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Thinking at the axes of homonationalism, civic education, and queer-inclusive social studies, this article complicates the uneven relationships between lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) exclusion and belonging. Arguing that more attention should be paid to how Genders and Sexualities Alliance (GSA) spaces may function to render particular imaginaries of the queer civic subject, and the U.S. queer civic subject in particular, more viable than others, I extend both the conceptual and methodological directions of out-of-school social studies research to underscore how equity – as a concept – becomes connotative of particular types of civic action and life. Highlighting how LGBTQ + youths’ talk can be discursively read and traced as a pedagogical text, I emphasize how a ‘good’ queer citizenry, and indeed a ‘good’ queer life, is one that follows the logics of cis-hetero-patriarchy and American exceptionalism. In so doing, I document the rhetorical reification and discursive production of queer complicity and community.

Building a more comprehensive understanding of gaming literacies, this article explores the kinds of literacy practices that emerge through participation and play within escape rooms. Based on a da...

The emergence of e-literature – texts created on and for digital devices – has coincided with innovative, transgressive methods of storytelling. Pry, an iOS-based text, exemplifies e-literature’s p...

This study explores how educators ( n = 23) in a graduate-level “teaching with technology” course used the affordances of digital composing, and sonic composition in particular, to “sound out” reflection. Using the twin-lenses of sociocultural theory and social semiotics, findings suggest that sound operated as a: rhetorical tool for illustrating affect/argument; complementary mode to syncretic meaning; and a diegetic structural feature/locating mechanism. Examining how multimodality became a technology and communicative resource for teachers to remix reflection, this study highlights the frictions and freedoms of using sound to synthesize learning in the online teacher education classroom. As such, this article proposes novel ways to think with sound in e-learning and (re)educates the senses to hear practitioner-inquiry in new ways.

Mobilizing a/r/tographic inquiry with young children, this article focuses on a series of research-creation events to examine the making and movement of speculative “withness” inherent in creative production. Thinking with theories of posthumanism and visual studies, it diffractively reads across young children’s making to refashion Szarkowski’s elements of photography (the thing, the detail, the frame, time, and vantage point) as a/r/tographic renderings of the relational-aesthetic. Seeking to expand the sentient possibilities of ‘seeing’ and ‘knowing’ with young children, a series of provocations are presented to question the role of the image in young children’s world making.

This article addresses how researchers have drawn from qualitative methods when engaging with/in liminal populations, with a focus on historically marginalized populations and their rhetorical and material (dis)placement. As scholars housed within distinct domains of educational scholarship, we embrace this opportunity to “think-with-theory” and collaborate across methodological and theoretical differences. Ecologies of liminal (in)humanisms are discussed across analytic snapshots of seemingly incommensurate empirical research traversing analytic domains: state, institutions, and practices. We consider a liminality of (in)human politics, one that unravels the entanglement of what data, research/er, and method(ology) are in our contemporary context.

Reflecting on data from a longitudinal connective ethnographic study exploring how six lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) youths mobilized digital literacies to write against in...

Scholarship in postqualitative research has long examined the constructs of orientation and experimentation. How do we come to know and name experience? How do we value its matter as a form of mattering. Combining perspectives from phenomenology, feminist new materialisms, and sound studies, this article traces the intra-active encounters of the Museum of Contemporary Art–Detroit’s (MoCAD) performance of John Cage’s “How to Get Started.” Reading postphenomenological inquiry as improvisation, the article underscores that phenomenological ontologies are always already a be(com)ing, and that qualitative research more broadly is inherently an act of being “in-resonance-with.”

Working at the axes of sound art, critical childhood studies, and post-human approaches to early literacy, this chapter plays with the politics of ‘noise’ to examine young children’s early art learning. Shaped by the heard and felt dimensions of an 8-week research-creation partnership, it demonstrates how sound was not only a representational resource for design but a vibrant material that children intra-acted with. Challenging mainstream aesthetics and ideologies concerning young children’s artistic learning, this chapter details how young children experimenting with sound art highlighted aesthetic dimensions of more-than-human relationality, reciprocity, and plurality. Embedded in, and inseparable from their environment, we close by highlighting how sound allowed us, as educators, hear more expansive tales of young children’s artistic and embodied entanglements with human and more-than-human worlds.

This chapter examines the implications for conceptualising, composing and structuring a postqualitative research project with video and sound. To do so, the authors challenge philosophically, politically and methodologically the mainstream ideas about how video in research works. The chapter starts with a brief detour to explore how the historical entanglement between art and science might inspire ways that postqualitative research could trouble the concept of representation in research, which lies constantly beneath the surface when video and sound technology is integrated into research practices. Demonstrated through a range of examples of research practices embracing moving images and sounds differently, this chapter offers a taste of what postqualitative research with sonic and visual technology could entail. Key questions are discussed, such as what comes into focus when paying attention to the material and the nonhuman through video and sound and what ontological shift this technology allows or promotes. The role of sound is given special attention as an example of readjusting what is heard (and valued as worth hearing) when analysing research data. The aim of the chapter, with its examples and suggested activities, is to excite and inspire researchers to reanimate and re-imagine research with video and sound.

Working to combat, speak back to, and shift discourses concerning issues of genders, sexuality/ies, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and 2-spirit (LGBTQ2) identities in schoo...

Drawing upon conceptual approaches in sound studies, posthuman literacies, and new materialisms, this article highlights how writing for young learners is always already an emplaced invention of withness. Zeroing in on a diffractive experiment of young children reauthoring Showers’s picture book, The Listening Walk, this study charts how the withness of writing is a communicative project that is all at once elliptical, relational, and coexistent. Reading the literacy desirings and material←→discursive intra-actions of 12 young children writing with wearables, the article illuminates how more-than-human ecologies of literacy amplify composition not as a practice of being, but of becoming. Thinking with Henriques’s conception of rhythmic elements (periodic pulses, reciprocal resonances, and oscillating overtures), findings are presented as strategic sketches. Attuning to writing as a more-than-human assemblage, this article pedagogically amplifies new be(com)ings of writing and literacy-in-action while theoretically resituating research as a process that thinks with.

Amplified by a global political climate of fear, oppression, and increased nationalism, this article examines how U.S. secondary students in a digital media elective course used multimodal composit...

This chapter discusses sound and its modal intensities by refuting ocular-centric notions of seeing phenomena in educational research. It shows that earwitnessing (in)equity, a process where the so-called hearer becomes an ethical listener/witness, is a process that is always already emergent. Its goal is to add to the sonorous sensibilities and sonic possibilities of orienting researchers within their environments, connecting them with affective stimuli, and opening their bodies up to sonic foundations of schooling. Whether earwitnessing the sounds of inequity in a digital media classroom or participating in the production of an auditory performance piece investigating improvisation, sound is always already an action of “becoming-in-resonance with”. Stories, juxtaposed and told from an array of perspectives, modes, and locales, are stacked to evoke possibilities of earwitnessing (in)equity in educational research. Earwitnessing (in)equity and becoming-in-resonance-with promotes an ethics of listening, one that acknowledges who gets heard and what gets silenced. Earwitnessing (in)equity is never finite but always already in process.

Purpose Plugging into the multimodal aesthetics of youth lifestreaming, this article examines how three lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and/or queer (LGBTQ) youths use digital media production as an activist practice toward cultural justice work. Focusing on the queer rhetorical dimensions of multimodal (counter)storytelling, the communicative practice used to (re)name, remix and challenge epistemic notions of objective reality, this paper aims to highlight how youth worked to (de)compose and (re)author multiple identities and social relationships across online/offline contexts. Design/methodology/approach Through sustained participant observation across online/offline contexts, active interviewing techniques and visual discourse analysis, this paper illuminates how composing with digital media was leveraged by three LGBTQ youths to navigate larger systems of inequality across a multi-year connective ethnographic study. Findings By highlighting how queer rhetorical arts were used as tools to surpass and navigate social fault lines created by difference, findings highlight how Jack, Andi and Gabe, three LGBTQ youths, used multimodal (counter)storytelling to comment, correct and compose being different. Speaking across the rhetorical dimensions of logos, pathos and ethos, the author contends that a queer rhetorics lens helped highlight how youth used the affordances of multimodal (counter)storytelling to lifestream versions of activist selves. Originality/value Reading LGBTQ youths’ lifestreaming as multimodal (counter)storytelling, this paper highlights how three youths use multimodal composition as entry points into remixing the radical present and participate in cultural justice work.

(Re)Entering data from a networked collaborative project exploring how sound operates as a mechanism for attuning towards cultural difference and community literacies, this article examines one primary grade classroom’s participation to investigate the rhythmic rituals of ‘emergent listening’ in early childhood literacy. Thinking with sound studies and more posthuman ways of knowing/being/doing, this article details how the sonic was felt not only as an actor on the scene of young children writing but also as an intra-active agent of what the teacher called ‘making space’ and community. Exploring ‘emergent listening’ through a diffractive entanglement of stories and concepts, this paper focus on two pieces of early writing: a digitally produced audio clip and a ‘body built’ (Ms Lionel’s words) tableau depicting the sensorial process and thinking behind children’s making moments. The findings highlight how particular actions of emergent listening generated new forms of embodied knowledge-in-motion. Encouraging educators to consider the modal affordances of sound and sonic composition, this article expands definitions of young children composing with material realia and explores how, as this article suggests, emergent listening opens up pedagogical spaces where creative energies are generated and mobilized to bring to fruition an ethico-onto-epistemological world view.

Attuning to the acoustic ecologies of multicultural education, this critical qualitative project interrogated how elementary prospective teachers (PST) used digital media to write community through and with sound. Examining PST produced soundscapes and the practice of sonic cartography, this study inquired how hearing difference and listening to community re-educated the senses towards issues of difference, belonging, and multiculturalism. Findings illuminate three ways in which PSTs maintained a ‘proper distance’ – a proximal, reflexive, and reciprocal stance – through digitally composing their cartographic creations and reflections. Developing materials that hear and sustain community, this study has implications for how English educators can attune to the frequencies and rhythms of culture while designing towards more equitable landscapes for learning.

Through mobilizing the work of scholars in queer theory, sexuality studies, and educational research, this chapters unpacks the power and potential in reading lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and two-spirit (LGBTQ2) youth writing as resistance. Drawing on data from a longitudinal study examining how LGBTQ2 youth of color used writing as a mechanism to navigate, combat, and speak back to inequality, it extends the work of recent resource-based pedagogies (e.g., culturally sustaining pedagogy) to center the queer/quare in youth culture. Calling for a [q]ulturally sustaining pedagogy, this chapter uses a series of empirical snapshots to illustrate how imagining classroom spaces as [q]ulturally sustaining is to invite educators and researchers alike to rethink how we see, learn from, listen to, and work with LGBTQ2 children and youth.

Drawing from a subset of data from a multi-year connective ethnographic study with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) youth, this article explores the scriptural counter-economy of composing new media narratives across online/offline contexts. Combining theoretical constructs from “multi-” literacy studies alongside visual and textual analysis, this article describes the influences of Web 2.0 technologies and photo-based composing tools on contemporary configurations of LGBTQ youth identity making. Giving visuality a place of primacy, this article focuses on two larger thematic findings: snapping selfies as sedimentary identity texts and curating lifestreams as operationalizing community. Focusing on how youth use these material, embodied, and visual texts to reinforce, challenge, combat, and/or resist identities of difference, this article considers how the so-called visual vernaculars and material texts of youth lifestreaming offer alternative conceptions to contemporary new media writing and storying of the self.

Locating itself broadly within the 'sociolinguistics of mobility' (Blommaert, 2014) and taking heed of Stornaiuolo and Hall's (2014) call to 'trace resonance' in writing and literacies research, this article works to trace academic literacies across the emerging 'literacy sponsorscapes' (Wargo, 2016a) of contemporary culture. Despite its variance and recent resurgence (Lillis and Scott, 2007), academic literacies continues to be reduced to: (1) an instrumentalist and pragmatic pedagogy, and (2) the ability to navigate academic conventions and practices of higher education (Lea and Street, 1998), in particular the writing classroom (Castelló and Donahue, 2012). This centred focus, however, is limiting, and silences the more innocuous and less tangible sponsors of academic literacies: mobilities, ideologies, identities, and technologies. Set against the backdrop of globalization, and grounded in two case studies, this article considers how academic literacies are not an 'and' but an 'elsewhere', thereby emphasizing the importance of sociolinguistic space in academic literacy development. In it, we chart new directions for scholarship and underscore how ideologies shift with mobilities (Pennycook, 2008; Pennycook, 2012), are indexed by identities (De Costa and Norton, 2016; Hawkins, 2005), and extend through technologies (Lam, 2009; Rymes, 2012). By outlining a literacy sponsorscapes framework for studying academic literacies, this article highlights the purchasing power of seeing academic literacies not solely as a field or set of practices, but rather as a locating mechanism for studying a range of hybridized repertoires that are shaped and constituted by the physical and social spaces that contemporary youth inhabit.

Critics and readers alike praise Malinda Lo for her novel, Ash, a contemporary Cinderella story and a queer variation of the ash girl tale. Despite its potential as a landmark variation in same-sex romance, this paper suggests that Lo’s queer approach is undercut by heteronormative rebounds into sexualized payment. Ultimately, Lo confines her slipstream variation to rigid boundaries of gender and sexuality, rendering the lesbian narrative invisible to hauntings of bisexual shame and compulsory heterosexuality.

This chapter utilizes a cultural sociological lens towards economy to describe and explore youth techtual economies and the purchase/paradox of educational equity. Reading the inclusion and purchase of technology as text, techtual economies detail and nuance the larger contexts of culture, relational social ties, and institutional structures. Taking heed of the ways in which people differentiate media, money and moments of transaction, I consider youth techtual counter-economies and interrogate why these spaces of socialization and affinity (i.e., social networking spaces, microblogs, etc.) are silenced rather than drawn upon. In reading the array of techtual economies included, this chapter moves beyond reading economy solely in terms of monetary means. Instead, it illuminates how rituals, practices, and the so-called figured worlds of school and technology monetize the purchase of equity.

Re-theorizations of culturally responsive pedagogies have shifted the paradigm away from deficit-based responses to difference and have worked toward the act of sustaining it. Gender and sexuality, however, are never taken up as central features in these more pluralistic pedagogies. Working toward theorizing a [q]ulturally sustaining pedagogy, this chapter is divided into three sections. First, the author surveys the historical and cultural tensions embedded within theorizing a “queer” pedagogy. The second section borrows from Johnson (Text Perform Q, 21(1):1–25, 2001) to operationalize “quare,” an approach to pedagogy that acknowledges the corporeal and materialized reality of youth of color. In the final section, the author centers the “q” from quare to (re)imagine what a [q]ulturally sustaining pedagogy would entail for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and two-spirit youth of color.