Literacies of Contention in/for Digital Civic Ecologies

• In Event: Cross-Platformization, Digital Media Platforms as Global Ecosystems, and the Shifting Understandings of Critical Platform Practices

Abstract

Overview
This article reports findings from the second phase of a larger social design experiment (Gutiérrez & Jurow, 2016), which enjoined researchers and teachers in creating, and studying the implementation of, inquiry-based units focused on digital civic ecologies — or the intermediation of digital and civic life, and its implications for personal and societal transformation. This phase invited ninth-grade ELA students (n=80) to investigate the relations among literacy, digital media, and political contention — and their role in modulating civic identity and action.

Theoretical Framework
We ground this phase in the literatures of social movement studies (Choudry, 2015) and platform studies (Burgess, 2021). Scholars of social movements argue that civic activism draws on contextually distinct constellations of tactics for political agitation — or, a “repertoire of contention” (Tarrow, 1998). Significantly, this repertoire has historically been conditioned by the technologies available for coordinating dissent. Public protest, for instance, became a predominant mode of contention in the 20th century, in part, because imaging technologies multiplied the visual effect of masses gathered in public spaces (Bevins, 2023).

Until recently, many saw digital media marking a similar shift in the politics of contention: e.g., by facilitating networked participation and democratizing information (Jenkins, 2006). However, scholars of platform studies demonstrate that these rosy projections elided the bleaker effects of digital intercession. Increasing access to information also amplified misinformation (Dhokalia et al., 2023); and networked participation has mobilized reactionary communities around nativist politics (Marwick & Partin, 2023). The same technologies once positioned as opening new modes of civic identity, participation, and contention, in other words, have instead compounded the civic crises we face — raising profound questions for civic literacy education.

Methods and Analysis
To address these questions, we designed and studied the implementation of a unit where students were introduced to a range of dynamic civic literacy practices — restorying (Discussant, 2016), online protest (Price-Dennis & Sealey-Ruiz, 2021), and transnational media activism (Brough, 2020; Nemer, 2022) — and considered these practices in relation to their own civic literacy identities. Data sources included teacher/researcher fieldnotes, classroom artifacts, students reflections, and interviews — all of which were analyzed inductively (for emergent patterns) and deductively (for themes related to digital literacy, identity, and civic action).

Findings and Significance
Our findings crystallize a provisional framework for understanding the literacies of contention that young people are engaging to critique, or intervene in, the civic crises posed by emerging digital ecologies. Importantly, it also clarifies the incongruities young people identified between the forms of civic literacy available to them and the scale of the civic problems that most concerned them. Such asymmetries, we argue, make visible limitations to the role that “literacies” play in civic transformation. Rather than obviating the project of “civic literacies,” we suggest this indicates a need for increased attention to the relationship between literacy and other modes of contention in civic teaching and learning. We conclude with promising insights from our study, which help to illustrate what such lines of inquiry might look like in practice.

Authors

• T. Philip Nichols, Baylor University

• Alexandra Thrall, Baylor University

• Kevin R. Magill, Baylor University

• Christine Derbyshire, Independent Researcher