Guns, Schools, and Democracy: Adolescents Imagining Social Futures Through Speculative Civic Literacies

Abstract

This article analyzes how guns emerged as both urgent topics of dialogue and common features of everyday life for 228 students and their teachers in six communities across the United States who participated in the Digital Democratic Dialogue (3D) Project, a year long social design-based experiment aimed at foregrounding youth voice and fostering connection across lines of geographic and ideological difference. We trace the myriad ways that guns literally and discursively shaped the multiple ecological contexts of the 3D Project in order to detail youth sociopolitical learning and extend traditional models of civic education. We propose a paradigm of speculative civic literacies that privileges a collaborative push toward democratic interrogation and innovation over integration into existing civic and political structures.