Our findings suggest that our collaborative composing was shaped by immediations (Ehret et al., 2019)– moments of yes which led to decisions around what should be fixed or stay open for players, recursively sparking further immediations.
... Research on communities that center youth aesthetic interpretation often explores the critical practices of youth writers and digital composers. For example, Thomas and Stornaiuolo (2016) update Rosenblatt's reader response theory to include the myriad ways that youth re-story what they have read in novel ways. Thomas and Stornaiuolo illustrate how youth respond to texts by changing key aesthetic features such as genderbending or racebending focal characters of popular stories to shift aesthetic representations and invert power structures. ...
Concerned with disinformation, fake news, and a post-truth era, literacy research on digital learning ecologies has focused on content of the texts that youth encounter but less explicitly on aesthetics-issues of form or the way a text is written. Drawing on critical sociocultural theories, this article examines youth aesthetic meaning-making with non-neutral digital texts. The data analyzed are part of a multiyear multi-method study of the aesthetic literacy practices of queer youth of color and allies. Data were collected during an online summer literary salon where youth discussed textual content alongside issues of aesthetic forms. Findings illustrate that youth drew on a broad range of aesthetic tools to achieve (1) a poetic function concerned with how aesthetic forms elicit figurative, connotative, and storied meanings; (2) a catalytic function concerned with how aesthetic forms persuade, manipulate, or encourage particular actions; and (3) an ideological function concerned with how aesthetic forms inscribe or contest social inequalities. These tools and functions, complicate previous under-standings of disinformation, fake news, and critical reasoning in literacies research. This study suggests a critical sociocultural approach to aesthetics as territory for further scholarship across many areas of literacy research.
... In a Community in Dialogue (CiD) (Roux 2012), using digital tools, they engaged across geographical locations (Harkins & Barchuk, 2014) in response to the questions indicated in Table 2 below. New/shared interpretations were applied in the light of clarified or new/shared understandings of best practices in teaching (Foote, 2015;Thomas & Stornaiuolo, 2016). ...
Transnational knowledge mobilities and connections without physical travel can make internationalisation in higher education more inclusive and equitable, moving beyond elitist trends that privilege those who can afford to travel abroad. To this end, a recent small-scale research project utilised digital tools for virtual communication between South African and Norwegian pre-service teachers. This article suggests that international engagement between pre-service teachers from the global south and global north can promote decolonisation by highlighting these teachers' lived experiences in diverse contexts. Employing empathetic-reflective-dialogical re-storying as a research methodology aligns with a decolonial approach, framing the process as participants focus on best teaching practices. Crossing geographical boundaries, pre-service teachers from two geographical contexts potentially reshaped their prior conceptions of best teaching practices.
... After reading the U. S. News (2012) article, I taught a mini lesson on Black redactions and Black annotations (Sharpe, 2016). The pedagogical use of Black redactions and annotations is that students can alter text for more humanizing aims through covering text and images that seems harmful, adding new information, and re-storying (Thomas & Stornaiuolo, 2016) or repurposing information already present. As Sharpe (2016) explains, "Black annotation and Black redaction are ways to make Black life visible, if only momentarily" (p. ...
Informed by a critical qualitative project I conducted during the summer of 2019 using Black critical race-grounded methodology, where the methodological social location was a socially and community-engaged out-of-school space for multi-ethnic Black high school youth in New York City, I construct an empirically-informed photo essay of students’ Black aesthetic productions and their assemblages of Black world creation—amid ongoing antiblackness. Through presentation and analysis of the art-based photos that embody Black youth aesthetics and/as Black world making, I further the theory development of Black Aesthetics in Education through an overarching lens of critical artistic resistance. I frame my photo essay, which takes the form of a living artistic storying, as an embodiment of Black Aesthetics in Education as an actionable, pedagogical framework.
Keywords: Black aesthetics, art-based research, antiblackness, youth
... In a Community in Dialogue (CiD) (Roux 2012), using digital tools, they engaged across geographical locations (Harkins & Barchuk, 2014) in response to the questions indicated in Table 2 below. New/shared interpretations were applied in the light of clarified or new/shared understandings of best practices in teaching (Foote, 2015;Thomas & Stornaiuolo, 2016). ...
Decoloniality is a framework addressing global power imbalances, particularly between the global north and south, rooted in the process of othering. This article suggests that internationalisation can promote decolonisation, particularly in South Africa, by challenging the notion of inferiority in the global south. Crossing disciplinary and geographical boundaries plays a crucial role in evolving classroom practice into reflective and reflexive classroom praxis. The use of empathetic-reflective-dialogical restorying as a teaching strategy aligns with a decolonial agenda. This approach allows pre-service teachers from diverse geographical contexts, like South Africa and Norway, to engage in empathetic and reflective dialogue within a safe space, potentially reshaping their prior conceptions of best teaching practices. This transformative process holds promise for the classroom environment.
... As a result, we were driven by our belief in both the power of stories to enhance literacy learning within the intervention setting and the necessity of the imagination (Enciso, 2017) and restorying (E. Thomas & Stornaiuolo, 2016) in response to a world marked by erasure and by derision for many students of immigrant backgrounds. We believed, as Crisp et al. (2020) asserted, that children's books can serve as "cultural artifacts that inform the ways readers view and understand themselves and the world in which they live" (p. ...
... They conduct their own literary analyses to further their own engagement with texts and to push texts forward in critical directions. For example, Jones et al. (2023) (Kelly, 2020) and digital artwork/narratives (Thomas & Stornaiuolo, 2016). Across many communities, youth reimagine and ultimately transform understandings of what it means to be a literarian and do English-particularly to bend these communities toward justice. ...
Two teacher educators explore how youth and literary professionals engage in the creation of new literary knowledge as a form of social justice.
... Finally, drawing on the work of Thomas and Stornaiuolo (2016), the narrative of the school bus is not fixed; we can "restory" it. While the narrative of the school bus conveys it as a sometimes uncomfortable but necessary component of how students interact with and participate in schooling in the US However, through shifting the gaze of schooling from a structural analysis of school systems to a humanistic perspective of young people's learning opportunities, this paper argues that school buses might be sites for resistance, imagination, and realigning public discourse. ...
... Given that codes-both technical and sociocultural-have histories and can act as narratives telling us what to expect (Benjamin, 2019), this study drew from narrative scholarship to support youth in engaging in speculative literacy practices of interrogating and reimagining technology's relationship to systems of power. Rooted in recent configurations of restorying describing how nondominant youth use digital tools to reshape narratives from marginalized perspectives (Thomas & Stornaiuolo, 2016), I offer restorying through design as an approach for supporting nondominant youth in designing computational artifacts while also interrogating and reimagining dominant narratives about computing technologies. Due to Black women's unique knowledge and experiences with intersecting oppressions such as racism, sexism, and classism (Collins, 2002;Phillips, 2006), this conceptualization of restorying through design is grounded in Black feminist and womanist theories and practices. ...
... 4). Thomas & Stornaiuolo (2016) describe this practice, restorying, as using new media tools to reimagine the world and retell popular stories by changing to an alternate identity, time, place, mode, perspective, or metanarrative. Learning scientists have used speculative practices and their potential to empower youth, especially from minoritized communities, to engage in constructing and thinking on meaningful and more equitable futures (Holbert et al., 2020;Mirra & Garcia, 2020). ...
... With deep roots in narrative scholarship (i.e., Clandinin & Connelly, 2000;Clandinin, 2006), restorying describes the ways marginalized communities reread and rewrite the world (Thomas & Stornaiuolo, 2016). Recent configurations offer youth of Color a conscious process for analyzing present and past realities to reimagine more just futures (Shaw & Kafai, 2020). ...
... Findings from the critical walkthrough suggested that within a platform such as CAI, "fun" experienced by youth writers derives from a relationship between the creative possibilities of composing with and alongside AI and the world-building possibilities associated with creating new stories for characters. Writers find pleasure in having a collaborative composition partner that generates writing that responds to their needs, whether as a door to endless opportunities to imagine familiar characters anew through restorying (Thomas and Stornaiuolo, 2016) or as a catalyst for designing and engaging with original characters and stories. We examine how the platform dynamics of CAI capitalize on those generative and imaginative pleasures of youth writers in two central ways: by linking the capacity to write/rewrite AI-generated text with the promise of helping to build future technologies and by connecting the possibilities of inhabiting characters through AI (i.e. ...
Purpose
With the rapid advancement of generative artificial intelligence (AI), it is important to consider how young people are making sense of these tools in their everyday lives. Drawing on critical postdigital approaches to learning and literacy, this study aims to center the experiences and perspectives of young people who encounter and experiment with generative AI in their daily writing practices.
Design/methodology/approach
This critical case study of one digital platform – Character.ai – brings together an adolescent and adult authorship team to inquire about the intertwining of young people’s playful and critical perspectives when writing on/with digital platforms. Drawing on critical walkthrough methodology (Light et al. , 2018), the authors engage digital methods to study how the creative and “fun” uses of AI in youths’ writing lives are situated in broader platform ecologies.
Findings
The findings suggest experimentation and pleasure are key aspects of young people’s engagement with generative AI. The authors demonstrate how one platform works to capitalize on these dimensions, even as youth users engage critically and artfully with the platform and develop their digital writing practices.
Practical implications
This study highlights how playful experimentation with generative AI can engage young people both in pleasurable digital writing and in exploration and contemplation of platforms dynamics and structures that shape their and others’ literate activities. Educators can consider young people’s creative uses of these evolving technologies as potential opportunities to develop a critical awareness of how commercial platforms seek to benefit from their users.
Originality/value
This study contributes to the development of a critical and humanist research agenda around generative AI by centering the experiences, perspectives and practices of young people who are underrepresented in the burgeoning research devoted to AI and literacies.
... Claim-making extends beyond academic disciplines to include fandom communities (Morrell & Duncan-Andrade, 2002; Thomas & Stornaiuolo, 2016). Fan communities form around many types of central texts, including books, movies, TV shows, music albums, webcomics, YouTube channels, etc. ...
In order to better understand how the full range of students’ semiotic resources may be marshalled for learning, we analyse the role of interpretive claim-making across fandom and disciplinary communities. Using a framework of syncretic literacies with a focus on navigation, we analyse data from a series of writing conferences in a U.S.-based, fandoms-themed English course serving diverse high school students. Our analysis attends to shifts in convergent and divergent intersubjectivity to trace students’ navigation of interpretive practices as they talked with their peers and their instructor. Discursive claims emerged as an important tool functioning differently across these interactions. Specifically, the claim-making practices of one focal student demonstrate an emerging understanding of the distinctly different functions that claims serve as tools for navigating between, and hybridizing, discursive communities. Our findings highlight the importance of using discourse to analyse the presence of multiple or conflicting discursive practices, and designing learning environments in ways that support students’ use of hybrid discursive tools.
This article examines contemporary fanfiction as a special type of engagement with popular serial narratives. It proposes the concept of fractal seriality as a lens through which to gauge the proliferation and popularization of fanfiction as a potentially fruitful strategy for critiquing fiction: part of fiction’s persuasiveness inheres in an author’s ability to consciously or unconsciously set the rules of the fictional world in ways that reinforce the author’s message and their vision of the real world, while fractal seriality allows fanfiction authors to change the focus and reorient stories in ways that will engage readers of the original series while refusing to circulate key aspects of the initial worldbuilding and moral values. E. J. Lomax’s boy with a scar builds on J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series not by continuing it chronologically but branching off from it in a series of “what-ifs” that broaden and deepen the wizarding world by focusing on characters, events, and circumstances that the original series has elided, oversimplified, or otherwise treated in ways that Lomax finds inadequate. VeroniqueClaire’s Volée, meanwhile, expands the action of three scenes from the Phantom of the Opera stage play into 25 chapters, realizing the potential for transformative justice already inherent, but unfulfilled, in the original.
In this article, we describe a year‐long superhero storytelling project we facilitated with youth in a midwestern middle school. In this project, students read Miles Morales: The Ultimate Spiderman , designed superhero stories set in their community, and presented artistic representations of their stories to their families and peers. We present three episodes of mobile storytelling from this project, focusing on Aidan, one of eighteen youth participants. Using tools from theories of transliteracies and critical imagination, we illustrate how Aidan's embodied movement and play constituted critically literate acts. A transliteracies lens oriented toward critical imagination reveals how Aidan fluidly moved between fictional and real worlds to reimagine his experienced realities. These findings indicate a need to expand what counts as literate activity in schools.
In the 21st century, the term “critical” has attached itself to numerous aspects of literacy research. However, what critical means remains commonly anchored to Freire and a primary critical reading practice—suspicious critique. Expanding critical literacy research (CLR), this article advances reading orientations as a conceptual tool for drawing attention to the phenomenological aspects of our critical reading practices and for exploring alternative “methods” and “moods” for reading power in literacy studies. Through three “re‐turns” to previous publications within the field of critical literacy, I position myself as an exploratory case. The first re‐turn surveys four leading models of critical literacy, which I encountered in my graduate training, and highlights how critique and suspicion function in these models. The second re‐turn zooms into my own work, re‐reading three previous publications to illustrate how suspicious critique has influenced my research. Experimental, my third re‐turn presents previously unpublished data to engage an alternative reading method—reparative description—and illustrates how we might read power otherwise in CLR. Together, these re‐turns emphasize the possibilities of accounting for reading orientations in CLR and for exploring additional methods and moods of reading within the field.
Due to their rapid evolution, scholars sometimes categorize digital and computer-mediated genres as fully distinct from more traditional offline genres. In this theoretical exploration, we complicate binaries of online/offline to understand networked genres in their own right and situate fanfiction and its associated practices. We examine how social genres intertwine with reader
response and transliteracies in the complex, ongoing fandom conversations that surround original texts and fan works. We consider the computer-mediated and networked nature of fandom
practices and communities, and how these networks allow fans to interact with source content in ways that are distinct from more official interpretive communities such as publishers and literary
critics, media producers and reviewers, or writing instructors. Finally, we explore how literature and publishing have been disrupted by contexts like fandoms where texts are often constructed online in bottom-up ways— and the consequences of this disruption for learning about composition
Prevailing political and popular narratives often treat the issue of trans death as an inevitability and reduce complex stories of trans life to their endings. This paper investigates the transformative potential of creative forms of resistance—specifically a selection of Canadian poetry, personal essays, and comics—and how their artistic affordances engage with transfeminism as an approach to narratives of trans existence. Rooted in Canadian author Kai Cheng Thom’s reckoning with the shortcomings of trans-exclusionary feminist thought, and informed by Chinua Achebe’s conceptualization of re-storying, this article explores how I Hope We Choose Love and Falling Back in Love with Being Human by Kai Cheng Thom, Death Threat by Canadian creatives Vivek Shraya and Ness Lee, and comics from Assigned Male by trans activist and Canadian comic artist Sophie Labelle re-story “necessary” trans death to orient queer death spaces around a trans-for-trans (t4t) praxis of narrativization. Addressing the (inter)disciplinary possibilities of trans-inclusive feminism and comics studies, this article celebrates how these texts disavow and re-story the “Good” Trans Character, who dies to satisfy transmisogynistic ideologies, and theorizes the T4t Dead Trans Character, who dies to reclaim instances of trans death and recodify trans personhood as a site of hope, agency, and self-determination. In their re-storying, these texts recognize the transformative potential of trans existence and echo Thom in their urging of trans-inclusive feminism to renounce narratives of disposability and invest in the dignity of all human life.
Media fandoms highlight the power nonhuman actors have to move, shape, and perhaps even possess us. In stating, “I am a fan of this thing,” we have already signaled a new state of being for ourselves rooted in a deep investment with something nonhuman. However, despite the foundational nonhuman entanglements of fandom, fan studies as a field has yet to engage in a sustained, comprehensive dialogue with posthumanism. In this article, I propose a theoretical vision for posthumanist fan studies, outlining how this framework would both compliment and complicate existing fandom scholarship and explicating an emergent, intra-active view of fandom. I then offer two potential methodologies that would prove useful in posthumanist fan studies research.
Fandoms have become an unequivocal part of contemporary life and aid in the construction of identity and community building. But as the originator of modern fan studies, Henry Jenkins noted, ‘the original sin of fandom studies was its silence about race.’ Some research has occurred in response to this call to action, but no overarching framework or model has emerged. This article utilizes critical race theory (CRT) to guide its critical re-interpretation of Wann’s Team Identification–Social Psychological Health Model that can be used to examine the experiences of Black fans. The model presented, termed the Black Fandom Identification Social-Psychological Model, conceptualizes how Black fandoms are formed and sustained, as well as how Black fandoms protect their fandom from threats. Through this process, Black fans reach an enhanced state of Blackness, which increases their well-being and mental health. Implications of the model provide a schema for fan studies scholars to use.
In this article, we explore the dynamic interplay of youth agency, spatial justice, and literacy practices across community spaces through micro‐analysis of photographs and interviews of children and youth. Through a lens of spatial reclamation, the study investigates how children and youth disrupt adult‐designed spaces to restory and reclaim narratives, ultimately reshaping the socio‐spatial landscape. Combining the concepts of restorying and spatial justice, we explore the awareness and agency children exhibit when challenging dominant expectations, particularly examining instances of rulebreaking and safety negotiation. Examining two distinct settings—a school playground and a community protest—the study reveals how youth engage in embodied performances that rupture anticipated discourses in place. The findings underscore the multilayered nature of youth rulebreaking as a form of resistance and as a form of leadership, emphasising the potential for transformative socio‐spatial impact as youth reclaim narratives through new co‐constructions of space. Across age groups and geographies, Black and Brown youth and children emerge as leaders in reshaping spaces through their acts of resistance, redefining boundaries, and leading peaceful protests. The article calls for a nuanced understanding of how spatial justice intersects with restorying, urging educators and researchers to reconsider acts of reclamation as literacies across adult‐dictated spaces.
Using the framework of critical writing pedagogy, this study explores how five elementary students utilized craft moves from postmodern picture books in their own writing.
Since the social turn in applied linguistics, there has been growing interest in the role of emotion in language practices. This role is especially relevant to self-access language learning in terms of how it influences learner autonomy and motivation. With its focus on autonomy and sociality, self-access learning offers unique affordances for facilitating learner and advisor awareness of emotion in language learning. To this end, this study used an arts-based method, language mapping, for learners to express their language practices in multimodal ways. Language mapping integrates body mapping and language portraits methods to catalyze individual and group reflection anchored by embodied, emotional experiences. The researchers collaborated with a Japanese university self-access language learning center to engage seven volunteer participants in a series of two workshops. Data were gathered through participants’ language maps, narratives shared in workshops, and questionnaire responses. Findings highlight the potential of language mapping in exploring learners’ affective connections to their named languages. While mother tongues were generally portrayed as comforting, vivid, default, and unconscious, relationships to learned languages were represented through more diverse visual and verbal metaphors. Key pedagogical considerations include the impact of exemplars and group processes.
Since the social turn in applied linguistics, there has been growing interest in the role of emotion in language practices. This role is especially relevant to self-access language learning in terms of how it influences learner autonomy and motivation. With its focus on autonomy and sociality, self-access learning offers unique affordances for facilitating learner and advisor awareness of emotion in language learning. To this end, this study used an arts-based method, language mapping, for learners to express their language practices in multimodal ways. Language mapping integrates body mapping and language portraits methods to catalyze individual and group reflection anchored by embodied, emotional experiences. The researchers collaborated with a Japanese university self-access language learning center to engage seven volunteer participants in a series of two workshops. Data were gathered through participants’ language maps, narratives shared in workshops, and questionnaire responses. Findings highlight the potential of language mapping in exploring learners’ affective connections to their named languages. While mother tongues were generally portrayed as comforting, vivid, default, and unconscious, relationships to learned languages were represented through more diverse visual and verbal metaphors. Key pedagogical considerations include the impact of exemplars and group processes.
Project-based learning (PBL) grounds instruction in authentic learning experiences where students engage in real-world explorations that culminate in a final product or performance. We report on a mixed methods study with 43 ninth-grade English language arts (ELA) teachers (22 PBL and 21 comparison) and 1,671 students exploring the feasibility of enacting PBL in ELA classrooms and examining how teachers and students perceived this approach to learning. PBL teachers enacted PBL design principles significantly more than comparison teachers. The majority of PBL teachers perceived positive instructional shifts including more student-centered and authentic learning, more student choice, and greater student engagement. Many teachers also expressed a sense of renewal and passion. Students in PBL classrooms reported more meaningful learning experiences, opportunities for collaboration, and other aspects of social and emotional learning. We discuss tensions, including the challenge of covering required content and skills within a PBL-focused classroom.
Land connection is foundational to Indigenous identity and cultural sustenance but has been threatened during Canadian colonization. Colonization has, in many cases, displaced Indigenous communities from their lands, attempting to destroy the reciprocal relationship between humans and nature physically and epistemologically. Indigenous education and generational teachings about land connection therefore become critical to resisting settler practices and sustaining Indigenous knowledge and identities. Podcasting is one storytelling tool that people have used to communicate knowledge and identity in a legally unregulated and creatively unrestrictive industry. This chapter asks if podcasting is a storytelling tool for Indigenous peoples in Canada to self-represent, and educate about, Indigenous land connection in their own ways. The chapter textually analyzes episodes and additional online materials from the Indigenous-produced podcast Stories from the Land (Indian & Cowboy, 2014–2018). Stories from the Land is chosen because its mandate promotes Indigenous worldviews in experiential audio formats and its episodes invite special guests to share their stories about physical presence and more-than-human interactions on the land. All episodes amalgamate into an Indigenous-controlled, self-representative and educational podcast catalogue for future generations to learn about what it means to be Indigenous and how identities are constructed on the land through traditional practices.
This article examines the impact of a poet‐led classroom‐based poetry programme on secondary school students' writer identities and self‐expression, particularly focusing on BPoC teenagers. Drawing on the Writing Realities framework, the research uses focus groups, participant observations, and interviews with the poet‐in‐residence. Rather than analysing the students' poems, the study explores their engagement with poetry writing and the poet‐in‐residence, highlighting the contribution to self‐reflection and meaning‐making. The findings reveal how the residency introduced students to diverse poetry forms, community‐based poetry, and collaborative writing, facilitating critical engagement with themes relevant to their lives. However, the school's status as a Predominantly White Institution hindered full expression of BPoC students' identities. The presence of the poet‐in‐residence, a young mixed‐heritage Muslim woman, positively influenced students' relationships with writing, particularly for BPoC students, by providing a protected space for self‐expression and identity exploration. The study underscores the importance of creating supportive environments in schools to nurture BPoC students' creativity and writer identity, emphasising the need for anti‐racist practices and culturally sustaining pedagogies to empower students from socially marginalised groups.
This resource piece explores commonly held adult beliefs about young people’s play and challenges some of these ideas through published research and examples from child and youth participatory fan cultures. We begin this piece by examining some of these misconceptions and myths, primarily the ideas that children’s play is in decline, that children’s play is trivial and non-productive, that popular culture reduces children’s desire to play, and that children are no longer creating their own cultural artifacts (Small 259). Challenging these assumptions, we discuss the ways that children and youth engage in three participatory fan activities—writing fanfiction, creating fan videos, and participating in cosplay—drawing on examples from a range of popular youth fandoms including Harry Potter, Girl Meets World, Percy Jackson, The Avengers, Monster High, and the Hunger Games.
Background
Studies of socio-scientific decision-making in times of crisis are in their infancy. This study investigates how minoritized youth engage and make sense of newly developed COVID-19 vaccines and their intersections with the evolving multi-pandemic. Guided by theories of lively data, data sense and epistemic injustice, we center the experience of four Palestinian Arab minority youth throughout the ongoing pandemic.
Methods
Our analysis of long-form interviews and experience sampling was based on critical grounded theory. We also used counter-narrative to bring witness, capture youth first-hand experience, and recenter marginal knowledge.
Findings
Our findings show how youth come to understand the multidimensional nature of the crisis through their first-hand sensory experiences with COVID-19 data. They used their agentic positions with data to make their lively data matter. Their sense- and decision-making shifted as the pandemic and reflected how they understood it as a health hazard, vaccine efficacy, the political, scientific narratives and policies regarding the vaccine. The pandemic proposed solutions resonant with the science they understood and in negotiation with broader context of local, national, and global pandemic data.
Contribution
The study offers implications for learning with lively data toward epistemic justice in data science and socio-scientific decision-making.
This chapter helps teachers use genre for effective language learning in the increasingly linguistically and culturally diverse 21st-century language classroom. The chapter provides an overview of the history of the term genre across various academic disciplines and explains why critical knowledge of genres is a key literacy in the 21st century. It discusses current trends of use of genre in the language classroom and gives tips on how to use genre responsibly with multicultural, multiliterate, multilingual students, focusing in particular on the usefulness of critical literacy in linguistically and culturally diverse language classrooms. The chapter also highlights ways in which teachers can use genres to empower minority students—including those belonging to a linguistic minority—and to counteract bias in their classrooms.
In this article, we revisit the co‐creation of a 45‐min film, Gender is Like an Ocean , produced with middle school students in response to Kirstin Cronn‐Mills's young adult novel Beautiful Music for Ugly Children . The making of this film brought together collaborative inquiry and arts creation. Drawing on the work of critical literacy educators as well as scholars in queer and trans studies, we trace students' participation in the process of co‐creating this film through three critical moments, which map their inquiries into gender identity and representation and our own attempts to learn alongside them.
Rapidly developing technological advances have raised new questions about what makes us uniquely human. As data and generative AI become more powerful, what does it mean to learn, teach, create, make meaning, and express ourselves, even as machines are trained to take care of these tasks for us? With youth, and in the context of literacy and media education, we embrace this moment to broaden our social imaginations. Our collaboration with journalists ages 14–25 from 2019 to 2023 has yielded a corpus of over 30 multimodal compositions constructed with and/or about AI reaching audiences in the millions. On the basis of these youth texts – produced within our participatory research at YR Media, a national STEAM learning center and platform for emerging BIPOC content creators – we developed the conceptual framework presented here: Humanizing Data Expression (HDE). The key role of expression in HDE distinguishes the human from the machine through the lens of storytelling. Analysis of this corpus (podcasts, web‐based interactives, videos, radio features, online posts, social media assets) revealed four literacy practices of YR Media authors as they made sense of AI: (1) contextualize : try out AI‐powered features, reveal how it works; (2) unveil authorship : introduce AI creators and processes; (3) grapple : explore tensions and paradoxes; (4) play : hack, mess with, outsmart, exaggerate AI. From these insights, we end with implications of HDE as a framework for learning and teaching AI literacy, including its potential for critically transforming data literacy practice and pedagogy across schools, teaching, and teacher education.
Purpose
This paper aims to trace how Asian American girls engaged with civic learning in a virtual out-of-school literacy community featuring a curriculum of diverse literary texts.
Design/methodology/approach
The researcher used practitioner inquiry to construct a virtual literacy education community dedicated to the civic learning of Asian American girls.
Findings
The paper explores how participants mobilized critical practices of textual consumption and production rooted in their intersectional identities and embodied experiences to make meaning of the civic constraints and affordances of marginalized identities and to read and (re)design author choices for civic purposes. These findings – examples of youths’ critical civic meaning-making – indicate how they claimed space for Asian American civic girlhoods in literacy education.
Originality/value
This paper foregrounds how Asian American girls mobilize critical processes of text consumption and production to assert civic identities in literacy education – a significantly under-examined topic in literacy studies. This work has implications for how literacy practitioners and scholars can prioritize Asian American civic girlhoods through pedagogy and research.
This conceptual article examines the role of speculation in driving responses to generative AI platforms in literacy education and the implications for research, pedagogy, and practice. Our focus on “speculation” encompasses two meanings of the term – each of which has inspired lively lines of inquiry in literacy studies and transdisciplinary research on artificial intelligence, respectively. In the first sense, literacy scholars have recognized literacy education as a speculative project – one characterized by the cultivation of particular reading and writing practices in order to prefigure different imagined social futures. In the second sense, scholars of media and computational cultural studies have theorized a different kind of speculative logic that underwrites the design and functioning of AI platforms – one characterized by extrapolative prediction and algorithmic reasoning. Investigating the evolving relationship between these modes of speculation, we argue that the former has allowed literacy education to be uniquely susceptible to the influence of the latter; and likewise, that the latter exerts its influence in ways that remake the former in its image. We theorize this relation as a process of speculative capture , and we highlight its stakes for equitable literacy education. We then conclude by providing provocations for researchers and teachers that may be of use in preempting the collapse of these speculative formations into one another; and perhaps, in mobilizing a conception of the speculative that works productively toward alternative ethico‐political ends.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore teacher candidates’ response to young adult literature (prose and comics) featuring fat identified protagonists. The paper considers the textual and embodied resources readers use and reject when imagining and interpreting a character’s body. This paper explores how readers’ meaning making was influenced when reading prose versus comics. This paper adds to a corpus of scholarship about the relationships between young adult literature, comics, bodies and reader response theory.
Design/methodology/approach
At the time of the study, participants were enrolled in a teacher education program at a Midwestern University, meeting monthly for a voluntary book club dedicated to reading and discussing young adult literature. To examine readers’ responses to comics and prose featuring fat-identified protagonists, the author used descriptive qualitative methodologies to conduct a thematic analysis of meeting transcripts, written participant reflections and researcher memos. Analysis was grounded in theories of reader response, critical fat studies and multimodality.
Findings
Analyses indicated many readers reject textual clues indicating a character’s body size and weight were different from their own. Readers read their bodies into the stories, regarding them as self-help narratives instead of radical counternarratives. Some readers were not able to read against their assumptions of thinness (and whiteness) until prompted by the researcher and other participants.
Originality/value
Although many reader response scholars have demonstrated readers’ tendencies toward personal identification in the face of racial and class differences, there is less research regarding classroom practices around the entanglement of physical bodies, body image and texts. Analyzing reader’s responses to the constructions of fat bodies in prose versus comics may help English Language Arts (ELA) educators and students identify and deconstruct ideologies of thin-thinking and fatphobia. This study, which demonstrates thin readers’ tendencies to overidentify with protagonists, suggests ELA classrooms might encourage readers to engage in critical literacies that support them in reading both with and against their identities.
This chapter will examine the role of multimodal texts to support students' disciplinary learning. Disciplinary literacy is based on a premise of access to advanced ways of thinking and doing as contextualized by individual disciplines. The authors put forth a framework of disciplinary literacy that combines habits of thinking such as thinking strategies, habits of practice or the actions experts engage in, beliefs experts hold about the discipline, and language use and vocabulary in the discipline. Disciplinary literacy in the classroom utilizes all these components to help students read, write, and think similar to ways that experts do in order to help them move past memorizing information and instead engage in authentic disciplinary argumentation and problem solving.
The recent speculative turn in literacy, English education, and other ELA-related fields has brought renewed energy for redesigning English teaching and learning through genre awareness. However, extant work on speculative genres of reading, writing, and literary study assumes that ELA teachers are prepared or, more fundamentally, aware of these genres and their unique features. Addressing this gap, this article presents a single intrinsic case of Carlos, a queer man of Color and bilingual elementary teacher, as he cultivated genre awareness through an interactive approach to genre pedagogy through restorying. Based on a rhetorical genre studies approach, Carlos’s case demonstrates how English teachers might expand their genre repertoire to include speculative genres and integrate them into their classrooms. This article concludes by advocating for the integration of speculative literacies into English teacher education, doing so to disrupt normative realities tied to white supremacy and homophobia within the field.
Purpose
This paper aims to offer an approach to cyborg composing with artificial intelligence (AI). The author posits that the hybridity of the cyborg, which amalgamates human and artificial elements, invites a cascade of creative and emancipatory possibilities. The author critically examines the biases embedded in AI systems while gesturing toward the generative potential of AI–human entanglements. Drawing on Bakhtinian theories of dialogism, the author contends that crafting found poetry with AI could inspire writers to problematize the ideologies embedded into the corpus while teasing apart its elisions or contradictions, sparking new forms of expression at the interface of the organic and the artificial.
Design/methodology/approach
To illustrate this approach to human–AI composing, the author shares a found poem that she wrote using ChatGPT alongside her reflection on the poem. The author reflects on her positionality as well as the positionality of her artificial interlocutor, interrogating the notion of subjectivity in relation to Bakhtinian dialogism and multivocality.
Findings
Weaving tales of resilience in harmony or tension with AI could unravel threads of possibility as human writers enrich, deepen or complicate AI-generated texts. By composing with AI, writers can resist closure, infiltrate illusions of objectivity and “speak back” to AI and the dominant voices replicated in its systems.
Originality/value
By encouraging students to critically engage with, question and complicate AI-generated texts, one can open avenues for alternative ways of thinking and writing, inspiring students to imagine and compose speculative futures. Ultimately, in animating assemblages of the organic and the artificial, one can invite transformative possibilities of being and becoming.
Centering the narratives of teachers with disabilities, this piece offers Disability Sustaining Pedagogy as a stance and practice for honoring disability identities in literacy classrooms.
In this essay, Philip and Garcia argue that visions of mobile devices in the classroom often draw on assumptions about the inherent interests youth have in these devices, the capability of these interests to transfer from out-of-school contexts to the classroom, and the capacity for these new technologies to equalize the educational playing field. These overly optimistic portrayals minimize the pivotal value of effective teaching and are implicitly or explicitly coupled with political agendas that attempt to increasingly control and regiment the work of teachers. Through discussing student interest and issues of educational technology in urban schools and highlighting the affordances and limitations of the texts, tools, and talk that teachers might facilitate with these devices, the authors offer a teacher-focused perspective that is sorely missing in the contemporary debates about using mobile technologies in schools.
In this article three interacting categories for the understanding of emergent digital activism are reviewed: tools that enable the participation, people as social agents, and contexts of social or political participation. Since in many of the most recent cases of digital activism the main actors have been young activists, the paper attempts to present how some of these new cohorts make use of technology mediated tools for social interaction, crowd engagement and participation, through a networked and apparently leaderless social and political activism. By analyzing the interaction between the existing tools and the generational characteristics of the social actors in particular situations we show the role that digital systems and new social media play in certain situations.
Con el fin de comprender el activismo digital, en este artículo se exploran tres categorías que se entrelazan: las herramientas que facilitan los procesos de participación, las personas como agentes sociales que intervienen y los contextos de participación social y política. Dado que en los casos más recientes de activismo digital los principales actores pertenecen a cohortes juveniles, el artículo intenta presentar algunas ideas de cómo esos activistas hacen uso de las herramientas tecnológicas para la participación social, la cooperación y la inteligencia de las multitudes, mediante un activismo en red aparentemente sin liderazgos notorios. Se hace el análisis de la interacción entre las herramientas tecnológicas y las características generacionales en tres casos particulares para ilustrar el papel que los sistemas digitales y los nuevos medios sociales juegan en ciertas situaciones.
In the midst of discussions about improving education, teacher education, equity, and diversity, little has been done to make pedagogy a central area of investigation. This article attempts to challenge notions about the intersection of culture and teaching that rely solely on microanalytic or macroanalytic perspectives. Rather, the article attempts to build on the work done in both of these areas and proposes a culturally relevant theory of education. By raising questions about the location of the researcher in pedagogical research, the article attempts to explicate the theoretical framework of the author in the nexus of collaborative and reflexive research. The pedagogical practices of eight exemplary teachers of African-American students serve as the investigative "site." Their practices and reflections on those practices provide a way to define and recognize culturally relevant pedagogy.
This essay explores the notion of meaning, particularly as applied to acts of producing and reading texts. The analysis is grounded in principles of activity theory and cultural semiotics and focuses on the ways in which reading takes place among readers and texts in a culturally mediated, codified experience characterized here as the “transactional zone.” The author builds on Vygotsky’s work to argue that meaning comes through a reader’s generation of new texts in response to the text being read. As a means of accounting for this phenomenon, examples are provided from studies illustrating, for instance, Vygotsky’s zones of meaning, the dialogic role of composing during a reading transaction, and the necessity of culturally constructed subjectivity in meaning construction. The author concludes by locating meaning in the transactional zone in which signs become tools for extending or developing concepts and the richness of meaning coming from the potential of a reading transaction to generate new texts.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” (Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass )
Social network sites like MySpace and Facebook serve as "networked publics." As with unmediated publics like parks and malls, youth use networked publics to gather, socialize with their peers, and make sense of and help build the culture around them. This article examines American youth engagement in networked publics and considers how properties unique to such mediated environments (e.g., persistence, searchability, replicability, and invisible audiences) affect the ways in which youth interact with one another. Ethnographic data is used to analyze how youth recognize these structural properties and find innovative ways of making these systems serve their purposes. Issues like privacy and impression management are explored through the practices of teens and youth participation in social network sites is situated in a historical discussion of youth's freedom and mobility in the United States.
African American children's literature is a vibrant form of expression. Written by a leading authority on the subject, this book overviews the history of African American children's literature from the antebellum South to the present day. The volume places African American children's literature in its social, political, and cultural contexts, discusses its origins in songs and folklore, and examines its importance as a vehicle for promoting respect for the African American heritage. Included are discussions of major authors and illustrators, such as Virginia Hamilton, Walter Dean Myers, and John Steptoe, as well as important genres of children's literature, such as poetry, historical fiction, and picture books. Teachers of children's literature will treasure this book as a convenient overview of this fascinating subject, while students of literature and social studies will value it as a guide to the African American literary achievement and to the treatment of social issues in fiction. The volume also includes a rich selection of picture book illustrations.
Recently, transactional reader response theory has been criticized for providing an inadequate theoretical guide for the study of multicultural literature. Some scholars argue that Rosenblatt assumes the reader and her response to literature are ideologically innocent and the continuum of aesthetic and efferent stance does not encompass critical reading. They call for re-theorizing or moving beyond transactional theory.
Young Adult literature, from The Outsiders to Harry Potter, has helped shape the cultural landscape for adolescents perhaps more than any other form of consumable media in the twentieth and twenty-first century. With the rise of mega blockbuster films based on these books in recent years, the young adult genre is being co-opted by curious adult readers and by Hollywood producers. However, while the genre may be getting more readers than ever before, Young Adult literature remains exclusionary and problematic: few titles feature historically marginalized individuals, the books present heteronormative perspectives, and gender stereotypes continue to persist. Taking a critical approach, Young Adult Literature: Challenging Genres offers educators, youth librarians, and students a set of strategies for unpacking, challenging, and transforming the assumptions of some of the genre's most popular titles. Pushing the genre forward, Antero Garcia builds on his experiences as a former high school teacher to offer strategies for integrating Young Adult literature in a contemporary critical pedagogy through the use of participatory media.
Thresh brings the rock down hard against Clove’s temple. It’s not bleeding, but I can see the dent in her skull and I know that she’s a goner. There’s still life in her now though, in the rapid rise and fall of her chest, the low moan escaping her lips.
Emphasising the contradictions of fandom, Matt Hills outlines how media fans have been conceptualised in cultural theory. Drawing on case studies of specific fan groups, from Elvis impersonators to X-Philes and Trekkers, Hills discusses a range of approaches to fandom, from the Frankfurt School to psychoanalytic readings, and asks whether the development of new media creates the possibility of new forms of fandom. Fan Cultures also explores the notion of "fan cults" or followings, considering how media fans perform the distinctions of 'cult' status.
First published in 1829, Walker's Appeal called on slaves to rise up and free themselves. The two subsequent versions of his document (including the reprinted 1830 edition published shortly before Walker's death) were increasingly radical. Addressed to the whole world but directed primarily to people of color around the world, the 87-page pamphlet by a free black man born in North Carolina and living in Boston advocates immediate emancipation and slave rebellion. Walker asks the slaves among his readers whether they wouldn't prefer to "be killed than to be a slave to a tyrant." He advises them not to "trifle" if they do rise up, but rather to kill those who would continue to enslave them and their wives and children. Copies of the pamphlet were smuggled by ship in 1830 from Boston to Wilmington, North Carolina, Walker's childhood home, causing panic among whites. In 1830, members of North Carolina's General Assembly had the Appealin mind as they tightened the state's laws dealing with slaves and free black citizens. The resulting stricter laws led to more policies that repressed African Americans, freed and slave alike. A DOCSOUTH BOOK. This collaboration between UNC Press and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library brings selected classic works from the digital library of Documenting the American South back into print. DocSouth Books uses the latest digital technologies to make these works available as downloadable e-books or print-on-demand publications. DocSouth Books are unaltered from the original publication, providing affordable and easily accessible editions to a new generation of scholars, students, and general readers.
In this 'new media age' the screen has replaced the book as the dominant medium of communication. This dramatic change has made image, rather than writing, the centre of communication. In this groundbreaking book, Gunther Kress considers the effects of a revolution that has radically altered the relationship between writing and the book. Taking into account social, economic, communication and technological factors, Kress explores how these changes will affect the future of literacy. Kress considers the likely larger-level social and cultural effects of that future, arguing that the effects of the move to the screen as the dominant medium of communication will produce far-reaching shifts in terms of power - and not just in the sphere of communication. The democratic potentials and effects of the new information and communication technologies will, Kress contends, have the widest imaginable consequences. Literacy in the New Media Age is suitable for anyone fascinated by literacy and its wider political and cultural implications. It will be of particular interest to those studying education, communication studies, media studies or linguistics.
They argue that the role of oral language is almost always entirely misunderstood in debates about digital media. Like the earlier inventions of writing and print, digital media actually “power up” or enhance the powers of oral language.
This article differentiates the usages of transaction and interaction as reflections of differing paradigms. The transactional theory of reading is dissociated from information-processing and interactive processing. The implications for research of various concepts basic to the total transactional theory of reading are discussed.
"Children's literature is a contested terrain, as is multicultural education. Taken together, they pose a formidable challenge to both classroom teachers and academics. Rather than deny the inherent conflicts and tensions in the field, in Critical Multicultural Analysis of Children's Literature: Mirrors, Windows, and Doors, Maria José Botelho and Masha Kabakow Rudman confront, deconstruct, and reconstruct these terrains by proposing a reframing of the field. Surely all of us - children, teachers, and academics - can benefit from this more expansive understanding of what it means to read books." Sonia Nieto, From the Foreword Critical multicultural analysis provides a philosophical shift for teaching literature, constructing curriculum, and taking up issues of diversity and social justice. It problematizes children's literature, offers a way of reading power, explores the complex web of sociopolitical relations, and deconstructs taken-for-granted assumptions about language, meaning, reading, and literature: it is literary study as sociopolitical change. Bringing a critical lens to the study of multiculturalism in children's literature, this book prepares teachers, teacher educators, and researchers of children's literature to analyze the ideological dimensions of reading and studying literature. Each chapter includes recommendations for classroom application, classroom research, and further reading. Helpful end-of-book appendixes include a list of children's book awards, lists of publishers, diagrams of the power continuum and the theoretical framework of critical multicultural analysis, and lists of selected children's literature journals and online resources.
Walter J. Ong’s classic work provides a fascinating insight into the social effects of oral, written, printed and electronic technologies, and their impact on philosophical, theological, scientific and literary thought.
Discusses reading with pre–teens Francine Pascal’s “Sweet Valley Twins: Best Friends,” one of a series of pre–romance novels featuring identical twin sisters. Interviews six girls using the Symbolic Representation Interview (SRI) about the good girl/bad girl dichotomy in novels and other media. Provides comments by Tom Romano and Diana Mitchell. In Response: Tom Romano, Diana Mitchell
Fiction has often been viewed as requiring imaginative input on the part of the audience, but relatively little empirical work has examined the role that fictional characters and worlds play in the imaginings of adolescents and adults, outside of the text itself. Here, I provide an overview of existing research on fanfiction, or extratextual stories written for pleasure by fans, based on an existing media property. I suggest that fanfiction is a form of imaginary play that reflects both emotional engagement with and resistance to the source material. I draw comparisons between writing fanfiction, daydreaming, and childhood pretend play and argue that there is a need for research that explores this phenomenon using more rigorous psychological methods. Such research may shed light on a range of issues in the psychology of fiction and why we read for pleasure.
Focusing on issues of methodology, this paper reflects on our experiences of studying a specific Twitter-based fan community, and seeks to discuss some of the opportunities and challenges associated with the use of Twitter data for fan studies research. Building on the extensive body of work on online fan practices taking place on message boards (e.g., Hills, 2005; Williams, 2011), fan Web sites (e.g., Bailey, 2002), fan fiction sites (e.g., Coppa, 2006; Cumberland, 2002), and so on, there has been increasing academic interest in how fans use social networking systems such as MySpace, Facebook and Twitter (e.g., Booth, 2008; Wood and Baughman; 2012, Zhivov, et al., 2011). Social media services are attractive sites for fieldwork due to the ease of access that some of these platforms afford researchers, as well as the novelty associated with certain platforms and the fan activities taking place there. More importantly, though, "exploring Twitter can also provide a snapshot into the ways that television fans enhance their own viewing experiences using social media tools" [1]. Furthermore, exploring fan activities on social networking systems can help us learn more about how fans negotiate the structures of different online spaces, and how that impacts on their engagement with each other and with their fan objects. It is therefore timely to encourage debate around different approaches to researching social media based fan practices, and this article tries to do so by reflecting on how we negotiated ethical, analytical and more practical methodological issues that emerged from our own empirical research project.
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
My first ventures into academia began while studying for an
undergraduate degree in journalism, film, and broadcasting at
Cardiff University. Though I initially wanted to be a music
journalist, it was during working for this degree that I realized
that academic writing ignited a stronger passion within me. Rather
than write about music in the journalistic sense, I decided to
pursue my studies in the area of fandom with a specific focus on
the Internet. It was through my exposure to Matt Hills’s and Will
Brooker’s work at the time that I began to understand how I could
conduct valid and exciting research that interrogated and explored
the fields of fandom and cyber studies.
Thus, my main areas of research and study have evolved to
encompass an intersection of audiences and the Internet—how the
Internet is used, how power is negotiated, and the ways in which
social media affects communications. Within this field, I am most
fascinated by fan cultures and fandom, and my work mainly looks at
popular music fan networks and communities. My PhD, completed in
November 2009 (also at Cardiff University), was a
cyber-ethnography, focused on Murmurs.com, an online
community of the American rock band R.E.M. Under the supervision of
Matt Hills, I explored how normative behavior within the community
was encouraged and maintained. In doing so, I examined the
importance of, and power relations surrounding, oppositional fan
identities and the manner with which fans negotiate community
norms.
As a fan, community member, and part of the administrative team
that helped run the community, I was in a unique and challenging
position to undertake this research and provide original insight
into the maintenance of fan communal norms. In this sense, I had a
personal investment in my object of analysis, as Hollis Griffin has
also experienced and outlined in his essay in this section. While
conducting the ethnography, the scholars that inspired me most were
Will Brooker, Henry Jenkins, Matt Hills, Daniel Cavicchi, Nancy
Baym, and Cornel Sandvoss. Brooker’s work continues to remain an
important source of inspiration: I later built on his chapter on
Lost fans in particular in my own post-PhD study of
Lost online fandom and its approaches to temporal play
within the narrative.
At the same time, reading Henry Jenkins’s influential
Textual Poachers allowed me to understand and consider
further how fan cultures often produce rich and powerful methods of
reading, adapting, and approaching the fan texts. Jenkins’s
application of de Certeau’s “strategy” and “tactics” to fandom also
proved revelatory in my initial foray into fan studies. In my PhD
dissertation, I sought, then, to discover how normative behavior
could be maintained and encouraged in an online fan community—in
other words, how the accepted or “right” ways of fan conduct and
the expectations and conventions of a fan community were
communicated to members. Alongside Jenkins’s work, I drew on Mary
Douglas’s theory of “matter out of place” and Michel Foucault’s
concept of heterotopic spaces to demonstrate how fan communities
can approach nonnormative behavior (or, conducting themselves in
the “wrong” way) through the use of bounded space and discourses of
order and rationality.
Matt Hills’s Fan Cultures also became a key text
for me, especially in terms of understanding my liminal position as
scholar-fan and researcher, which often pulled me in two
directions. Hills’s cautionary advice—that “asking” participants,
most specifically fans, is fraught with the danger of their “auto
legitimizing their responses”—contributed significantly to my
ethnographic approach. Being aware of this proposition that simply
“asking” participants is insufficient in itself to deliver
comprehensive knowledge integral to the ethnography, I strived to
maintain a balance between “asking” the fan participants and
highlighting the “gaps and dislocations” within their responses and
community discourse—an approach that has continued to shape my
current work.
Daniel Cavicchi’s work on Bruce Springsteen fans was also
extremely influential. In particular, his descriptions of fans
attending live Springsteen concerts and the ways in which fandom is
a distinction process that fans continually adjust and monitor
worked to shape and inform my understandings of fan behavior. Nancy
Baym’s work...
On Sept. 5, 2006, Mark Zuckerberg changed the way that Facebook worked, and in the process he inspired a revolt. Zuckerberg, a doe-eyed 24-year-old C.E.O., founded Facebook in his dorm room at Harvard two years earlier, and the site quickly amassed nine million users. By 2006, students were posting heaps of personal details onto their Facebook pages, including lists of their favorite TV shows, whether they were dating (and whom), what music they had in rotation and the various ad hoc "groups" they had joined (like "Sex and the City" Lovers). All day long, they'd post "status" notes explaining their moods — "hating Monday," "skipping class b/c i'm hung over." After each party, they'd stagger home to the dorm and upload pictures of the soused revelry, and spend the morning after commenting on how wasted everybody looked. Facebook became the de facto public commons — the way students found out what everyone around them was like and what he or she was doing. But Zuckerberg knew Facebook had one major problem: It required a lot of active surfing on the part of its users. Sure, every day your Facebook friends would update their profiles with some new tidbits; it might even be something particularly juicy, like changing their relationship status to "single" when they got dumped. But unless you visited each friend's page every day, it might be days or weeks before you noticed the news, or you might miss it entirely. Browsing Facebook was like constantly poking your head into someone's room to see how she was doing. It took work and forethought. In a sense, this gave Facebook an inherent, built-in level of privacy, simply because if you had 200 friends on the site — a fairly typical number — there weren't enough hours in the day to keep tabs on every friend all the time. "It was very primitive," Zuckerberg told me when I asked him about it last month. And so he decided to modernize. He developed something he called News Feed, a built-in service that would actively broadcast changes in a user's page to every one of his or her friends. Students would no longer need to spend their time zipping around to examine each friend's page, checking to see if there was any new information. Instead, they would just log into Facebook, and News Feed would appear: a single page that — like a social gazette from the 18th century — delivered a long list of up-to-the-minute gossip about their friends, around the clock, all in one place. "A stream of everything that's going on in their lives," as Zuckerberg put it. When students woke up that September morning and saw News Feed, the first reaction, generally, was one of panic. Just about every little thing you changed on your page was now instantly blasted out to hundreds of friends, including potentially mortifying bits of news — Tim and Lisa broke up; Persaud is no longer friends with Matthew — and drunken photos someone snapped, then uploaded and tagged with names. Facebook had lost its vestigial bit of privacy. For students, it was now like being at a giant, open party filled with everyone you know, able to eavesdrop on what everyone else was saying, all the time.
Using a critical race theory lens, the authors propose a way of writing race research using composite counterstories. Drawing on data from a yearlong study of school rebuilding in the time period immediately after Hurricane Katrina devastated the City of New Orleans, the authors examine the experiences of African-American educators in the school rebuilding efforts. Cook and Dixson look specifically at how composite counterstories speak back to racialized constructions of black educators that justified their post-Katrina displacement and usher in an era of school reform in which New Orleans is described as “ground zero” for the expansion of charter schools, the disempowerment of teachers’ unions, and the re-organization of teacher preparation. Given the context of the research, the authors argue that researchers should consider how composite counterstories facilitate racial research and ensure the protection of research participants.
Any analysis of reading today must consider contemporary writing practices. The epochal shift from print to digital texts has been under way for some time. Indeed, print books are now so interpenetrated with digital media at every stage of their production that they may more appropriately be considered an output form of digital texts than a separate medium. Much has been written about the end of books, but, as Alan Liu observes, they have been deconstructed almost from the beginning, from the remixing of Bible excerpts according to the liturgical calendar to the experimental fiction of Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy to Raymond Queneau's Cent mille milliards de poèmes (“End” 509-11). This tradition notwithstanding, Jessica Pressman correctly detects in some contemporary novels anxiety about the continued life of books and a desire to reassert the book's authority in the face of the exponential expansion of the Web and the ongoing conversion of books into digitized texts, including the several million now available at Google Books and other online venues.
WHAT ARE WE REALLY TALKING ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT THE STATE OF READING? AND WHAT DO WE HOPE TO LEARN FROM THE Answers to that question? Confirmation of deeply held prejudices, or a better understanding of what reading means in digital cultures? We need to pose those questions right up front because the debate about the state of reading has been precipitated by the increasing ubiquity of the e-book, even though reading culture has been undergoing massive infrastructural changes for over a decade in the United States. The public discourse on the state of reading and on whether it has a viable future has focused on the future of the book and of literary reading now that e-books have apparently changed everything. The state of reading, as such, is not at stake because it doesn't seem likely that firemen from Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 will be swinging by your place anytime soon to torch your books and replace them with a well-appointed wall screen, eliminating reading forever in favor of mindless viewing. People will keep reading, if only to take in the endless text that comes at them on their various screens, from the ones on the wall to the ones they carry around with them everywhere on their portable devices. Try looking at those screens without reading. No, it's clear from the assumptions that underpin the end-is-near pronouncements about the e-book that there's reading and then there's reading and that when people talk about the future of reading, they're worried about whether readers worthy of the name will continue reading literary fiction in the twenty-first century. But that isn't a very interesting question because it imagines the act of reading in such an ahistorical manner, curled up in a well-upholstered time warp, far from the unruliness of contemporary reading cultures.
Seventeen years ago Gloria Ladson-Billings (1995) published the landmark article “Toward a Theory of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy,” giving a coherent theoretical statement for resource pedagogies that had been building throughout the 1970s and 1980s. I, like countless teachers and university-based researchers, have been inspired by what it means to make teaching and learning relevant and responsive to the languages, literacies, and cultural practices of students across categories of difference and (in)equality. Recently, however, I have begun to question if the terms “relevant” and “responsive” are really descriptive of much of the teaching and research founded upon them and, more importantly, if they go far enough in their orientation to the languages and literacies and other cultural practices of communities marginalized by systemic inequalities to ensure the valuing and maintenance of our multiethnic and multilingual society. In this essay, I offer the term and stance of culturally sustaining pedagogy as an alternative that, I believe, embodies some of the best research and practice in the resource pedagogy tradition and as a term that supports the value of our multiethnic and multilingual present and future. Culturally sustaining pedagogy seeks to perpetuate and foster—to sustain—linguistic, literate, and cultural pluralism as part of the democratic project of schooling. In the face of current policies and practices that have the explicit goal of creating a monocultural and monolingual society, research and practice need equally explicit resistances that embrace cultural pluralism and cultural equality.
In this article, I argue that the most common use of reader-response theory in the classroom is misguided in its emphasis on personal response and identification. After reconsidering the meaning of the “aesthetic stance” as defined in the work of Louise Rosenblatt, I discuss the social and political nature of readers, texts, and contexts. I include two examples of teachers talking about a work of children's literature to illustrate that when a text is about characters whose cultures and life worlds are very different from the reader's, disrupting the reader's inclination to identify with the text can heighten the reader's self consciousness and text consciousness. This stance should not be viewed as less aesthetic than a more direct or immediate relationship between reader and text. Finally, I argue for a broader view of what aesthetic reading can mean, one that addresses the social and political dimensions of texts and invites students to take pleasure in both the personal and the critical.
Research has helped practice get to this possibility. Having built on earlier work, research today is well beyond simple notions of texts, readers, and contexts. Researchers today who study response from a sociocultural frame take for granted the complexities of the reader-text transaction that is embedded in multiple worlds. Teachers, too, recognize the care with which this transaction must be negotiated in the classroom-itself a conflicted cultural world. What teachers say and do, the texts they choose and how they choose them, and the tasks they set for their students all affect this transaction. While teachers can help students develop specific tools to use as they read and respond in a particular classroom, the cultural tools that students bring to the classroom remain varied, sometimes closely aligned to those sanctioned by the teacher, sometimes in opposition. By creating opportunities for students to read and respond in the company of others, teachers foster their students' ability to make sense of text worlds and lived worlds. By encouraging 8-year-olds to make connections between their own experiences and experiences of characters in the books they read, or giving 16-year-olds the tools they need to explore how they and the characters they are reading about are constituted by their cultures, teachers make it possible for students to use their responses to school-sanctioned text to construct and critique their worlds.
People telling stories about their life experiences has rapidly gained legitimacy in educational research. This article presents seven elements of narrative research that represent the aspects of a narrative study and the criteria that might be used to assess the quality of a narrative project. The article focuses on one phase in narrative data analysis: ”restorying” or “retelling.” By highlighting restorying narrative, researchers can see how an illustrative data set, a science story told by fourth graders about their experiences in their elementary classroom, was applied to two analysis approaches. A comparison of the two narrative approaches, problem-solution and three-dimensional space, shows several common features and distinctions. As narrative researchers decide which approach to use, they might consider whether the story they wish to report is a broader wholistic sketch of the three-dimensional approach or a narrower linear structure of the problem-solution approach.
Last year, guided by theories that regard sympathy as an imaginative capacity that can bridge divisions between people of different backgrounds, I conducted an experiment with nearly 200 Finnish secondary school students, in order to determine the extent to which particular texts would generate their sympathy for characters who seem unattractive, undesirable, or generally outside of the accepted norms of the societies in which they live. The present paper builds on my findings in that study by suggesting some of the pedagogical implications of providing adolescents with opportunities to engage with the lives of fictional characters, and particularly to experience feelings of sympathy for individuals toward whom they ordinarily might feel aversion or uncertainty. It examines some of the ways in which experiences with narrative fiction can be used to help develop emotional and conceptual structures in adolescent readers. In Education and Experience John Dewey contends that “the conditions found in present experience should be used as sources of problemsâ€; indeed, the present paper shows how narrative experience can help form the basis for a problem-solving, emotionally-rich curriculum that takes as its primary aim the development of students’ capacities for emotional awareness and ethical reflection.
Public Culture 14.1 (2002) 191-213
The speed, intensity, and extent of contemporary global transformations challenge many of the assumptions that have guided the analysis of culture over the last several decades. Whereas an earlier generation of scholarship saw meaning and interpretation as the key problems for social and cultural analysis, the category of culture now seems to be playing catch-up to the economic processes that go beyond it. Economics owes its present appeal partly to the sense that it, as a discipline, has grasped that it is dynamics of circulation that are driving globalization -- and thereby challenging traditional notions of language, culture, and nation.
There is a certain historical irony to the contemporary discovery of the centrality of circulation to the analysis of the globalization of capitalism. The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1969) inaugurated what would later be called the "linguistic turn" by applying Prague School linguistics to the analysis of circulation and exchange in precapitalist societies; by focusing on the structural analysis of the "total social fact" of exchange, he sought to overcome the dichotomy of economy and culture that is characteristic of modern thought. In hindsight, it can be seen that his use of phonology as the model for structural analysis raised fundamental issues about structure, event, and agency that continue to inform poststructuralist discussions of performative identity. One result is that performativity has been considered a quintessentially cultural phenomenon that is tied to the creation of meaning, whereas circulation and exchange have been seen as processes that transmit meanings, rather than as constitutive acts in themselves. Overcoming this bifurcation will involve rethinking circulation as a cultural phenomenon, as what we call cultures of circulation. An expanded notion of performativity would then become crucial for developing a cultural account of economic processes.
If circulation is to serve as a useful analytic construct for cultural analysis, it must be conceived as more than simply the movement of people, ideas, and commodities from one culture to another. Instead, recent work indicates that circulation is a cultural process with its own forms of abstraction, evaluation, and constraint, which are created by the interactions between specific types of circulating forms and the interpretive communities built around them. It is in these structured circulations that we identify cultures of circulation. Our idea draws from a variety of contemporary sources, including Benedict Anderson's (1991) account of nation, narration, and imagination; Jürgen Habermas's (1989) work on public opinion and the public sphere; Arjun Appadurai's (1996) conceptualizations of cultural flows and "-scapes"; and Charles Taylor's essay, in this issue, on the self-reflexive creation of modern social imaginaries. But our project also harks back to classic anthropological work on gifts and exchange such as studies by Marcel Mauss (1967) and Bronislaw Malinowski (1966), and their updatings by Pierre Bourdieu (1977), Annette Weiner (1992), and Jacques Derrida (1992), as well as Marxist analyses of money and capital (Postone 1993; Harvey 1982). The broad range of this legacy suggests that developing a critical perspective on circulation will require moving beyond disciplinary boundaries and placing it in a conceptual space that encompasses some of the most difficult and troubling issues in contemporary cultural and philosophical analysis: self-reflexivity, performativity, indexicality, metalanguage, objectification, and foundationalism, to name just a few.
Cultures of circulation are created and animated by the cultural forms that circulate through them, including -- critically -- the abstract nature of the forms that underwrite and propel the process of circulation itself. The circulation of such forms -- whether the novels and newspapers of the imagined community or the equity-based derivatives and currency swaps of the modern market -- always presupposes the existence of their respective interpretive communities, with their own forms of interpretation and evaluation. These interpretive communities determine lines of interpretation, found institutions, and set boundaries based principally on their own internal dynamics.
The three social imaginaries that Taylor (in this issue) suggests are crucial to Western modernity -- the public sphere, the citizen-state, and the market -- all presuppose a self-reflexive structure of circulation built around some reciprocal social action, whether that action be reading, as in the case of the public sphere and nationalism, or buying and selling...
Valerie Kinloch describes how the literacy narratives around place-making by Phillip, an African American teenager who resides in this historic community, demonstrate complexities of confronting power, struggle, and identity within an out-of-school community that is rapidly becoming gentrified. (Contains 3 notes.)
Based on longitudinal data from a three year ethnographic study, this article uses discourse analytic methods to explore the literacy and social practices of three adolescent English language learners writing in an online fan fiction community. Theoretical constructs within globalization and literacy studies are used to describe the influences of new media and technologies on modern configurations of imagination, identity, communication, and writing. Findings suggest that through their participation in online fan-related activities, these three youth are using language and other representational resources to enact cosmopolitan identities, make transnational social connections, and experiment with new genres and formats for composing.
Narrative research is frequently described as a rich and diverse enterprise, yet the kinds of narrative data that it bases itself on present a striking consensus: they are autobiographical in kind (i.e., about non-shared, personal experience, single past events). In this paper, I put forth a case for under-represented narrative data which I collectively call (following Bamberg 2004a, b; also Georgakopoulou & Bamberg, 2005) “small stories (partly literally, partly metaphorically). My aim is to flesh small stories out, to urge for the sort of systematic research that will establish connections between their interactional features and their sites of engagement and finally to consider the implications of their inclusion in narrative research for identity analysis (as the main agenda of much of narrative research). I will thus propose small stories research as a “new narrative turn that can provide a needed meeting point for narrative analysis and narrative inquiry.