This article provides a reanalysis of a multisited case study of youth arts, media, and critical literacy to theorize the role of networked and physical “publics” within which youth engage with issues they care about, making claims about their lived experiences. An understanding of the nature and role of publics is crucial to productive formulations of literacy research and pedagogies in schools, communities, and nations. The theorizations offered here, related to ethical and aesthetic public engagement, spatiality, and mobilities, focus on those moments when youth come together in community and educational sites to create counternarratives in relation to their lives and futures. Three examples of situated counternarratives are analyzed to illustrate how youth exhibit powerful engagements with discursive resources across spatial and material locations and with various publics, producing critical social and political analyses in the local/global interface that often go unrecognized or unrealized in educational contexts.
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