Cyborg Literacies in an Afterschool ?Loophole of Retreat?
Miles, Parker
2024
Abstract
In this dissertation I explore the fugitive technology practices of Black high-schoolers in a tech-rich after-school makerspace. To do so, I invoke ontologies from two cyborgs to make sense of these Black teens’ practices. First, James and Costa Vargas (2012) offer the Black Cyborg— the rebel intellectual rejecting victimization through self-making— as a figure that can emerge from the antiBlackness that organizes American social and political activity, of which schooling is a vehicle. Second, Haraway’s (1985) cyborg is a metaphor and a scientific reality that casts the porous human/machine boundary in relief and helps to articulate how Black youth’s imbrication with the digital offers both new ways for them to interpellated into antiBlackness and new ways to refuse it. With a third figure, Harriet Jacobs’ (1861) loophole of retreat, I align with the long history of fugitive and liberatory Black literacy and making— and more recent interventions about the need and design of Black learning spaces (Warren and Coles, 2021; Okello, 2024). These frameworks were my lenses as I asked: How do Black youth practice cyborg literacies in an after-school loophole of retreat? To answer this question, I carried out a multimodal critical ethnography in an after-school makerspace co-designed alongside youth participants over the course of 8 weeks. Data collection included participant observation, focus groups, photographs of activity and products, and longer case interviews with two participants. I turn to Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis (CTDA) to hold these multimodal data in focus as I read them through the three figures above; CTDA enables a simultaneous examination of participants’ artifacts, practices, and beliefs vis a vis the makerspace-as-technology (Brock, 2018). In the first of three findings chapters, I describe how two affordances— vibes and self-determination— were a function of the learning ecology of the school and co-curated by students and me. Here, I also describe how these affordances allow the space to function as a loophole of retreat for Black youth. In the second findings chapter, I detail the cyborg literacies— the technologically mediated practices of selfmaking, sensemaking, worldmaking, joymaking, and refusal— in which participants engaged. In the final findings chapter, I offer a closer look at the study’s participants by sharing insights and influences garnered from the two case interviews. Findings from this study contribute to conversations about the role of the digital in the lives of Black youth and their technology literacy practices. Findings also align with contemporary research about how afterschool spaces in which Black youth feel joyful, safe, and whole create new opportunities for the development of literacy skills. The dissertation concludes with a recommendation for designing learning experiences for Black youth in out-of-school time and some looming questions about the utility of equity- and STEM- centered frameworks “in the wake” of slavery (Sharpe, 2016).Deep Blue DOI
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cyborgs literacy as a social practice fugitivity Black youth technology Makerspaces
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