Queering critical literacies: disidentifications and queer futurity in an afterschool storytelling and roleplaying game

Purpose This paper aims to describe the critical literacies of high school students engaged in a youth participatory action research (YPAR) project focused on a roleplaying game, Dungeons and Dragons, in a queer-led afterschool space. The paper illustrates how youth critique and resist unjust societal norms while simultaneously envisioning queer utopian futures. Using a queer theory framework, the authors consider how youth performed disidentifications and queer futurity. Design/methodology/approach This study is a discourse analysis of approximately 85 hours of audio collected over one year. Findings Youth engaged in deconstructive critique, disidentifications and queer futurity in powerful enactments of critical literacies that involved simultaneous resistance, subversion, imagination and hope as youth envisioned queer utopian world-building through their fantasy storytelling. Youth acknowledged the injustice of the present while radically envisioning a utopian future. Originality/value This study offers an empirical grounding for critical literacies centered in queer theory and explores how youth engage with critical literacies in collaboratively co-authored texts. The authors argue that queering critical literacies potentially moves beyond deconstructive critique while simultaneously opening spaces for resistance, imagination and utopian world-making through linguistic and narrative-based tools.

Critical archives for decolonial literacies

This article relates to the information ethical critique of archives in the decolonial debate for social memory appropriation and cultural knowledge production. The decolonial approach is presented as a critical literacy emergent tendency that searches for evidencing conflicts in the formation of archives, collections and common knowledge in its power relations of historic social constructions. Decolonial theory have been unfolding in many areas and bringing diverse questionings focusing on the plurality of knowledge and ethical preservation, especially on ethno-racial relations. This article tries to broad the field of information science production pointing to a fictional problematic frontier of meaning making, dispute and collective reality. Looking for support on a psychoanalysis approach to cultural trauma, Lacan's symbolic contribution helps to evidence perspectives on ways of reporting and constituting social conflict with development of archival devices, communication contends and social memory. The biographical and performance artistic aspects presented, complements decolonial perspectives in what is referred to as “neo-documentalism”, in the field of Information Science, as a poetic character intrinsic in critical literacies of information. Abstrato (pt): Relaciona a crítica dos arquivos no debate decolonial pela apropriação social da informação e produção cultural do conhecimento. A abordagem decolonial se apresenta como um letramento crítico evidenciando conflitos na formação dos arquivos, acervos e do conhecimento comum em suas relações de poder e construção histórica social. As abordagens da psicanálise de Lacan para o trauma cultural ajudam a apoiar perspectivas sobre as formas de relatar e constituir conflitos sociais com o desenvolvimento de dispositivos e conteúdos simbólicos arquivísticos. Os aspectos biográficos e performáticos apresentados complementam a perspectiva decolonial no que se denomina “neodocumentalismo”, no campo da Ciência da Informação, como caráter artístico intrínseco aos letramentos críticos da informação.

Activating Joy and Hope in Critical Literacies Instruction: Responding Pedagogically to Youth Skepticism in a YPAR Project

In the face of persistent racial injustice, critical literacy approaches to instruction frequently involve investigating and altering unjust racialized power structures through critical action. However, what happens when youth have become understandably skeptical of action for change? This analysis uses healing frameworks to explore the critical literacies of Black and Latinx youth in a youth participatory action research project that took place in the early days of the Trump administration, as well as the pedagogies employed. The salience and persistence of racial injustice in national politics and the local school district operated against youth’s reserves of hope and belief in change work, introducing tension into a project focused on transformation. As a pedagogical response, the project’s two White coteachers facilitated new pathways for critical literacies that involved joy, care, and new audiences. This response focused on joy in critical work and prompted some, though notably not all, of the youth to reengage with critical action and articulate hope for justice in their local worlds.