Selves/Collectives/Landscapes: Tracing the Learning and Literacies of Indian and U.S. Urban Migrant Girls in Two Critical Civic Education Programs (Poster 50)

• In Event: Promising Scholarship in Education Research: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

Across the urban centers of the U.S. and India, the world’s two largest democracies, girls from migrant communities face similarly converging barriers to civic belonging (e.g., urban inequalities, sociocultural marginalization, heteropatriarchy). While prior research has found that critical, literacy-focused civic education programs can promote the sociopolitical inclusion of U.S. and Indian urban migrant youth, this work has mostly analyzed nation-specific programs centering these young people as wider demographic groups. We thus know little about how urban migrant girls across these two major democracies engage with literacy-based critical civic learning. Comparative research into this area is necessary to develop civic education programming that is informed by the contextual, yet comparably intersectional challenges these uniquely situated actors face.

This poster presentation will draw on a Comparative Case Study (Bartlett & Varvus, 2017) that addressed this gap. Building on sociocultural literacy studies, critical urban studies, and a transnational girlhoods framework, the project used practitioner methods to chart how urban migrant girls from two U.S. and Indian cities engaged with critical civic learning in two virtual afterschool programs. The poster will foreground findings from each program to illuminate how, in response to critical civic curricula, youth comparably leveraged their literate repertoires, intersectional identities, and lived experiences to assert emergent civic identities. Besides nuancing understandings of Indian and U.S. migrant girls as significant transnational civic actors, the poster will also provide recommendations for practitioners across both nations who seek to cultivate urban migrant girl-centric civic education programs.

Author

• Ankhi Guha Thakurta, Boston College
  Presenting Author