Critical Aesthetics of Teens’ Digital Activist Literacies in an Online Multi-Case Study

• In Event: Expanding Media Literacy Through Critical Digital Aesthetics

Abstract

This paper draws from a three-month multi-case study of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) teens’ daily literacy practices in various social media forms, including Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube. Through case study, cross-case, and online research methods, this study investigated how six teens enacted social media literacies related to their racialized experiences and digital identities (e.g., change makers, social commentators, activists, and allies). Online, they demonstrated social consciousness (Ladson-Billings, 1995), creating and sharing content in response to local and widely publicized incidents of social injustice (e.g., police brutality, racial justice movements, civil unrest, political division, and the global pandemic) and their lived experiences. This paper, in particular, focuses on teens’ digital activist literacies (Author, 2023), and a new and timely pedagogical framework, Culturally Digitized Pedagogies (CDP) (Author, 2022; Author 2023), expanding recommendations for culturally-infused teaching (Ladson-Billings, 1995/2014; Paris, 2012; Paris & Alim, 2014/2017; McCarty & Lee, 2014) to better support the learning of BIPOC teens. Although I did not facilitate students’ digital literacies in online contexts, I closely observed their social media profiles, which they operated with agency and autonomy, collected artifacts such as justice-oriented content they created or shared from other creators, paying particular attention to their enactment of digital literacies, and interviewed them about it. Ultimately, this paper suggests that culturally relevant pedagogies should be expanded to include digital activist literacies, reimagining the value of intersecting social media and student-authored critical digital texts in traditional educational spaces.

This analysis draws from Rosenblatt’s aesthetic stance (1981,1994). Teens in the study represented this stance by adopting what Rosenblatt (1981) argues is one of two main ways of looking at the world. For instance, they responded to the social injustice they saw or experienced in the world in which they were living through their digital activist literacies. Thus, they aligned with the aesthetic stance, which Rosenblatt describes as “the sensuous, the affective, the emotive, the qualitative” (1994, p. 32). These teens’ posts show a sense of social awareness, sharing their feelings through narrating stories composed in critical aesthetic ways. In other words, these teens’ digital activists' literacies deeply involved considerations of how they wanted their audiences to read their text, resulting in their reading and creating aesthetically. ​​An aesthetic digital lens on their content creation attends to a specific organization of composing various content, including writing and multimodal techniques, such as style, sentences, transitions, and other intentional composing moves. This lens affords opportunities to understand how student choices in content creation have implications for cultivating culturally digitized pedagogical praxis and the possibilities of a justice-oriented ELA curriculum based on teens' digital activist literacies.

Findings from the cross-case analysis illustrate that teens engaged with aesthetic literacies as they (a) made sense of the intersections of marginalized identities; (b) enacted activism, action, and allyship; (c) reimagined the society they live in through social media literacies.

Author

• Dominique Skye McDaniel, Kennesaw State University