Intersectional Identities and Literacy Participation in Youth-Centered Social Justice Work

• In Event: 25.021 - Adolescent Male Students and Their Negotiation of Patriarchal Privilege Across Literacies and Literary Contexts

Abstract

Research Purpose
Over the past five years, I have been part of a regional community with anti-racist youth programs in the U.S. Midwest. This qualitative study centered youth in two high schools, activists in school and the community. The school-based groups recognized schools as historically and systemically racist institutions. Students responded to racial justice issues often ignored, including in particular state-sanctioned violence against young Black men. Because diversity and equity work in schools often loses funding, a broad objective of this study asked about the literacy and learning practices. How was literacy and learning framed within these anti-racist youth leadership groups? What did it mean to learn in these interracial contexts? For this symposium, analysis highlights multiple identities, ideologies, and interactions of male participants, examining their literacy participation within their activism.
Theoretical Frameworks
I approached this study with a critical sociocultural perspective (Lewis & Moje, 2003), recognizing learning as a social and cultural process (Nasir, Rosebery, Warren, & Lee, 2006) and literacies as socially situated (Gee, 2000; Moll, 1992), laden by power relations, histories, language, people, and cultures. Guiding this work is the belief that young people need to participate within their own powerful literacies (Kirkland, 2013; Moje, 2002), to be creators of inquiry, knowledge, and critical consciousness (Ladson-Billings, 1995). Analysis relied on Black feminist and queer of color philosophers who use intersectionality to “[conceive] categories not as distinct but as always permeated by other categories, fluid and changing, always in the process of creating and being created by dynamics of power” (Hill Collins, 2015).
Methodology and Data Sources
As a public scholar in a critical ethnographic and connective study, I use humanizing and participatory research (Paris & Winn, 2013; Lincoln & González, 2008; Cammarota & Fine, 2010), meandering as a researcher to center and follow participant voice and choice. I used thematic and visual analysis and critical discourse analysis for close analysis of intense dialogic moments, aiming to center the multiple perspectives of youth.
Over eight months, I wrote field notes and gathered audio and video recordings, conversational interviews, and artifacts from student-led events and social media. As a white female researcher, I also practiced ongoing self-reflexion in journals and with participants. Keeping with the ethics of youth-centered, critical research, participation and data collection was continually negotiated (Rogers, Winters, Perry, LaMonde, 2015, p.12).
Preliminary Findings
Data analysis uses intersectionality to better understand complexities of participation and agency, particularly as marginalized and dominant identities intersect. Ideologies of maleness were central to participation. Intersectionalities were rendered visible within the broader context of social justice movements and how young people conceptualize racial and gender privilege.
Scholarly Significance
Of interest to learning in social contexts is the purposeful entanglement of school to out-of-school literacies and learning. Through youth activism, participants pushed boundaries of time and space and school. This study is significant because it does not stop at exploring literacy practices in school, but it also analyzes how identities and ideologies limit or shape engagement, and asks: At whose or what expense?

Author

• Abigail Rombalski, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities