Toward a Knowledgeable Agents of the Digital Framing for Black Women and Girls’ Digital and STEAM Literacies

• In Event: Black Girls and Women Recalling, Resisting, and Reclaiming Self Through Multimodal Composing

Abstract

This paper examines the Knowledgeable Agents of the Digital (KAD) framework (Lewis Ellison,
2018) through Black women and girls’ agentive practices and digital and STEAM literate lives. Lewis Ellison explores how KAD is analyzed in the ways Black women and girls, through multimodal practices and tools (e.g., narratives, photographs, digital apps, and vision boards):
(a) are empowered within digital and non-digital texts; (b) foster agency as a means of remaking and re-identifying oneself (Lewis Ellison & Wang, 2019); and (c) reaffirm and self- define the roles and practices in which they engage (Lewis Ellison, 2018; Lewis Ellison & Qiu,

2023). This work can help encourage researchers to consider how KAD could be used for Black women and girls in other settings beyond digital and STEAM contexts. The erasure of Black women and girls’ childhood (Epstein et al., 2017), the exclusion and silencing of Black women and girls’ literacies, and the racial and social disparities in STEM/STEAM fields are criminal in how their brilliance, intellect, and bodies are eliminated in privileged spaces (Lewis Ellison et al., in press). This solution calls for a reimagining of more equitable research and discussions while resisting all injustices for all possibilities to be revealed. This work connects with AERA’s 2024 conference theme, as it comes during critical moments in racial, educational, and political histories of injustices and oppression.

Author

• Tisha Lewis Ellison, University of Georgia