Civic Place Literacies: Tracing Urban Migrant Girls' Democratic Meaning‐Making Through Virtual Transnational Practitioner Research

Abstract

Historically marginalized youth shape public life through civic literacies that are rooted in their identities and experiences with systemic injustices. Literacy scholarship has accordingly traced how practitioner inquiry, a participatory approach to knowledge production, can educationally support the flourishing of these literacies. But while marginalized youth negotiate public life across multiple national contexts of inequality, this research has remained mostly nation‐bound. This paper extends prior scholarship in a comparative, cross‐national direction by exploring how, in a virtual transnational practitioner study, two urban migrant girls based in the United States and India—multiply marginalized youth from two of the world's largest and most unequal democracies—engaged in democratic meaning‐making. Tracing how youth took up learning invitations across two separate inquiry communities and one‐on‐one conversations with the teacher‐researcher, it foregrounds their civic place literacies: that is, their meaning‐making practices which reflected how their intersectional identities in their democratic communities shaped, too, their socio‐spatial navigations of those contexts. Tracing two themes related to girls' civic place literacies across India and the United States, the article concludes with implications for how future research and praxis can center urban migrant girls' civic place literacies, agency, and resistance across borders. (WC = 203).