Drawing from a subset of data from a multi-year connective ethnographic study with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) youth, this article explores the scriptural counter-economy of composing new media narratives across online/offline contexts. Combining theoretical constructs from “multi-” literacy studies alongside visual and textual analysis, this article describes the influences of Web 2.0 technologies and photo-based composing tools on contemporary configurations of LGBTQ youth identity making. Giving visuality a place of primacy, this article focuses on two larger thematic findings: snapping selfies as sedimentary identity texts and curating lifestreams as operationalizing community. Focusing on how youth use these material, embodied, and visual texts to reinforce, challenge, combat, and/or resist identities of difference, this article considers how the so-called visual vernaculars and material texts of youth lifestreaming offer alternative conceptions to contemporary new media writing and storying of the self.

(Re)Entering data from a networked collaborative project exploring how sound operates as a mechanism for attuning towards cultural difference and community literacies, this article examines one primary grade classroom’s participation to investigate the rhythmic rituals of ‘emergent listening’ in early childhood literacy. Thinking with sound studies and more posthuman ways of knowing/being/doing, this article details how the sonic was felt not only as an actor on the scene of young children writing but also as an intra-active agent of what the teacher called ‘making space’ and community. Exploring ‘emergent listening’ through a diffractive entanglement of stories and concepts, this paper focus on two pieces of early writing: a digitally produced audio clip and a ‘body built’ (Ms Lionel’s words) tableau depicting the sensorial process and thinking behind children’s making moments. The findings highlight how particular actions of emergent listening generated new forms of embodied knowledge-in-motion. Encouraging educators to consider the modal affordances of sound and sonic composition, this article expands definitions of young children composing with material realia and explores how, as this article suggests, emergent listening opens up pedagogical spaces where creative energies are generated and mobilized to bring to fruition an ethico-onto-epistemological world view.

Drawing upon conceptual approaches in sound studies, posthuman literacies, and new materialisms, this article highlights how writing for young learners is always already an emplaced invention of withness. Zeroing in on a diffractive experiment of young children reauthoring Showers’s picture book, The Listening Walk, this study charts how the withness of writing is a communicative project that is all at once elliptical, relational, and coexistent. Reading the literacy desirings and material←→discursive intra-actions of 12 young children writing with wearables, the article illuminates how more-than-human ecologies of literacy amplify composition not as a practice of being, but of becoming. Thinking with Henriques’s conception of rhythmic elements (periodic pulses, reciprocal resonances, and oscillating overtures), findings are presented as strategic sketches. Attuning to writing as a more-than-human assemblage, this article pedagogically amplifies new be(com)ings of writing and literacy-in-action while theoretically resituating research as a process that thinks with.

In thinking about how sound allows us to hear, listen, and write against injustice, this article examines one LGBTQ youth's sonic cartography to explore the relation among sound, writing, and identity.

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