Publications

SELECTED Publications

Joseph "Nuke" Montalvo, Cyberzapata (2010, 2011)

AlgoRitmo literacies in gaming: Leveraging ChicanX praxis to reimagine AI systems. Reading Research Quarterly [PDF]
Arturo Cortez, José R. Lizárraga, & Edward Rivero (2024)
Abstract: This article reports on findings from a social design-based study conducted with an intergenerational group of youth, educators and researchers participating in the Learning to Transform (LiTT) Gaming Lab. We advance the notion of AlgoRitmo Literacies, to highlight the ingenuity of youth and educators as they used a tool called Character AI to author lore emerging within a virtual city called LiTT City. We conceptualize AlgoRitmo—a play on the word algorithm—as part inquiry and reflection (the algo or “something” of AI tools), and part action and future-oriented (ritmo as in movement). Inspired by cosmogonies influenced by Coyolxauhqui, the fragmented Aztec moon goddess, this paper illustrates how young people reconfigure AI artifacts, reshape relationships with AI-governed non-playable characters, and repurpose AI tools to envision alternative futures and identities. In identifying AlgoRitmo Literacies, we provide examples of how ChicanX communities subvert ideologies embedded in AI through creative and ingenious interventions in video games and the construction of cyborg Chicanx subjectivities. This paper offers implications for how educators across content areas can leverage gaming, and AI tools, toward consequential literacy development.

Interrogating the notion of giving voice: Designing for polyphony across game-based learning ecologies. Mind, Culture, and Activity [PDF]
Arturo Cortez, José R. Lizárraga, & Andy Castro (2023)
Abstract: This paper illuminates how a young person and adults learned to design for robust learning in the context of video-game play. We argue that consequential learning can emerge through the intentional design of learning spaces where normative conceptions of novice and expert are re-imagined. Our analyses revealed that everyday digital game play was a rich zone of learning, fostering principled polyphony: the orchestration and symphonic arrangement of multiple voices and tools. Drawing on a cultural historical approach, we show how young people and adults create new social futures, through robust collaboration and the creation of syncretic sociotechnical arrangements.

Contending with nightmares and dreams: Designing liberatory Black futures through Lovecraft Country’s speculative counterstorytelling. Supernatural Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Art, Media, and Culture [PDF]
Ashieda McKoy & Arturo Cortez (2022)
Abstract: Our article specifically addresses a need to understand speculative storytelling as an agentic lever in the creation of more just and equitable futures for Black communities. Thus, Lovecraft Country serves as a pedagogical example that helps Black spectators collectively understand both nightmares and dreams as tools of hope and possibility, resistance, and agency. Particularly, episodes that comment on respectability—or the ways in which Black folks shed our literal and metaphorical skins as capital exemplified by the “Strange Case” episode—materialize in the realm of nightmare, of the oppression that haunt our pasts and presents. Conversely, episodes that story the power of manifesting who we want to be now and in the future, as in the seventh episode “I Am.,” make for collective dreams that help us move closer to our imagined futures. Lovecraft Country, then, asks us to move through both the nightmares and dreams, or as Sankofa directs us, to contend with the horrors of our pasts to imagine the futures of our own making. Here, we point to the pedagogical possibilities of Lovecraft Country as a speculative counterstory that reimagines narratives of Black pasts/presents into stories of agency and resistance authored by Black communities themselves.

The future of young Blacktivism: Aesthetics and practices of speculative activism in video game play. The Journal of Futures Studies [PDF]
Arturo Cortez, Ashieda McKoy, & José R. Lizárraga (2022)
Abstract: Our study examines the collective ingenuity of Black young people as they develop speculative activist stances in the context of video games. Drawing on an Afrofuturist perspective, we center hope and possibility by exploring how Black people leverage their histories as a resource in the present to imagine radically new Black Futures in games such as The Sims and Grand Theft Auto V. We offer a framework for how youth develop fugitive and abolitionist imaginaries and practices that remix technology, resistance, and social relations, thereby re-articulating the possibilities of video game play, collaboration, and activism toward consequential forms of learning.

Intentionally addressing nested systems of power in schooling through teacher solidarity co-design. Cognition and Instruction [PDF]
Thomas M. Philip, Josephine Pham, Mallika Scott, & Arturo Cortez (2022)
Abstract: Teacher solidarity co-design is a special case of participatory design research that emphasizes the unique power dynamics of partnering with teachers who are multiply positioned in schooling, educational policy and research, and society. Through contrastive case analysis of four instrumental cases, five principles that characterize teacher solidarity co-design emerged. Collectively, the cases traverse the professional life-course of teachers in a variety of contexts but foreground co-learning and relationality between teachers and researchers in their efforts to create transformational change in schools. Additionally, the analysis of the cases centers our own experiences and insights as former teachers who are currently educational researchers. The principles account for the complex and nested systems of power that teachers occupy within efforts that seek to transform schools into more equitable and just spaces.

Cyborg jotería pedagogies: Latinx drag queens leveraging communication ecologies in the age of the digital and social displacement. Association of Mexican American Educators Journal [PDF]
José R. Lizárraga & Arturo Cortez (2020)
Abstract: Researchers and practitioners have much to learn from drag queens, specifically Latinx queens, as they leverage everyday queerness and brownness in ways that contribute to pedagogy locally and globally, individually and collectively. Drawing on previous work examining the digital queer gestures of drag queen educators (Lizárraga & Cortez, 2019), this article explores how non-dominant people that exist and fluctuate in the in-between of boundaries of gender, race, sexuality, the physical, and the virtual provide pedagogical overtures for imagining and organizing for new possible futures that are equitable and just. Further animated by Donna Haraway’s (2006) influential feminist post-humanist work, we interrogate how Latinx drag queens as cyborgs use digital technologies to enhance their craft and engage in powerful pedagogical moves. This essay draws from robust analyses of the digital presence of and interviews with two Latinx drag queens in the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as the online presence of a Xicanx doggie drag queen named RuPawl. Our participants actively drew on their liminality to provoke and mobilize communities around socio-political issues. In this regard, we see them engaging in transformative public cyborg jotería pedagogies that are made visible and historicized in the digital and physical world.

Socio-spatial repertoires as tools for resistance and expansive literacies. [PDF]
Arturo Cortez & Kris D. Gutiérrez (2019)
Abstract: This chapter profiles a site of resistance, navigated by emergent bilingual youth, that sparked new literacies, language practices, and stances. It examines this site to understand the socio-spatial repertoires essential to meaningful learning and powerful forms of literacy, including learning in local resistance practices. Additionally, the chapter analyzes how preservice teachers can design pedagogical spaces that leverage these socio-spatial repertoires in order to foster transformative learning within schools. This teacher preparation requires intentionally designing learning spaces where teachers can work with youth to engage in consequential learning by building and employing powerful literacies.

Youth as Historical Actors in the Production of Possible Futures. Mind, Culture, and Activity [PDF]
Kris D. Gutiérrez, Bryce Becker, Manuel Espinoza, Krista Cortes, Arturo Cortez, José R. Lizárraga, Edward Rivero, Karen Villegas, & Peng Yin (2019)
Abstract: In this paper, we expand the concept of historical actors to elaborate on how transformative agency has been addressed in our work with youth from nondominant communities, particularly as they leverage digital tools. First, we revisit our work with migrant students, from which the concept arose. Next, we expand this theory by proposing four indicia of the transformative nature of becoming historical actors, and offer three empirical examples to elucidate them. In our first vignette, we document how, when youth glitch during video game play, they collectively experiment with the rules, regulations, and boundaries of game design, finding ways to circumvent normative video game play and co-author their experiences. In the second vignette, we focus on siblings who take over research video cameras as their family is being filmed. We illustrate how they reshape their relation to the cameras, reorganizing participation structures through their agentive and transgressive actions. Finally, we offer an example from viral media to consider how we might recognize the process of becoming historical actors in the research that youth themselves conduct when they leverage digital tools to document everyday acts of racism, and, importantly, resistance.

#gentrification, cultural erasure, and the (im)possibilities of digital queer gestures. [PDF]
José R. Lizárraga, & Arturo Cortez (2019)
Abstract: In this chapter, we explore how a Latinx drag queen, Persia, engages in digital activism to challenge the social and spatial projects of displacement, dispossession, and gentrification in the context of the Bay Area. Of relevance to this chapter, we examine how Persia’s work across digital and analog stages stimulates collective resistance practices against the deep entrenchment and advancement of the homonormative project already under way in San Francisco. In particular, we make visible the collective imaginings percolating across Persia’s Twitter network as her fans, audience, and students engage in practices that are simultaneously dignity-affirming (Espinoza and Vossoughi 2014) and challenge the dominant order. On Persia’s Twitter network we pay special attention to those practices and artifacts—what we have to come to call digital queer gestures—that move across and between the digital and physical domains as queer Latinxs imagine and organize for new futures. While we illuminate the practices of Persia, we further examine how her queerness is taken up, hybridized, and remixed to expand a collective understanding (indeed the learning) of the effects of gentrification from a racialized, sexualized, and classed perspective.

Replacing representation with imagination: Finding ingenuity in everyday practices. Review of Research in Education [PDF]
Kris D. Gutiérrez, Krista Cortes, Arturo Cortez, Daniela DiGiacomo, Jennifer Higgs, Patrick Johnson, José R. Lizárraga, Elizabeth Mendoza, Joanne Tien, & Sepehr Vakil (2017)
Abstract: This chapter is a call for consequential education research that has transformative potential: intellectually, educationally, and socially. It is about learning to see differently. It is an argument about seeing our work with youth and communities in ways that can help education researchers see ingenuity instead of ineptness and inability, to see resilience instead of deficit, and to imagine futures with youth from nondominant communities instead of imposing failure. We use the notion of “learning to see” both metaphorically and as a theoretical lens and methodological guide to illustrate how rigorous and consequential education research can help us imagine and design new forms of learning and schooling. We argue that rupturing educational inequality also involves new forms of inquiry that help reconceptualize what it means to work with nondominant communities.