Race(ing) towards futurity: Black and Latinx young people’s multimodal compositions of future selves and literacies

As guest co-editors of this special issue of the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, we present critical multimodal scholarship that disrupts and dismantles dominant narratives that narrowly circumscribe the futures of Black and Latinx young people. Specifically, we seek to achieve two interrelated goals. First, we highlight critical qualitative studies that articulate the multiple spaces and multiliterate processes through which Black and Brown young people author their future selves from a place of critical awareness, strength, power, and activism. Second, we feature critical multimodal research that employs varying qualitative designs and methods, including case study, ethnographic research, and poetic inquiry, to center how Black and Brown young people call out and contest deficit narratives about who they are as critical literate beings in their communities, and importantly, how they reclaim their futures with possibilities.

Informed by rich critical multimodal scholarship (Coles, 2019; Gibbs Grey et al., forthcoming; Greene, 2016; Griffin, 2020, 2021; Haddix & Sealey-Ruiz, 2012; Lewis Ellison et al., 2020; Liu, 2019; Muhammad & Womack, 2015; Rolón-Dow, 2011; Rusoja, 2022; Turner, 2022; Turner & Griffin, 2020), we invited critical education researchers who work closely with Black and Latinx young people to shed new light on the multimodal compositional practices that they engage to (re)design uplifting and authentic life possibilities and refute damaging distortions of their futurity. Framed by Critical Race perspectives (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002) and multimodal theories (Campano, Nichols, & Player, 2020; Street et al., 2009), these scholars explore the ways that Black and Latinx young people in varying contexts, such as afterschool programs, college and university settings, and/or community advocacy organizations, critically imagine new future selves and literacies through multimodal compositions (e.g. digital collages, posters, comics, photographs).

Collectively, the scholars in this issue call for an onto-epistemological shift and underscore the importance of counter storytelling and restorying in qualitative inquiry by interrogating what and whose stories count as worth telling, witnessing, and knowing. This shift is essential, because dominant narratives in qualitative research perpetuate the myth that Black and Brown young people have limited social futures in the United States. Qualitative studies have typically replicated stereotypic images that (mis)portray Black and Latinx young people as deviant, lazy, anti-intellectual, unmotivated, disrespectful, criminalistic, and/or aggressive (Collins, 2002/2015; Pérez Huber & Solórzano, 2015; Sealey-Ruiz & Greene, 2015). These deficit frameworks proliferate in PK-16 schools as well as other societal institutions (e.g. community programs), working to constrain, and ultimately destroy, Black and Latinx young people’s voices, identities, and life trajectories. Thus, there is an urgent need for critical qualitative research that centers Black and Brown young people as knowledge makers who “move beyond negative stereotypes to maintain their creativity and manifest the present and future lives they desire and so deeply deserve” (Griffin & Turner, 2021, n.p.). Towards that end, we ask: What might qualitative researchers learn from Black and Latinx young people’s multimodal compositional practices of dreaming in a dystopian world?

The scholars in this special issue address this crucial question through qualitative inquiries that privilege Black and Brown young people as composers of their own futures, and disrupt the aforementioned deficit-oriented narratives. Collectively, their scholarship showcases three types of creative multimodalities that Black and Latinx young people leverage in their compositional work to envision possible futures: the Visual Arts, Speculative Literature, and Intergenerational Literacies. Creativity, especially for Black and Latinx young people, is always racialized and tied to our histories, legacies, and communities (Griffin & Turner, 2021). For folx of Color, multimodality is deeper than visual design (e.g. color, design, and layout), and involves the careful interpretation and (re)creation of our lives to build the liberated futures we envision for ourselves. Like June Jordan (1977/2016), we assert that “love is a life force” and acknowledge that the creative spirit is “nothing less than love made manifest” (p. 11). As such, the studies presented here illuminate how Black and Latinx young people author multimodal futures as a means “to resist and survive, but, more importantly, to live creative lives in the face of social, political, and economic oppression and marginalization (LaMothe, 2012, p. 862).

The first two articles explore how Black and Latinx young people engage the Visual Arts as Creative Multimodalities, including photography, drawing, and painting, to inspire and materialize their futuremaking. In “E-Racing False Narratives: A Black Woman Track Star’s Multimodal Counterstory of Possible Futures,” Autumn A. Griffin and Jennifer D. Turner present a critical re-telling of Black woman student athlete’s (Arielle Mack’s) story for her future through a series of personal photographs, digital images, and words. The authors frame Arielle’s multimodal counterstory with two reflective questions: (1) What did Arielle have to say in response to the 2019 University of Missouri tweet, which exemplifies how collegiate sports programs at predominantly white institutions (PWIs) fail to recognize and uplift futures of Black women student-athletes beyond their contributions to the school? and (2) How, if given the chance, might Arielle have represented herself and her future differently? In so doing, the authors create space for Arielle to tell her own future, rejecting the limited trajectories, identities, and prospects that many PWIs presume, expect, anticipate, and endorse for Black women student-athletes.

Next, in their article, "We Can Be Leaders": Minoritized Youths’ Subjugated (Civic) Knowledges and Social Futures in Two Urban Contexts,” Kristin A. Sinclair, Sophia Rodriguez, and Timothy P. Monreal feature multimodal compositions, including posters, paintings, and community event programs, created by Latinx and Black young people in two urban communities. The authors demonstrate that through these artistic compositions, the young people illuminated their racialized experiences and revealed their embodied knowledge of immigration, gentrification, and racism. As such, the young people’s compositions (re)positioned them as civic knowers, or as agentic citizens capable of discussing policy solutions to the societal injustices they identified, advocating for their communities, and serving as leaders for social change.

Honoring the ways that Black and Brown young people critically read, analyze, and respond to speculative literature that allows them to (re)story their current and future worlds and emancipate themselves from the violence of this one (Thomas, 2019; Thomas & Stornaiuolo, 2016), the next three articles focus on Speculative Literature as Creative Multimodalities. In "Getting Lost in Stars and Glitter": Black Girls’ Multimodal Literacies as Portals to New Suns,” Grace D. Player and Oluwaseun Animashaun use a framework rooted in radical hope (Furrow & Furrow, 2007) and build on Octavia Butler’s Black girl-centered and prophetic science fiction writing through the Parable trilogy (1993, 1998) to explore the ways one Black girl, Seraphina, used her multimodal literacies (Campano et al., 2020) to explore the liminal space between pessimism and optimism, characterized by ongoing encounters with a white supremacist heteropatriarchy and by histories of survival and the creation of joy beauty, art and magic by Black women and girls. Together, they narrate the ways Seraphina used her literacies to create future imaginings of the worlds she deserved, confront reality, and imagine a new world, under a new sun, built for and by Black girls.

Octavia Butler’s science fiction writing was also central to Oluwaseun Animashaun and Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz’s study, “Time Traveling Forward and Backward: Multimodal Speculation as Racial Literacy.” As practitioner-researchers in a remedial writing class at an urban college, they developed a speculative fiction text set which included Butler, Saidiya Hartman, N.K. Jemisin, and other writers of Color. Animashaun and Sealey-Ruiz then examined the multimodal compositions produced by two students of Color, Carmen, a Latina woman, and Imani, a Black woman, after their textual encounters. Their analysis reveals how speculative texts served as creative inspiration for Carmen and Imani’s multimodal poetry about worlds where time-travel, liberation, joy, and racial justice were possibilities for people of Color.

Finally, in “Storying Against Non-human/Superhuman Narratives: Black Youth Afro-Futurist Counterstories in Qualitative Research,” Justin A. Coles uses the theoretical framing of BlackCrit and theories of Afrofutrisum to share two composite Afro-futurist counterstories developed by Black high school students in a summer writing course. Coles highlights how their multimodal renderings confront antiblackness and disrupt the ways the regime makes educators complicit in seeing Black youth as non-human/superhuman.

The final two articles emphasize Intergenerational Literacies as Creative Multimodalities, demonstrating how Black and Brown young people come together with their families, elders, and/or community members to collectively envision hopeful futures through (multi)literacy. Such hopeful futures are beautifully depicted in Tisha Lewis Ellison’s and Tairan Qiu’s “From Black Girl Exclusion to Black Girl Empowerment: Understanding One Black Girl’s Digital and STEAM Literacy Practices as Empowering, Liberatory, and Agentic.” In their article, the authors illustrate the agentic experiences of one adolescent Black girl’s (i.e. “Star”) literacy digital and STEAM practices. Using the knowledgeable agents of the digital framework (Lewis Ellison, 2018) they show us the ways that Star’s involvement in a digital application workshop for Black girls and their fathers and a robotics club workshop for Black girls reshaped her understanding of herself as a leader and innovator. Through rich qualitative (e.g. focus groups, interviews) and multimodal data (e.g. photos, audio/video recordings, vision boards, digital app making), the authors provide readers with thick descriptive illustrations of Star as knowledge maker, creator, and producer within these spaces outside of the classroom. We see, too, the ways that collective educational efforts can and do disrupt systems that discourage and marginalize Black girls and women of varying identities in digital and STEAM literacies.

In the closing article, “‘Mi Lucha es Tu Lucha; Tu Lucha es Mi Lucha’: Latinx Immigrant Youth Organizers Facilitating a New Common Sense Through Coalitional Multimodal Literacies,” Alicia Rusoja, Yared Portillo, and Olivia Vazquez Ponce examine the role that multimodal literacy plays in the organizing of Latinx immigrant youth in Philadelphia, PA. The authors found that the young Latinx immigrant organizers composed community-centered multimodal renderings, including posters, sweatshirts, photographs, and comics, which (re)positioned them as organic intellectuals who critique the colonial logics of the U.S. immigrant rights movement, and transform it into one that is inclusive, intergenerational, and intersectional. Through their renderings, these young Latinx immigrants activists, together with older community leaders and family members, and in solidarity with Black people and other communities of Color, mobilized coalitional multimodal literacies to envision and enact a decolonial world.

We are grateful to all the scholars for their beautiful and brilliant research in this special issue. Their work reminds all of us to witness, affirm, and nurture Black and Latinx young people as agentic futuremakers who employ rich creative multimodalities to resist racial injustice and design new life visions that are celebratory and emancipatory.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).