Restorying as Resistance: How Youth Resist and Reclaim Spaces as a Spatialized Literacies Nexus of Practice

• In Event: Sheraton Roundtable Session Five
  In Roundtable Session: Counter-Understandings: Gentrification, "Post-Truth," and the Reclamation of Space (Table 8)

Abstract

By looking at community spaces, we use the concept of “restorying” (Thomas & Stornaiuolo, 2016) to consider how children resist and reclaim material spaces. Spatialized literacies considers the intersections of bodies, ideology, power, economy, and literacy practices (Mills & Comber, 2015). We selected photos that illustrate disruptions in the nexus of practice across two research sites and found commonalities in how participants co-constructed space. For analysis, we employ Nexus Analysis (Scollon & Scollon, 2004) to identify disruptions taking place in photographs. We found disruptions occurred when participants' bodies ruptured expected discourses around safety and care. This study interrogates embodied hierarchies of everyday spaces in pursuit of truth and how space must be part of the conversation in fostering equity.

Authors

• Casey M. Pennington, SUNY Cortland
  Presenting Author

• Amy Walker, Kent State University
  Presenting Author