Information practices of young activists in Rwanda

© the author, 2015. Introduction. This paper explores reasons why the information practices of a group of young Rwandan activists online differed from those of a similar group of young Australians, in particular, why they did not use the Internet to interact with people they did not already know. Method. The study uses abduction, a research method which is discovery-oriented. Data intended to shed light on the development of social capital through the use of information and communication technologies were collected in 2011 through a series of interviews and analyses of Websites and blogs. The data were supplemented in 2013 by data gathered from e-mail correspondence. Analysis. These data were systematically combined and matched against the theoretical positions of Chatman’s concept of the small world to make sense of what had been observed. Results. Young Rwandan activists can be seen to exist in four small worlds, each with its own norms. There are tensions among these norms so that the practices of the world of young activists are not developed. Conclusions. The small world nature of embodied social interactions may give rise to intense local information flows but may hinder engagement in globalised actions for social change

When our Data Don’t Match the Concepts: Reflections on Research Practice

© 2015 Australian Library & Information Association. Our understanding of knowledge in the field of library and information studies and its development is guided by a notion of consensus and accepted ways of working. Research findings make incremental changes to our knowledge and we have become used to acknowledging the constructivist underpinnings of scholarly knowledge by expecting differences in information behaviour and practices by people situated in different contexts and recognising the need for varied approaches to information provision to match these practices. Research thus can be seen to take a ‘business as usual’ model, as the ways of creating new knowledge are well established both in the consensus of the field and in the rigour of research methods. The purpose of this paper is to explore this notion of ‘business as usual’ in research in library and information studies, consider how it constrains the development of new understandings and to propose how the communal understanding, the consensus, can be revised. The paper concludes that moving away from a ‘business as usual’ model will potentially require acts of heroism, including the ability to see the creation of new knowledge as an imaginative process of discovery