Dyslexia in SNS: an exploratory study to investigate expressions of identity and multimodal literacies

The paradigm of neurodiversity provides a theoretical scaffold to challenge the idea of dyslexia as a deficit, by considering how difficulties related to literacy may reflect possible cognitive strengths and opportunities for learning. In this paper we adopt this perspective which associates dyslexia with strengths in visual, oral and three-dimensional thinking. Our goal is to understand if and how the multimodal affordances of SNS mediate participation and new literacies for dyslexic youth, and how these affordances interact with identity work. Seven young people struggling with literacy were interviewed about their use of SNS. Our results show that the visual affordances of SNS enable new forms of participation and expression, furthering our understanding of visual literacies. Nonetheless, despite the pervasive use of visual affordances to perform identity work, we also find that young people’s learning differences are not always obviated but re-constructed, or even confronted in SNS.