Imaginative Rupture and Re/Mixing Literacies in “Let’s Talk About Election 2020” (Poster 11)

• In Event: Designing for Racial Justice Through Speculative Pedagogies: Learning to Build Liberatory Futures

Abstract

Objectives: In this study, we explore the concept of rupture as a phenomenon of youth speculative civic composing that entails: challenging normative conceptions of time, space, and identity; re/mixing literacies; and the pursuit of historicized perspectives on current issues. We then illuminate this phenomenon through analysis of two youth-created media pieces, published on the website run by National Public Radio affiliate KQED, Let’s Talk about Election 2020. Both compositions evidenced rupture–one from Jazmin on Black Lives Matter and one from Luke on climate change. In analyzing these compositions, we seek to illuminate just a few of the diverse ways that youth may engage in speculative civic composing.

Theoretical Framework: The notion of youth speculative civic composing (Garcia & Mirra, 2020) brings together expansive orientations to youth civic composing with the joint potential and urgency of speculative imagination to compose a world that is joyful and just, remaking and replacing current structures of racial and economic oppression.

Defining rupture as moments in which youth employed tools of multi-literacies and heteroglossia (Bakhtin, 1981) in order to write themselves as historical actors (Gutierrez et al. 2019, p. 294), we sought to explore how youth enact imaginative rupture to articulate a vision of the future yet to be realized. We wondered, what is the texture of rupture in youth civic media composing? In what ways and with what tools do youth imagine a liberatory future through rupture?

Methods: Through ongoing collective viewing and consensus process, we identified media segments that suggested rupture, working toward the definition theorized in this chapter: moments or segments in which youth pushed the boundaries of a public media genre and mixed multiple literacies to articulate their role as change agents within their communities, simultaneously looking to the past and present to imagine changes they desire for a more just future. We take a phenomenological approach, using fine grained video analysis techniques to further explore texture and tools of rupture.

Findings: We found that Jazmin and Luke breached normative conceptions of time and space, interweaving literacies of past and present, connecting the historical and personal, and the global to the local. They articulated their own identities and experiences with racism and climate change, placing themselves inside these charged historical narratives.

Significance: Young people are too often treated as lacking - lacking in education, in political awareness, in motivation, or in skills. We must invest faith in the ability of rupture in youth. Here we provide evidence that it is happening, in small and big ways, all around us. We must choose to look and see, listen, and be curious about the composing of youth, even and perhaps especially when it is not connected to a school-based project.

Authors

• Emma Bene, Stanford University

• Emma Carene Gargroetzi, University of Texas at Austin

• Lynne Zummo, University of Utah

• Alexandra Aguilar, University of Texas at Austin