This dissertation study called Young Adults Acting On the World (YAAOW), addresses the injustices of withheld opportunities for critical literacy engagement and the marginalization of refugee-background students through a qualitative experiment of a critical, collaborative project, patterned after social design-based experimentation (Gutierrez, 2016), where a group of young adults from refugee backgrounds gathered over the course of six months to collectively increase their understanding of critical literacy and utilize critical literacy in response to a societal issue that adversely impacts their everyday lived experiences. In this study, I explore and address the following question: through engagement in a social design-based experiment, what critical perspectives developed within a group of refugee-background young adults as they examined their lived experiences and took action during a collaborative critical literacy project? Using an analytic lens of a critical literacy framework (Saldana, 2016), which looks at the world as a non-neutral, socially constructed text (Freire, 1970/2005; Janks, 2010; Vasquez et al., 2019), where being and doing critical literacy is embodied in our perspectives (Vasquez et al., 2019), I employed a qualitative, inductive, emic values coding method (Miles et al., 2020), which seeks to understand the complexities of the participants' everyday lived experiences as conveyed by the participants. The application of this analytic method through a critical literacy frame work helped me to understand the complex socio-cultural, socio-historical everyday lived experiences of the participants and the ways in which they see and engage with the world. Specifically, I used values coding, which reflects the participants' values, attitudes, and beliefs, which represents their perspectives on their worlds (Miles et al., 2020). Through their engagement in this critical literacy project the participants revealed: 1.) Understanding literacy in a more comprehensive and critical manner; 2.) An appreciation for their own imagined community of education; 3.) A belief that critical literacy is valuable. Overall, this study builds on the small body of scholarship which explores the application of literacy in the lives of young adults from refugee-backgrounds and provides specific implications for improvements to the educational spaces and systems which have often done harm to students from refugee-backgrounds. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2222/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]