Becoming Shuri: CTE, Racializing Affect, and the Becoming‐Technologist

Abstract

AbstractRacializing affect draws on Black feminist theories to extend affect theory and related poststructuralist approaches within literacy studies. The authors examined literacies via a study of affect and youth of color in career and technical education (CTE) and the reconfiguration of CTE to enable radical change in the racializing experiences of/with technologies. An information technology classroom and its spatial arrangements, plus the larger CTE school, offered a lens into how material spatial movement (mobility and dislocation) affects bodily movements (rhythm, relationality, intensity, and energy) in a rhizomatic becoming process of reconstituted racializing affect with technology. Interested in the emergent rhythms and living intensities within affect theory, the authors also drew on the movie Black Panther to further theorize affect in relation to the discussion on becoming‐technologist through the character of Shuri. This creative rendering provided a different methodological approach to reflect the authors’ own intensities as researchers and consumers of popular culture in the analysis. Together, the authors hope to shed light on CTE as an understudied educational context and to reimagine race, gender, and difference in relation to technology and literacy learning.