Digital Authoring: Negotiations of Identity, Agency, and Power Among Girls Resettled as Refugees From Thailand

• In Event: 70.029 - Examining Resilience and Agency Across Race and Ethnicity

Abstract

Drawing on critical sociocultural theory of literacy, this paper focuses on findings from an eight-month qualitative study based in the Intermountain West. It considers how nine girls who were resettled as refugees from Thailand author themselves in digital spaces. Focusing on the girls’ authoring processes, which represent the intersection of identity enactments and complex power relations, illustrates the ways in which they actively produced their identities by playing with contexts and producing digital worlds in which their authoring processes were recognized and valued. Engaging with youth’s digital authoring processes has the potential to allow educators working with students with refugee backgrounds to create meaningful learning experiences that affirm diverse knowledges and disrupt homogenizing deficit discourses surrounding refugee youth.

Author

• Delila Omerbasic, Tulane University