From the Bronx to the World: Critical Literacies and Coalition-Building in a Black Girl’s Digital Activism

This paper examines how Black girls enact critical and multiliteracies through digital activism. Focusing on Shauna, a Black high school student of Jamaican heritage living in New York City, the study explores how she uses social media to engage with sociopolitical issues and advocate for justice. Specifically, it investigates how Shauna draws on an intersectional analysis and a coalitional mindset to interpret contemporary issues affecting marginalized communities and shape her digital activism. The insights from this paper demonstrate that Shauna’s digital activism is deeply connected to her participation in a social justice educational space that centers dialogue among girls and women of color. Through these experiences, she developed critical language and analytical tools for examining power and oppression, which she later applied in digital spaces to engage agentic discourse and action. By centering Shauna’s experiences, this study contributes to scholarship on Black girls’ literacies and social justice education by illustrating how dialogic educational spaces can cultivate critical literacies that support youth activism, coalition-building, and civic engagement.