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

I-Witnessing; Reflections on Cosmopolitanism in Kigali

Starting from the classic view of cosmopolitanism, this paper uses personal experiences gained during a six-week stay in Rwanda with a family affected by the genocide to explore the disjuncts which emerge in trying to understand the concept. In this process of exploration, it considers conceptions of the guest, the stranger and what Geertz terms the `cosmopolite. Taking a reflexive position, it explores what it means to be a witness to events in someone elses life, with a focus on post-genocide reconciliation that took place in the family in January and February 2011. In this context, it introduces the notions of cosmopolitan curiosity (Appiah) and cosmopolitan tolerance (Beck) and finds each of them affected by structural imbalances which render them potentially inadequate in practice. The paper concludes that, from a reflexive point of view, an understanding of cosmopolitanism is a work in progress, and that it is much more difficult to sustain as a lived reality than it is as an abstraction

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

Creating community : theorising on the lived experiences of young people

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Business.Community is a term used to convey a range of ideas, from a sense of belonging to contributing to a collective to sharing ideas and values. An analysis of the literature suggests that community is used interchangeably with notions of identity, social relations, social capital and civil society. This ethnographic study of the lived experience of community online and offline of members of Generation X and Generation Y engaged in civil society shows community is important to them. It is important to feel that they belong, that they are part of something larger than themselves and that they are making a difference in their world. In being part of something larger, they are making individual choices, but for a purpose recognised and shared by others. This community is conspicuous when it relates to embodied, associational or collective actions, but it can be inconspicuous when people interact online or when it is based on the intangibles of trust and credibility. They are creating their identities as they become adults, reflecting on their growth and development, and finding a sense of self through writing and other forms of expression and through interaction with others, in circumstances where public and private worlds collide. They place emphasis on the techniques for establishing and maintaining social relations online and offline. They acknowledge that friendship, based on having some emotional connection with others, is important but also recognise that satisfying relationships can be formed through the sharing of information. Most are aware that the relationships they develop can be commodified and traded as contacts, but they acknowledge the need for acting from a moral position. They value authenticity in relationships but may not be deterred by not knowing who they are interacting with online. They create their own agenda for action, based on their own interests and concerns; online they may be passionate about issues but offline they may prefer not to take part on collective action. A theorisation of this lived experience of community indicates that participants in the study have a vocabulary they can use to discuss notions of community that comprises words not necessarily associated with community and containing potentially contradictory orientations. Finally, this study indicates that further research is needed on whether the concerns with community expressed by these participants arise from the privileged position of the university-educated and on the paradoxical relationship between public and private, a tension which underpins much of the findings

Who to be?: Generations X and Y in civil society online

An ethnographic study of members of generations X and Y which explored participants' perspectives on the creation and understanding of identity, found that young people have a strong sense of self, and value authenticity in themselves and others while recognising that it is possible to create multiple identities. Information and communication technologies were seen to both support and threaten their sense of self. Participants approached the question of 'who to be' in many ways, each of which revealed tensions between the freedom to create one's own identity and the desire for authenticity, and between the need for a sense of security and recognition of the possibility of experimenting with something challenging or different

Revaluing Women's Knowledge

Womens knowledge has often been seen as a whole set of knowledges that have been disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated: naive knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity." (Foucault 1980, p. 82). In this description, scientific knowledges are seen to be hierarchically more important, with traditional knowledges ranged beneath them. In this hierarchy, womens knowledges are found wanting. The purpose of this paper is to explore the assertion that womens knowledges are inadequate and to document ways in which they are marginalised. Revaluing womens knowledge is recognised as one of the most direct methods of changing the way a society works. A vast literature has argued that is a key factor in development and has been shown to lead to poverty alleviation, to the development of active citizens and to the creation of a more open and democratic society. Possibilities for the revaluing of womens knowledge using information and communication technologies are considered, focussing on the concepts of open access and the information common

The Gen Book and Transtextuality

This piece suggests that although individuals can make decisions not to speak of difficult times in their lives, documents with the multiple relationships created through transtextuality can act as silent witnesses to these unspoken times

Understanding community: Thoughts and experiences of young people online

This ethnographic study of members of Generation X and Generation Y seeks to explore the ways they understand and experience community. Their comments and stories were gathered through interviews collected towards the end of 2006 and the early part of 2007. These provide richly textured evidence of their need to belong, to maintain everyday relationships and to collaborate with others at the same time as they commodify relationships or share information but not necessarily beliefs and values. Consequences of globalisation such as individualisation, transience in relationships, immediacy in communication, the blurring of boundaries between work and leisure, between public and private and the reliance on information and communication technologies are part of their everyday lives. Some study participants feel dis-embedded from their traditional social relationships and seek to establish new ones, whereas others feel comfortable joking with anonymous others. Their intellectualised constructs of community and descriptions of the lived reality of community find reflections in a range of theoretical constructs in the literature, both reinforcing and shifting scholarly understandings of the concept of community

Transformations: From Social Media Campaign to Scholarly Paper

This paper takes up the challenge given at the 2015 meeting of the Document Academy to explore relationships between the conference paper being presented and the social media campaign on which it was based. Using Genette’s notion of transtextuality, through which he shows that all published texts are networked to other texts, and Frohmann’s argument that our understanding of a document and the justification of that understanding are to be found in the “the stories we tell”, the report of the exploration describes the way that the relationships between the two emerge from the links created between the content of the published paper and the content of the social media campaign and from the technology of online publishing; from the transformations of the social media campaign as it is incorporated into the scholarly work; and from the stories we tell directly and indirectly through our practices of scholarship

Social media activism in Maldives; Information practices and civil society

Introduction. The study was designed to explore the information practices of a group of human rights activists in a campaign seeking to pressure the police service and government into investigating the disappearance of a journalist in the context of transnational advocacy networking. Method. The social media associated with a campaign in Maldives, Find Moyameehaa, were the basis for the case study. Tweets and Facebook posts and comments from the first 100 days of the campaign and from the 500th day were downloaded; the website was analysed. Analysis. Content analysis of tweets, posts and comments was carried out using a priori coding. Results. The tactics of transnational advocacy networking proposed by Keck and Sikkink were apparent in the campaign, however the everyday focus of the posts showed this to be a campaign of local concern. A second potential purpose for the campaign emerged, the modelling of civil engagement in a fledgling democracy. Conclusions. The information practices approach, emphasising continuity and habitualisation following Savolainen, brings additional perspectives to understanding social media activism, showing how it can represent the behaviour of civil society and create an archive of a campaign and emphasising the importance of social and cultural factors