Abstract
The global pandemic has dramatically flipped the script on many aspects of our lives. We are now in an environment with increased rates of anxiety, depression, and substance use disorder. We are encountering unprecedented challenges to mental health (National Institutes of Health, 2023). The rapid normalization of remote learning has many educators lagging behind, while the “learning loss” experienced by students over the last three years has been consequential at every level of education. Primary and secondary teachers are leaving the profession at unprecedented rates. Global warming and racial inequities continue to push our apparent social order to the brink of devastation. According to a recent Pew Research Center poll, four out of 10 Americans believe that humanity is living in “apocalyptic” times (Diamant, 2022), and the Doomsday Clock by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is now the closest it has ever been to midnight (Mecklin, 2023). What does all this mean for literacy research? In this special issue, we tackle this apocalyptic moment not necessarily in the sense of destruction on a catastrophic scale, but in the deeper sense of the term. The Greek root for “apocalypse” (αποκαλυπτω | αποκαλυψισ) is a verb meaning “to uncover, reveal, lay bare, or make transparent what has been hidden.” It is in this sense that we see an opportunity for literacy researchers to play a pivotal role in fostering greater authenticity, transparency, and ultimately transformative action that will lead to repairing and healing our broken world. The articles in this special issue are a modest step in this direction.
In “These Tellings: Explosive Love as Literacy Research,” Vaughn W. M. Watson and Joanne E. Marciano move us toward a new vision of literacy at a crossroads. They explore the potential for a different, intense, and possible love in literacy research, teaching, and learning: a cosmic, explosive love. Through the exploration of selected narrative vignettes during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Watson and Marciano name “these tellings” as a means for researchers to assert the possibilities across two interconnected approaches: these tellings as beginnings and our lives as entangled in our work. Despite the challenges of our tumultuous times, Watson and Marciano point to opportunities for (re)conceptualizing prisms through which to engage in literacy research and practice as we recognize, respond to, and build from both joy and heartache urgently present, across times past, current, and to come.
In “‘Our Voice and Dreams Matter’: Supporting Youths’ Racial Literacy,” Joanne E. Marciano, Lauren Elizabeth Reine Johnson, and Alecia Beymer's qualitative study examines how youth participants in an ongoing community-based literacy initiative sought to increase awareness of racial justice among residents of their subsidized housing community in support of the Black Lives Matter movement in the summer of 2020 and throughout the 2020–2021 academic year. Drawing on theories of racial literacy and critical arts-based literacy, they examined youths’ engagement in 44 weekly 2-hour-long Zoom sessions of the literacy initiative held between June 2020 and June 2021. Specifically, they examined how youths designed, facilitated, and participated in critical arts-based literacy projects related to children's and young adult literature they chose to read focused on racial justice. This study contributes new insights into youths’ enactments of racial literacy, possibilities for art-making to support youths’ racial literacy, and the urgent need for literacy instruction responsive to youths’ voices and dreams, particularly during times of crisis.
In “Theorizing Literacies as Affective Flows: Attuning to the Otherwise Possibilities of Hip-Hop's ‘In-the-Red Frequencies,’” Bessie P. Dernikos, Bianca Nightengale-Lee, Jaye Johnson Thiel, Kimberly Lenters, and Erin Bailey provide a theoretical and conceptual reimagining of how meaning-making, literacies, identities, power, privilege, and in/equities are entangled with/in non/human sociomaterial force relations. Inspired by Rose, they build on the theoretical and philosophical principle of hip-hop flow, rupture, layering, and sampling. This piece serves as an invitation to literacy educators to adopt Afrodiasporic approaches to mobility that attune to “in-the-red frequencies,” or “noisy” political philosophies and practices that Black communities have used to create alternative spaces that challenge white supremacist patriarchal systems of oppression. Afrodiasporic approaches to mobility are an alternative to Western humanist epistemologies that foreground affective literacy as individual. This article shows how Afrodiasporic epistemologies and methodologies, or “fugitive modes,” can foster more creative and emergent ways of theorizing affective literacies. The authors’ ultimate argument for theorizing affective literacies in apocalyptic times has implications for ethical teaching, learning, and research. Affective literacies highlight “otherwise worlds” not predicated on hegemonic whiteness, anti-Blackness, and sociopolitical violence.
In “Dark Persistence: Black College Women's COVID-19 Photo Essays,” Jennifer D. Turner draws on intersectional multimodal literacy frameworks and analytic methods to analyze how the photo essays of seven high-achieving Black undergraduate women visually and textually represented their persistence during the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. Turner found that women's photo essays evoked an “endarkened” persistence rooted in the legacy of Black people's collective struggle and survival. These photo essays demonstrated two significant themes: first, the affirmation of Black beauty through explicit practices of embracing natural Black hair and caring for bodies, and second, honoring the spirit by activities that were consciously designed to (re)connect with “sistafriends,” (re)claim rest, and nurture creativity.
Finally, in “Nurturing the Literacy Lives of Boys of Color During COVID-19,” Marisa Segel shows through her yearlong case study that when schools closed down due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the imagined divide between home and school was fundamentally altered. Educators relied on families more than ever to mediate their children's learning. Segel's case study details the narratives of 14 Black and Latinx families as they negotiated literacy practices with their teenage sons across remote schooling, book clubs, and home. Drawing on notions of literacy sponsorship, findings suggest that parents shaped boys’ literacies across material, emotional, embodied, and digital dimensions to bolster their sons’ school-sanctioned literacies within the home. Segel shows through these narratives how parents negotiated entangled identities as caregivers and teachers during the pandemic. In addition, she shows how the boys simultaneously acquiesced to and resisted their parents’ attempts at sponsorship. This study provides valuable insights for better understanding family literacy research.
Each of the articles in this issue seeks to give literacy researchers insights into how we as literacy researchers can theoretically and methodologically make transparent the roots of our challenges and stretch our imagination to navigate these times. We believe despite the doom and gloom that surrounds, there is a unique opportunity for literacy researchers to transcend many of the boundaries we have been struggling to eliminate.