Out of the Box: Multimodal Book club Toolkits for Young Adult Librarians

My project addresses the ways in which youth librarians can engage with young adult literature within a framework that encourages activism, expands what counts as a “text,” and creates an environment for young patrons to tell their stories in their own voices. For this project, I created a website repository for a number of young adult (YA) books to serve as a toolkit for youth librarians. The information provided in this toolkit can be used in the school or public library setting as either one-off sessions or recurring series with patrons, and the format will provide youth librarians with the opportunity to create their own programs.Master of Science in Library Scienc

Shifting Skins: Becoming Multiple During Emergency Online Teaching

In this essay, we reflect on the emergence of our (new) teacher identities from the phenomenal space created within online learning, following the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. Thrust from classrooms into in-between spaces mediated by digital technologies, the capricious co-inhabited new learning space functioned as a becoming-other space of identity-play, surfacing from centrifugal intra-actions among human, non-human, and inorganic entities and energies—what we have named a thinning space (authors, forthcoming). It called for becoming shapeshifters together through resisting crystallized roles and (re)claiming a multiplicity of vulnerable thin skins. We draw from the possibilities of existing virtual gaming spaces to propose that a thinning space towards freer learning could redefine current neoliberal conceptions of ‘normal’ education

Policing Queer Sexuality

A Review of Vice Patrol: Cops, Courts, and the Struggle over Urban Gay Life Before Stonewall. By Anna Lvovsky

Género y Comunicación en las publicaciones científicas recientes

Los estudios de género son abordados desde diversas disciplinas con variadas intensidades y enfoques. La labor que desde la academia se realiza puede tener efectos positivos sobre la ciudadanía e influir sobre las líneas de acción de las instituciones, incorporando las averiguaciones de los estudios científicos a la vida social. La producción sobre género y comunicación cuenta con altas dosis de componentes sociales y de rigurosa actualidad, que no debieran ser desaprovechados. Sin embargo, el carácter difuso de los trabajos en este campo dificulta su consideración. Ante esta coyuntura, la presente comunicación busca conocer el lugar del género y su tratamiento en el ámbito de la comunicación en las diez publicaciones más destacadas en este ámbito académico en el último año, de forma que pueda servir también como material de utilidad a los investigadores centrados en la relaciones que se establecen entre el género y la comunicación, a modo de sucinta radiografía reciente de nuestro campoVarious disciplines address gender studies with varying intensities and approaches. The work done from the academy can have positive effects on citizenship, besides influencing the action program of the institutions, by incorporating the inquiries of academic studies into social life. The production on gender and communication has high doses of social components and rigorous topicality. These resources should not be wasted. However, the diffuse nature of the work in this field makes its consideration difficult. Given this situation, the present paper seeks to know the place of the genre and its treatment in the field of communication in the ten most outstanding publications in this academic field during the last year. Research is focused on aspects such as frequency, theme or authors, so that it can also serve as useful material for researchers focused on the relationships established between gender and communication, as a succinct recent radiography of our field

Global Queer and Feminist Activism: An Introduction

Queer and feminist visual activism has various origins across the globe and has emerged in a fluid cultural field of visual arts, popular culture, and protest aesthetics. Given the current context of gender backlash, these forms of activism have become urgent, and so too has scholarship that engages with global queer and feminist visual activism. In this special issue, we engage with the richness of activist aesthetics at the intersections of popular culture, subculture, art and activism, and other forms of visual political communication, not by attempting to contain these manifestations, but by offering a set of navigational tools. We conceive of three primary forms of queer and feminist visual practice – protest, process and product – each with its own histories and epistemologies. Each of these forms offers the capacity for resistance and collaboration. By opening up cross- and inter-disciplinary perspectives, and conversations across diverse global contexts, struggles and possibilities, we aim to expand on existing scholarship both geographically and conceptually. A central motivation for this work has been to think beyond the image; to be able to capture and engage with the activist communities (and the activism) behind and alongside the image and produced through the image. Taking the notion of social practice as an integral part of the ‘process’ of visual activism, we identify three emerging themes across the articles in this special issue: refusal, care, and thriving.Sid

Adolescents Becoming Feminist on Twitter: New Literacies Practices, Commitments, and Identity Work

The author investigated the relation between young people\u27s new literacies practices and identity development on Twitter and found that participants used three new literacies practices (live‐tweeting, hashtagging, and information sharing) in unique ways to develop feminist identities in this social media space. Participants mobilized popular culture to initiate dialogue about feminist issues, such as the wage gap, to participate in social activism (e.g., advocating for women\u27s reproductive care), and to provide informal counsel to peers. Twitter can be a vital space for young people to become feminists, providing opportunities to learn, develop, and participate

Teenagers, Fandom and Identity

This paper analyses collective and individual identity construction processes in adolescent fan communities mediated by multimodal discourse. Our approach is supported by ethnographic work with teenage girls belonging to music communities built around One Direction and Justin Bieber, and rooted in participant observation. Firstly, we will show how participating in communities of practice, undertaking tasks which give meaning to group activities, contributes to the construction of a social and cultural identity supported by the interpretation, production and dissemination of texts. Secondly, we will examine how subjective and personal identities related to feelings, emotions and situations of support are also built by the fan community

Tracing academic literacies across contemporary literacy sponsorscapes: Mobilities, ideologies, identities, and technologies

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