Learning Practices of Livability Toward Elsewheres: Critical Digital Literacies in the Everyday Activities of Trans and Queer Youth

Shrodes, Addie

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-49a2-b090

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Learning Practices of Livability Toward Elsewheres: Critical Digital Literacies in the Everyday Activities of Trans and Queer Youth

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This dissertation considers how 21 trans and queer teenagers learned to create livable lives in unlivable worlds through routine participation on social media. Through a multi-year partnership with an interdisciplinary gender program in Chicago, I employed a humanizing qualitative design anchored by interview and participatory visual methods over three nested phases to theorize with and alongside 21 participants ages 13-19 from a range of social positions. In the first phase, I conducted semi-structured interviews and surveys. In the second phrase, I conducted follow-up interviews and media reactions with 16 focal participants selected with attention to intersections of identity. In the final phase, I conducted participatory research with four focal participants anchored by five virtual sessions over three months. I argue that youth learn routine practices to nurture life otherwise across differentially marginalized social positions in the face of systematic injustice. These survival-rich practices arise out of necessity, yet they offer windows into possible elsewheres—expansive ways of being and organizing life. Through this dissertation, I intervene in the dominant paradigm of critical literacy that shapes multiple fields and build knowledge on how youth learn with digital tools. Most scholarship on critical digital literacies trace youth resistance, considering how young people use digital tools to disrupt injustice or participate in activism for school and state inclusion. The dissertation suggests resistance alone is insufficient for youth struggling to survive and thrive amid persistent encounters with injustice. Drawing on queer and trans studies, capaciously considered, to forward the framework of livability toward elsewheres, I expand the critical literacy paradigm from a focus on resistance to include practices of livability that sustain youth in the face of domination and open up possibilities for life otherwise. Specifically, I focus on the role of humor, hope, and radical joy in practices of livability toward elsewheres. In the analysis, I consider how youth learn these practices through digital activities and tools, from TikTok videos to Twitter threads. Through the study, I contribute new insights on practices of critical digital literacies, as well as how youth learn these practices through participation on social media. The study concludes with three ways the dissertation may inform design for teaching and learning in social justice education and equity-oriented English language arts.

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