Reading the Ink Around Us: How Karen Refugee Youth Use Tattoos as an Alternative Literacy Practice

This work uses the lens of new literacy studies to examine the narratives told through the tattoos of Karen youth refugees living in the United States. This insight into a single ethnic group, currently under-represented in the literature, seeks to broaden teacher perspectives on what “counts” as literacy. This work is based on a series of interviews with Karen refugees and takes a sociocultural perspective on the ways living in a divided cultural and linguistic space shapes Karen youth’s literacy practices and is shaped by their out-of-school lives. Findings are explored in two thematic groups related to Karen youth tattooing: tattoos as expressions of solidarity and tattoos that signify remembering. Implications and discussion sections include ways that teachers may specifically begin to consider and utilize student tattoos and other alternative literacies in the classroom.