Reading and (Re)writing the Civic World: An Asian American Girl-Centric Literary Inquiry

• In Event: Saturday Roundtable Session 11:25 am
  In Roundtable Session: Literary Empowerment: Disrupting Tropes, Reimagining Worlds, and Fostering Equity Through Reading and Writing (Table 16)

Abstract

Literacy scholars have found that curricula integrating diverse literary texts can enable historically minoritized youth to theorize and address civic injustices – and cultivate, by extension, their civic identities. Yet, little scholarship has explored how this form of education can support the civic learning of a critical group: Asian American girls. In conditions of heteropatriarchy and anti-Asian hatred, these youth confront unique intersectional barriers to sociopolitical belonging. This paper draws on a practitioner research study that addressed this gap by tracing how eight Indonesian American girls in a large northeast city transacted with literary texts for civic learning in a virtual critical civic education community. The paper traces two findings and the significance of this topic for the education field.

Author

• Ankhi Guha Thakurta, Boston College