Materiality is key to disrupt algorithmic forms of governmentality.

Literacy: Digital Writing With, For, and Against Racial Capitalism, Theory Into Practice, DOI:

10.1080/00405841.2020.1857128, acc. 7/15/23)//AS

Conclusion: Towards critical (abolitionist) design literacy Many have argued for increased focus on youth daily realities, including both their digital lives and also their oppressions faced within and outside of school. These can no longer be seen as separate issues. Going beyond a focus on the micro, on subjectivities, and on individual identity development or expression as primary avenues of social justice will better enable us to mount critiques of the sociopolitical and enact social justice pedagogies outside of racial technocapitalist (neoliberal) frameworks, especially when it comes to technology. We should question if individual empowerment really functions as such (O’Connor et al., 2015). Without a broader context, such as I have discussed, we miss the broader implications of designs. This brings us (as educators, researchers, and human beings) back to the normative question (Luke, 2004): what kind of world are we working towards? Literacy research and pedagogy is the perfect place to undertake a project examining immediate (and perennial) issues of social justice around technological shifts. Critical design literacy is needed as part of all literacy instruction (E. Gee & Aguilera, in press; Soep, 2014). It begins with a critical understanding of designed experiences and move to anti-oppressive design justice that is mindful of the relationship between design, power, and social justice, promoting approaches led by marginalized communities that challenge structural inequalities, rather than reproduce them (Costanza-Chock, 2020). Abolitionist designs can fight racial hierarchies and work towards solidarity and justice (Benjamin, 2019). Students, particularly marginalized youth, need to be given the opportunity to design experiences for others in ways that build their understanding of algorithms if they are to critically confront the increasingly common and commercialized software they face in everyday life, developing “the capacity to speak up, to negotiate, and to be able to engage critically with the conditions of their working lives” (New London Group, 1996, p. 67). I see this as a project appropriate to our times towards liberatory turns in literacy (Anders et al., 2016) “toward unearthing the horizons of ‘unrealized opportunities’ within all human beings” (p. 393) by creating openings for liberatory theory and practice appropriate to the 21st Century