Collecting Social Justice and Curating Cosmopolitanism: Understanding Youth Digital Literacies as Social Tactics in Navigating (In)Justice

• In Event: Roundtable Session 6
  In Roundtable Session: Adolescent Language Processes

Abstract

As new(er) communicative landscapes emerge and the social contexts in which we communicate become more hybrid and malleable, writing becomes a practice not solely interested in ekphrasis (description) but experience. Employing a theoretical framework guided by social semiotics and electracy, this paper draws on data from a longitudinal connective ethnography to examine how three youth writers use the digital social practices of curating and collecting to engage in issues of social justice and contribute to more g(l)ocal understandings of cosmopolitanism. By privileging how the visual and material concerns are attended to in youth digital literacies and networked social practices, this paper interrogates what educators and researchers alike may learn from considering curating and collecting as radical forms of composing.

Author

• Jon Michael Wargo, Michigan State University