Redesigning Multiliteracies: What Does It Mean to Design Social Futures in Today's Racialized, Transnational, and Digitized Lifeworlds?

Abstract

In this essay, Brady L. Nash and Allison Skerrett reexamine the New London Group's theory of multiliteracies thirty years after its initial conception, considering how changes in technology, culture, and politics have impacted the ability of young people to act as designers of social futures. Multiliteracies theory led to an explosion of scholarship examining how students use multiple literacies to design and communicate meanings within an interconnected world. Today, artificial intelligence and complex algorithms govern digital communication, people communicate and move across a global expanse at an unparalleled clip, and right-wing authoritarian movements, often aligned with wealthy financiers that control communications technologies exploit racial constructs to accrue power. By looking at the ways algorithms and digital platforms govern information and communication, the role of affect and emotion in communication and meaning making, the complex literacies of transnational youth, and the racialized power relationships inherent in linguistic communication, this essay explores how the concept of design, central to the multiliteracies framework, is inherently related to assumptions about rationality and agency in a world in which digital technologies, human emotions, national boundaries, and racial dynamics influence and constrain the ability of humans to act as designers of social futures.