Publications

SELECTED Publications

Play, Speculation, and social Futures

AlgoRitmo literacies in gaming: Leveraging ChicanX praxis to reimagine AI systems. Reading Research Quarterly [PDF]
Arturo Cortez, José Ramón Lizárraga, & Edward Rivero
This article introduces AlgoRitmo Literacies through a social design-based study in the LiTT Lab. We show how youth and educators used artificial intelligence to build lore, reconfigure AI-governed characters, and imagine alternative identities and futures. Grounded in ChicanX praxis, the concept names creative ways communities interrogate and repurpose AI systems toward consequential literacy learning.

KEYWORDS: Artificial Intelligence, Gaming, ChicanX praxis, Literacy

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)
This article challenges the idea that educators simply “give voice” to young people. Through video-game play, we show how youth and adults designed a learning ecology in which expertise was redistributed and multiple voices, tools, and perspectives were orchestrated. We call this principled polyphony: a collaborative arrangement that supports consequential learning and the creation of new social futures.

KEYWORDS: Game-based learning, Youth–adult collaboration, Design, Polyphony

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)
This article examines Lovecraft Country as speculative counterstorytelling that supports the creation of liberatory Black futures. We analyze how the series uses nightmares to confront histories of oppression and dreams to imagine agency, resistance, and possibility. Moving through both, we argue, enables Black communities to reinterpret past and present while authoring futures of their own making.

KEYWORDS: Black futures, Speculative storytelling, Popular culture, Counterstorytelling

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)
This study examines how Black youth develop speculative activist stances through video-game play. Drawing on Afrofuturism, we show how young people remix histories, technologies, and social relations in The Sims and Grand Theft Auto V to imagine radical Black futures. We offer a framework for understanding fugitive and abolitionist imaginaries as consequential forms of learning and activism.

KEYWORDS: Afrofuturism, Youth activism, Gaming, Abolitionist imaginaries

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)
This article expands the concept of youth as historical actors to explain how young people from nondominant communities use digital tools to transform the conditions of participation. Across examples involving game glitches, research cameras, and viral media, we identify forms of agency through which youth challenge rules, reorganize social relations, document racism, and author new possibilities.

KEYWORDS: Youth agency, Digital media, Transformative learning, Social futures

Queer Latinx Pedagogies and DIGITAL Resistance

Rogue Jotería Platformization: co-constructing queerfuturities in Latinx digital drag ecologies. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education [PDF]
José Ramón Lizárraga, Arturo Cortez, & Mariel Reyes-Galvez
This article examines Latinx queer digital drag as pedagogy and collective world-making. Through digital ethnography and multimodal discourse analysis, we identify practices of hospitality and co-creation that transform commercial platforms into spaces of belonging, care, and critique. We theorize Rogue Jotería Platformization as a speculative methodology that resists linguistic imperialism, platform capitalism, and the sanitization of drag.

KEYWORDS: Digital drag, Queer Futurity, Platform studies, Latinx communities

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)
This article examines how Latinx drag queens use digital technologies, performance, and liminality as forms of public pedagogy. Drawing on interviews and digital analyses, we show how queer performers mobilize communities around social and political issues across physical and virtual spaces. We theorize these practices as cyborg jotería pedagogies that make more equitable futures imaginable and actionable.

KEYWORDS: Latinx drag, Public pedagogy, Digital culture, Queer world-making

#gentrification, cultural erasure, and the (im)possibilities of digital queer gestures. [PDF]
José R. Lizárraga, & Arturo Cortez (2019)
This chapter examines how Latinx drag artist Persia uses digital activism to challenge gentrification, displacement, and cultural erasure in the Bay Area. We trace how digital queer gestures move across online and physical spaces, enabling audiences to remix queer performance into collective, dignity-affirming practices of learning, resistance, and future-making.

KEYWORDS: Gentrification, Digital activism, Queer Latinx culture, San Francisco

Justice-Centered Design and Transformative 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)
This article develops teacher solidarity co-design as a justice-centered form of participatory design research. Across four cases, we identify five principles for partnering with teachers who occupy multiple positions within schooling, policy, research, and society. The framework foregrounds co-learning, relationality, and attention to nested systems of power in efforts to transform schools.

KEYWORDS: Teacher learning, Participatory design, Solidarity, Justice

Socio-spatial repertoires as tools for resistance and expansive literacies. [PDF]
Arturo Cortez & Kris D. Gutiérrez (2019)
This chapter examines how emergent bilingual youth draw on socio-spatial repertoires developed through local resistance practices to create powerful literacies and transformative learning. It also considers how preservice teachers can design learning spaces that recognize and extend these repertoires, enabling youth and educators to engage in consequential learning together.

KEYWORDS: Emergent bilingual youth, Teacher education, Literacy, Resistance, San Francisco

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)
This chapter calls for consequential education research that learns to see ingenuity, resilience, and possibility in the everyday practices of youth and nondominant communities. We develop learning to see as a theoretical and methodological orientation for designing transformative research and schooling, arguing that educational inequality requires new forms of inquiry and more just relationships with communities.

KEYWORDS: Ingenuity, Imagination, Methodology, Transformative Learning