Restorying as political action: authoring resistance through youth media arts

ABSTRACT

This article explores the lived realities for young people growing up and learning in a climate of racial discrimination, religious intolerance, misogyny, and xenophobia, and how school-sponsored and school-supported uses of digital media can afford young people opportunities to navigate their experiences of social injustice and resist exclusionary discourses and practices. In a collaborative inquiry into the practices of two youth media producers, we explore how these counternarrative efforts are forms of restorying, in which young people write themselves into existence in ways that can reconfigure school spaces. Framed in Black feminist and critical cosmopolitan perspectives, this article considers how young people use new media tools in school to engage the narrative imagination and build the worlds they want to live in, simultaneously representing the political histories and realities of their everyday worlds and imagining alternative futures. We explore the ways schools can create opportunities for youth to engage in these new media practices that re-author themselves and the institutional spaces they encounter – and how these opportunities are situated within broader intersectional forms of systemic inequity and oppression.

KEYWORDS:

• Adolescent literacies
• critical literacy
• cosmopolitics
• identity
• writing

Acknowledgements

We are incredibly thankful to work with Gabriel and Sara in this project as well as the staff and students of the Collaborative Design School. We also thank Neil Geyette, Joshua Kleiman, Charlie McGeehan, Samuel Reed, Anthony Rivera, and Maggie Stephan for their support and creative efforts to make school a transformative space.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Amy Stornaiuolo is an associate professor of literacy education at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on adolescents’ digital literacy practices, especially new forms of networked writing and cross-cultural collaboration online. She is co-editor of the volume Handbook of Writing, Literacies, and Education in Digital Cultures (Routledge, 2018).

Ebony Elizabeth Thomas is an associate professor of literacy education at the University of Pennsylvania. A former Detroit Public Schools teacher, her research interests include children’s and young adult literature, African American education, and classroom interaction research. Her forthcoming book is The Dark Fantastic: Race & the Imagination in Youth Literature, Media and Culture (New York University Press).

ORCID

Amy Stornaiuolo http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0633-7117

Notes

1 All names are pseudonyms (including the school name). Sara and Gabriel were instrumental in the writing of this article but chose to remain anonymous at this time.