This article examines the resistive actions and discourses that shape and reshape the hegemonic and resistant interplay between female youth with histories of domestic violence (HDVs) and educators. Taken out of a larger critical ethnographic study, discussion demonstrates how one urban middle school girl with an HDV is positioned as an object of “emotional and behavioral disorder” and how she responded to violating pedagogies through performances of cultural resistance built out of her social experience of domestic violence. The article draws upon theoretical and methodological insights, including Butler’s notion of performativity, Scott’s theory of resistance, Hill-Collins’s standpoint theory, as well as Scollon and Scollon’s mediated discourse analysis. Similar to the girls in this study, sharing an identity of being a survivor of domestic violence herself, the author discusses how she and female participants (re)worked and (re)wrote agentic social moments in the field. Telling girls’ stories through counter-narratives and participatory research practices helps to reposition the often deficit subjectivities ascribed to girls with HDV.

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Purpose This paper aims to closely examine the features of an urban community-based learning program to highlight the synergy between its educational technology, literate practices and social justice ethos that impact youths’ learning and documentary filmmaking. This examination of a learning setting illuminates the “what is possible” and “how it comes to be possible” (Gomez et al., 2014, p. 10), illustrating possibilities for youths’ tech-mediated literacies to facilitate, support and extend engagement in social justice. Design/methodology/approach Grounded in the theoretical and analytical concept of activity theory, this study uses qualitative methods and activity systems analysis. Observations are the primary data source coupled with a detailed activity analysis supported by artifacts, images and interviews. Program participants included 12 youth, 2 youth mentors, 1 adult coordinator and 1 adult facilitator. Findings Findings illustrate that all subjects (participants) in the program co-created and shaped the activity system’s object (or purpose). Analyses also reveal the ways in which the program enables and empowers youth through its development of participatory literacy practices that “can facilitate learning, empowerment, and civic action” (Jenkins et al., 2016). Originality/value Overall, this study is a contribution to the field as it responds to the need for close examinations of complex technology-mediated learning settings “through the lens of equity and opportunity” (Ito et al., 2013).

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