Black students from immigrant backgrounds are a growing population in higher education. However, there is little research exploring their experiences as they make decisions about whether and where they will attend college. This qualitative study of 23 Black immigrants attending a public, selective research university explores how individual habitus, or worldview, shapes the predisposition, search, and institutional choice phases of college choice. Findings suggest participants' habitus is strongly influenced by culture, prestige, and the value parents place on education. These forces pervade the college choice process, establishing students' decisions to attend college early in their lives, as well as the emphasis placed on balancing prestige with financial accessibility in the search and institutional choice processes.

This piece builds on scholarship in African American parading and Black Girls’ Literacies by presenting parading as a metaphor to analyze a website created by nine Black adolescent girls. I draw on multimodal analysis frameworks to understand the symbolic nature of the site and its components, as well as how the girls use it as a platform to speak to issues of racism, sexism, self-definition, joy, and celebration. The girls write against liminal perceptions of their identities, (re)positioning themselves and their lives as worthy of celebration and themselves as experts of Black girlhood.

Purpose Historically, literacy education and research have been dominated by white supremacist narratives that marginalize and deficitize the literate practices of Black students. As anti-Blackness proliferates in US schools, Black youth suffer social, psychological, intellectual, and physical traumas. Despite relentless attacks of anti-Blackness, Black youth fight valiantly through a range of creative outlets, including multimodal compositions, that enable them to move beyond negative stereotypes, maintain their creativity, and manifest the present and future lives they desire and so deeply deserve. Design/methodology/approach This study aims to answer the question “How do Black students' multimodal renderings demonstrate creativity and love in ways that disrupt anti-Blackness?” The authors critically examine four multimodal compositions created by Black elementary and middle school students to understand how Black youth author a more racially just society and envision self-determined, joyful futures. The authors take up Black Livingness as a theoretical framework and use visual methodologies to analyze themes of Black life, love and hope in the young people’s multimodal renderings. Findings The findings suggest that Black youth creatively compose multimodal renderings that are humanizing, allowing their thoughts, feelings and experiences to guide their critiques of the present world and envision new personal and societal futures. The authors conclude with a theorization of a Black Livingness Pedagogy that centers care for Black youth. Originality/value Recognizing that “the creation and use of images [is] a practice of decolonizing methodology” (Brown, 2013, loc. 2323), the authors examine Black student-created multimodal compositional practices to understand how Black youth author a more racially just society and envision self-determined, joyful futures.

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