Black Girls and Women Recalling, Resisting, and Reclaiming Self Through Multimodal Composing

Session Type: Invited Speaker Session

Abstract

This proposed session is situated at the intersection of Black Feminism, digital literacies, and Black girlhood studies. It examines the multiple ways Black girls and women use multimodal compositions as tools of resistance to recall, resist, and reclaim self. Historically, Black girls’ intersecting gendered and racial identities have positioned them at the margins of society.
Black girls are confronted with various forms of oppression that work together to produce social injustice and marginalization (Collins, 2000; Turner & Griffin, 2020). As a collective of Black women digital literacy scholars with an activist-driven agenda, we employ epistemological approaches and theoretical orientations designed to center and affirm Black girls and women.

This proposed session contributes to a small yet growing body of scholarship focusing on Black girls and women’s digital literacies. Their digital literacies have been the area least

researched in Black girl literacy scholarship (Muhammad & Haddix, 2016). This body of scholarship has examined Black girls' affordances, specifically their use of multimodal composition to represent themselves and assume agency as both consumers and producers of knowledge. Digital literacies serve as counternarratives and are emancipatory providing Black girls and women the freedom, creative control, autonomy, and agency to author their lives by “speaking out on misrepresentations of who they are and negotiating their identities” (Price- Dennis et al., 2017, p. 4). This new type of counter-storytelling allows Black girls and women to use digital technologies as tools of resistance to disrupt dominant narratives and (re)present and (re)write images of who they are and how they see themselves (Ellison, 2017; Greene, 2016, 2021; Griffin, 2021; Muhammad & Womack, 2015; Price-Dennis et al., 2017; Turner &
Griffin, 2020).
This proposed session advances scholarship on Black girls and women’s digital literacies, focusing on the nuanced ways they composed content across multiple platforms, including digital stories, podcasting, and digital apps. Our work also extends scholarship on how literacy teachers can incorporate multimodal pedagogies in literacy instruction to support Black girls and women. What are the nuanced ways that Black girls and women create content using particular digital tools? Given this, how do Black girls and women use these various digital tools to dismantle racial justice and recall, resist, and reclaim self? How do they use these tools to express themselves and survive in a society that oppresses them (Collins, 2000; Richardson, 2003)? As digital literacy scholars, how do we support literacy teachers to incorporate multimodal pedagogies in ways that affirm Black girls’ personhood and cultivate a sense of agency and autonomy? What new theoretical underpinnings can be developed to further understand how Black girls and women recall, resist, and reclaim self digitally?
We are aware of how racial injustice impacts the socioemotional wellness of Black girls, resulting in schools being sites of contention that often do not account for the lived experiences, literacy traditions, and cultural identities that they bring with them into the literacy classroom. Furthermore, literacy classrooms often do not serve as socio-emotional supports, allowing Black girls to use print or digital writing to construct identities or make meaning since writing in schools traditionally adheres to narrow conceptions of literacy and tends to be viewed solely as a skills-based practice.

Sub Unit

• AERA Presidential Session

Chair

• Delicia Tiera Greene, University at Albany - SUNY

Papers

• (W)rites of Passage: Black Girls’ Journaling and Podcast Script Writing as Counter-Narratives - Delicia Tiera Greene, University at Albany - SUNY

• Intersectional Multimodal Analysis: (Re)framing Agency, Reclamation, and Resistance in a Black College Woman’s Pandemic Video - Jennifer Danridge Turner, University of Maryland

• Restorying Digital YAL (Young Adult Literature) Curricula: Learning With and From Black Girls - Autumn A. Griffin, University of North Carolina - Charlotte

• Toward a Knowledgeable Agents of the Digital Framing for Black Women and Girls’ Digital and STEAM Literacies - Tisha Lewis Ellison, University of Georgia

Discussant

• Detra Price, The Ohio State University