Rewriting the Popular Discourse on Food: Multimodal and Multilingual Facebook Posts of Indigenous Youth in India

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session 10
  In Roundtable Session: On Storying Equitable Literacies Education

Abstract

This paper sketches a research plan that can explore literacy and narrative skills for indigenous youth in global south, enacted through popular mediums, that is Facebook. Pragmatically the study gains immediacy for it responds to a prolonged Covid induced lockdown in India. Theoretically, its significance lies in working through the double bind of literacy for marginal communities, for its simultaneous empowering and yet potentially alienating affect. Building on the concept of ‘re-storying’, the paper looks at writing as re-writing and learning a new language as an act of unlearning the hegemonic, in this case around food practices. The emerging insights from this paper are result of analyzing multimodal Facebook posts of youth participants and in-depth interviews with them.

Author

• Gautam Singh Bisht, Northwestern University