Youth identities and affinities on the move: using a transliteracies framework to critique digital dichotomies

Abstract

ABSTRACT A number of literacy theorists have worked to describe what is new and different about youth enactments of literacy in the digital age. In doing so, many invoke “digital dichotomies,” or oppositional framings meant to differentiate among various enactments of literacy (i.e. digital vs. analog, online vs. offline, out-of-school vs. in-school). We argue that digital dichotomies do not adequately convey the creativity, permeability, messiness, and movement of youth literacies in practice. In this article we employ a transliteracies framework to examine youths’ textual production and identity mediation across physical and virtual domains. Focusing on two telling cases of student participation in affinity spaces (one dedicated to manga, the other skateboarding), we find that adolescents traverse spaces and employ tools with creative and agentive fluidity to participate in transliterate affinity communities. Youth do not consider tools and spaces to be dichotomous or determinative of their literate engagements. We encourage researchers and educators to move beyond using dichotomies to theorize literate phenomena in the digital age. Identity and youth culture are anything but static and neither should be the lenses researchers use to study them.