As discourse analysts, we find ourselves continually coming back to the power of language and interaction and the ways that people use them. It is in and through language and interaction that we represent and construct our world and our sense of place and identity within it. We see discourse analysis as a potent methodological tool for excavating this process of construction, allowing us to hold still moments of discursive interaction to understand what is being built and, perhaps more importantly, how.Furthermore, as researchers who are committed to teaching and learning as a practice of humanization and emancipation, we see discourse analysis as crucial for analyzing the circulation of power. As foundational works of critical discourse analysis have made visible (Fairclough, 2001;Van Dijk, 1993;Wodak and Chilton, 2005), combining discourse analysis with critical social theories can allow researchers to better understand how structures of power are built, represented and reinforced. By looking closely at the language of a policymaker, a textbook or a teacher, researchers can deconstruct how people use language to (re)produced white supremacy in and through literacy educational contexts.Yet, many of the same scholars who have demonstrated the power of deconstructive analysis have pushed the field to also engage in reconstructive analysis (Chouliaraki and Fairclough, 1999;Luke, 1995Luke, , 2004, also referred to as positive discourse analysis (Bartlett, 2012;Martin, 2004). A reconstructive orientation to discourse analysis is an intentional shift in attention toward, in the words of Luke (2004), "redress, reconciliation and the rebuilding of social structure, institutional lives, and identities" (p. 151). In this sense, a reconstructive approach is not merely a focus on the "good" but instead a careful examination of opportunities and mechanisms for social change. Bartlett (2012, p. 10) describes this work as "bring[ing] to light the contradictions and tensions within the hegemonic order and so provid[ing] the wiggle room for naturalising alternative representations that challenge this order." It is in this wiggle room where, as researchers, we find hope and opportunity.Mirroring the positive turn in psychology over the past two decades (Brown, 2017), there has been an increase in educational scholarship that takes on these kinds of reconstructive orientations (Darling-Hammond et al., 2020;Rogers et al., 2016;Rogers and Schaenen, 2014). We understand the shift in literacy research as part of this broader turn toward more humanizing research (Johnson et al., 2017;Paris and Winn, 2013) that centers solidarity, imagination, love and joy. We also note that, while there seems to be a more recent and mainstream attention to reconstruction, this reconstructive orientation is not new. From our perspective, it builds on the work of many black feminist educators, scholars and philosophers (