ABSTRACT
Youth draw from their full range of experiences during composing practices: including joys and traumas. Trauma-informed and healing pedagogies are entwined with critical media literacy as youth take up and restory media texts that represent persistent racialized trauma. In this chapter, high school youth demonstrate how they draw from joy and trauma as resources during critical memetic analysis and move toward healing pedagogies through memetic composing. The teenagers featured in this chapter demonstrate agency in their selection and creation of memes. Furthermore, analyzing the dialogue and testimony of and between youth demonstrates shifts in language and discourse patterns: youth increasingly moved into critical analysis and critique of sociopolitical structures identified as perpetuating harm.
