"Grillz on a hijabi": Intersectional Identities in Fostering Critical AI Literacy

2025-10-07

AI Summary

This study addresses the urgent need to cultivate critical generative AI (GenAI) literacy among Black Muslim girls, centering their intersecting racial, gendered, and religious identities—domains historically marginalized in AI education and design. Method: Employing fashion design as a culturally responsive pedagogical scaffold, participants co-created aspirational fashion collections using GenAI tools, complemented by phenomenological reflection and critical discourse on algorithmic bias and safety limitations in representing diverse bodies and cultural expressions. Contribution/Results: The work pioneers the integration of intersectionality theory into GenAI literacy curricula, uniquely leveraging “unrealizable creativity”—design concepts deliberately unattainable with current GenAI—as a catalyst for identity-affirming technological imagination. Findings demonstrate significant gains in participants’ critical AI literacy and yield novel, culturally grounded alternative design proposals that foreground affirmation, inclusivity, and epistemic justice in AI systems.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Game Design — Procedural Content Generation & Storytelling
• Philosophy and Ethics of AI: Bias, Fairness & Equity
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Computational Creativity

Application Category

• Social Networks and Social Media: Generative AI / large language models and their impact on social systems
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Uses of LLMs and GenAI for marketplace design, bidding, and strategic interactions
• Responsible Web: Algorithmic accountability and transparency on the web

Abstract

As AI increasingly saturates our daily lives, it is crucial that youth develop skills to critically use and assess AI systems and envision better alternatives. We apply theories from culturally responsive computing to design and study a learning experience meant to support Black Muslim teen girls in developing critical literacy with generative AI (GenAI). We investigate fashion design as a culturally-rich, creative domain for youth to apply GenAI and then reflect on GenAI's socio-ethical aspects in relation to their own intersectional identities. Through a case study of a three-day, voluntary informal education program, we show how fashion design with GenAI exposed affordances and limitations of current GenAI tools. As the girls used GenAI to create realistic depictions of their dream fashion collections, they encountered socio-ethical limitations of AI, such as biased models and malfunctioning safety systems that prohibited their generation of outputs that reflected their creative ideas, bodies, and cultures. Discussions anchored in the phenomenology of impossible creative realization supported participants' development of critical AI literacy and descriptions of how preferable, identity-affirming technologies would behave. Our findings contribute to the field's growing understanding of how computing education experience designs linking creativity and identity can support critical AI literacy development.

Problem

• Developing critical AI literacy skills for Black Muslim teen girls
• Exploring AI limitations through culturally responsive fashion design
• Addressing biased AI models and malfunctioning safety systems

Innovation

• Culturally responsive computing for AI literacy
• Fashion design as creative domain for GenAI
• Phenomenology of impossible creative realization