Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationGrounded in a critical sociocultural theory of literacy that draws on elements of postcolonial feminism, postmodern geography, and cultural studies, this dissertation focuses on language and its use in digital multimodal literacy practices. This ethnographic study took place from January to September 2013 in the Mya Community Center (a pseudonym), which served youth resettled as refugees. I engaged with nine teenage girls who were resettled from the Thailand-Burma border. Through participant observation, in-depth interviews, and document collection, I focused on ways in which language was used in multimodal and digital literacy practices for complex negotiations of identity, agency, and power. The findings illustrate how, depending on the intersections of their social contexts, the girls enacted complex identities that included their individual perspectives on cultural belonging, friendships, love, and affinities through language and literacy practices. The findings also show that the girls' language learning and maintenance, along with their literacy practices, were impacted by historical and spatial contexts of their global lived experiences. This study seeks to disrupt the homogenous and deficit-oriented representations of young refugee women and girls by focusing on the ways in which they actively construct, or author, themselves through language and literacy in global digital spaces