Radical Youth Literacies: Black Resistance, Disability, and Liberation

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Sunday 9:45 am - Gold 3

Session Type: Roundtable Session

Abstract

This paper session examines how Black youth craft liberatory literacies that contest racialized ableism, gendered surveillance, and deficit framings in and beyond school. Across studies of stuttering activism, Black girls’ Sista Circles in sport spaces, radical Afrocentric storytelling, and Black Cognitive Joy, presenters illuminate creative practices—narrative, embodied, and communal—that reframe learning as political work and healing. Collectively, the papers theorize youth meaning-making as counterpublic pedagogy, showing how aesthetic, linguistic, and metacognitive practices build identities that refuse containment and offer design implications for classrooms that nurture resistance, belonging, and joy.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Research Focus on Black Education

Chair

• Shawn S. Savage, University of North Carolina - Wilmington

Papers

• Activism as Resistance: The Uprising of Black Youth with Stuttering Disabilities - Antonio L. Ellis, American University; William N. Thomas, American University; Phelton Cortez Moss, Virginia Commonwealth University; Eugene Pringle, American University

• Beyond the Mat: Centering the Literacy Experiences of Black Girls in Gymnastics through Sista Circles - Tamara N. Moten, Wesleyan College

• Unspeakable: A Critical & Conceptual Collaboration to Unveil Black Cognitive Joy - Karina Forsythe-Cummings, University of Michigan