Civic Redesigns: Exploring Asian American Youths’ YPAR-Based Sociopolitical Literacies of Resistance

• In Event: (Re)Shaping Our Educational Futures Through Literacies of Resistance

Abstract

Our paper will explore how, in a virtual Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) community, ethnically, culturally, and linguistically diverse Asian American (AsAm) youth from a northeast metropolitan area drew on their multiple literacies to redesign civic life – that is, the sociopolitical arena of activity encompassing formal political communities and informal citizen groups (Mirra & Garcia, 2017). This paper – which resists AsAms’ erasure in literacy studies and democratic life more broadly – will illuminate AsAm youths’ powerful, yet under-studied sociopolitical literacies of resistance.
This paper is informed by AsianCrit (Iftikar & Museus, 2018) – a theoretical lens centralizing AsAms’ racialized experiences in White supremacist, imperialist, and colonial conditions. Besides illuminating the specific exclusions AsAm youth face in the public sphere, AsianCrit (2018) also underscores the “alternative and empowering” forms of experiential knowledge they cultivate about the possibilities and tensions of democratic life. The paper also extends critical literacy perspectives (Luke, 2012; Vasquez et al., 2019) to highlight how, in our YPAR community, youth enacted critical reading and writing practices with the aim of transforming the “social relations and material conditions” of public life (Luke, 2012, p.9).
For this paper, we (an Indian American faculty member, an Indian international PhD student, and a Chinese international PhD student) draw on our work alongside nine high school-aged AsAm youth in a virtual YPAR community that we facilitated from Summer 2024-Spring 2025. YPAR is a research approach that centers youth as knowledge producers and social agents (Caraballo et al., 2017). Across our program, youth cultivated research questions about issues they cared about (e.g., Asian identity representation; the tokenization of POC); conducted research into those topics; and presented their results in a public-facing May 2025 showcase. For this paper, we drew on YPAR session recordings, youths’ literate artifacts, and our field-notes. Our analysis involved multiple rounds of coding, memo-writing, and team debriefs to discover how youth drew on their multiple literacies to re-design civic life into a space of greater justice (Saldaña, 2013).
Our analysis revealed two ways AsAm youth mobilized their multiple literacies of sociopolitical resistance in our YPAR community. The first was how several youth used their multiple literacies to resist erasure by re-imagining public spaces into sites of AsAm greater inclusion. As an example, a youth researcher explored the impact of culturally sustaining spaces on AsAm youth like herself, and presented a multimodal PowerPoint during the showcase that advocated for their creation across public contexts (e.g., schools, communities). Next, we found how most youth used their multiple literacies to reframe dominant narratives about their communities. During one session, for instance, another youth created a multimodal composition celebrating histories of AsAm activism that are erased in mainstream curricula.
This paper will expand field knowledge of AsAm youths’ sociopolitical literacies of resistance, and challenge these youths’ persistent educational and democratic marginalization (Yu et al., 2024). It will illuminate pathways for future research into AsAm youths’ sociopolitical literacies, as well as concrete ways for K-12 educators cultivate youths’ practices through critical, loving, and humanizing literacy instruction.

Authors

• Ankhi Guha Thakurta, Boston College

• Deepshikha Banerjee, Boston College

• Yueyang Shen, Boston College