Curatorial Play as Digital Literacy Praxis: Building a Youth-Led Digital Magazine

• In Event: Making Space for Youth-Produced Digital Texts as Remedy in a Time of “Crisis”: Inviting in Joy and Artistic Flourishing

Abstract

Objectives
The youth-led digital arts and writing magazine followed by this study aims to offer emerging creatives a space to celebrate and publish their work across mediums, from music to drawing to poetry. Situated in a broader participatory design research project (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016) and digital writing community housed on Discord, the teen writers have assembled an international editorial team of youth artists to curate each digital issue and conduct digital arts-based research on the publication. In this creative space to critique and arrange digital artwork, youth contend with the politics of digital curation, from framing fan art to writing using Artificial Intelligence.

Theoretical Framework: Critical Literacy through Digital Bricolage
Recent scholarship emphasizes online communities, such as fan-fiction sites, blogs, and servers, as examples of out-of-school sites for youth literacy practices to thrive (Lankshear & Knobel, 2006), while identifying the participatory affordances and challenges of such digital spaces (Jenkins, 2009). The process of playful curation, otherwise conceptualized as collage praxis (Whitelaw, 2021) or curatorial literacy (Player, 2024), offers sites for youth to critically analyze digital texts through the process of framing and remixing them. By remixing multimodal texts in new contexts, the editorial team has contended with the politics of artistic ownership across axes of artistic identity as well as the socially situated algorithmic logics and platform politics that inform the material conditions of their digital publication (Burgess, 2021).

Towards a Digital Arts-Based Methodology
To capture the fluid and multimodal design process of each zine, this study collected video data for each of the literary magazine’s visioning meetings and digital layout sessions. Drawing on a rich history of collage-based inquiry, (Butler-Kisber, 2007; Butler-Kisber & Poldoma, 2010; Davis, 2008; Davis & Butler-Kisber, 1999; Whitelaw, 2021), recordings and artifacts from the publication’s physical zine-making launch, in which editorial members could personalize physical copies of the first issue, were another data source for the study. Artifactual data includes multimodal magazine submissions and their corresponding group critiques. Tracing the emergence, resonance, uptake, and scale (Author et al., 2017) of each submitted art piece through the publication process illuminates the criticality required to collage, remix, and reframe works of art.


Findings and Significance: Navigating the Ethics of Digital Making
In an age in which self-publication, fan-art, and artificial intelligence are rapidly proliferating (Vadde, 2017), initial findings of this study suggest that digital curation offers a powerful participatory space (Broderick, 2014) for youth to be supported in engaging in critical conversations prompted by playful interactions with their digital creative environments (Author et al., 2024). Artists in this issue have photographed themselves holding or posing next to famous paintings, taking on the perspective of well-known book characters, and using generative AI to voice particular characters for their scenes, all opportunities for ELA teachers to critique online writing platforms and digital ecologies alongside students (Authors, 2023). In the context of digital literary and arts curation, play can be serious, which offers powerful entry points for educators to support youth through the ethical implications of creating artwork in a postdigital age.

Authors

• Clara Abbott, University of Pennsylvania

• Sunny Ajitabh, Rutgers University