The Literate Lives of Youth of Color: Examining Race, Home, and Displacement

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

In this session panelists explore the humanizing processes (Paris & Winn, 2013) and practices in which youth of color employ Literacies of Refuge. The scholars on this panel conceptualize these literacies as the ways young people engage with texts of the word and world, specifically literacies that create/cultivate literal and figurative spaces of protection from the oppressive conditions of a white supremacist, patriarchal, heteronormative, capitalist, settler colonial society. Particularly, in this era of #NoDAPL, #BlackLivesMatter, Immigration bans, and Islamaphobia, how youth of color compose themselves in relation to and within these conditions and how they create and understand themselves outside these oppressive structures is paramount. Panelists draw from empirical studies with Black, Im/migrant, and Latinx youth in out-of-school spaces.

Sub Unit

• Division G - Social Context of Education / Division G - Section 3: Studies of the multiple languages and literacies of varied social contexts

Chair

• Davena Y. Jackson, Michigan State University

Papers

• Liberation Literacies: Multiple Literacies as Spaces of Equity and Refuge - Jamila Lyiscott, University of Massachusetts – Amherst

• Black Youth Textual Sanctuaries as Means to Refusing Suffering in America's Schools - Justin Avery Coles, Fordham Graduate School of Education

• "Unnormal Sisterhood": Cultivating Interdependence With Girls of Color - Grace D. Player, University of Pennsylvania

• "We Know Because We've Lived It": Recognizing the Knowledge, Pedagogies, and Community Cultural Literacies of Im/migrant Youth - Monica Gonzalez, University of Colorado - Boulder

Discussant

• Django Paris, University of Washington