Critical Memetic Analysis: A Culturally Sustaining, Trauma-Informed Literacy Intervention

• In Event: Culturally Responsive Literacy Education

Abstract

This paper reports the results of a mixed methods, multiple case study of a culturally sustaining, trauma informed literacy invention: critical memetic analysis. Youth remain active, agentive meaning makers in virtual spaces through their use of literacies and texts. These tools are socioculturally developed, and reflect the hegemonic structures within society. Understanding youth literacies and meaning making with memetic texts is one way to study micropractices reproduce or challenged larger oppressive macrostructures. We found the repetition of questions related to audience grew youth understandings of diverse ideological perspectives while foregrounding youth experiences and, increasingly, how individual actors resist or disrupt oppressive systems. The findings support and extend research that challenges static notions of how literacies can be taught and measured.

Authors

• Leah Panther, Mercer University

• Latoya Tolefree, Fulton County Schools

• Paul Siegel, Mercer University