Disrupting Power and Dreaming Liberatory Worlds Through Multimodalities

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This 120-minute symposium explores how nondominant youth and communities leverage multimodalities to disrupt interlocking structures of power and dream liberatory worlds rooted in cultural histories. The five papers employ a range of qualitative methods and critical frameworks, presenting unique perspectives on how youth and communities use multimodalities, multimodal literacies, and multimodal composition to resist oppression and imagine other possibilities. The session will contribute to scholarly conversations on the role of multimodalities in critical and everyday literacies that support collective thriving in the face of white supremacy, antiblackness, systemic racism, settler colonialism, English monolingual supremacy, and cisheteropatriarchy. The symposium will also delineate the ethical responsibilities of researchers and educators to notice the creative tools nondominant youth use in moves toward liberation.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Writing and Literacies

Chair

• Addie Shrodes, Northwestern University

Papers

• The Critical Knowledge Production of Black Girls Through Multimodal Texts - LaTasha Mosley, Georgia State University; Gholnecsar E. Muhammad, Georgia State University

• Humor, Learning, and Multimodal Choreographies of Political Possibility on YouTube - Addie Shrodes, Northwestern University

• Guitarras on the Rise: Framing Youth Sierreño Bands as Translingual Ingenuity - Cati de los Rios, University of California - Berkeley

• African American and Latinx Girls' Compositions of Multimodal Community Journaling as Artifactual Literacies About STEAM - Tisha Lewis Ellison, The University of Georgia; Brad Robinson, Texas State University; Tairan Qiu, University of Georgia - Athens

• Lifestreaming Beauty: Reading antoniobtwo's User-Created Procedural Beauty Discourse as Queer Counterstorytelling - Jon Michael Wargo, Boston College

Discussant

• Kris D. Gutiérrez, University of California - Berkeley