Imaging, Keyboarding, and Posting Identities: Young People and New Media Technologies

Part of the Volume on Youth, Identity, and Digital Media Clicking, posting, and text messaging their way through a shifting digital landscape, young people are bending and blending genres, incorporating old ideas, activities, and images into new bricolages, changing the face, if not the substance, of social interaction and altering how they see themselves and each other. From data collected in Britain, Canada, and South Africa, we have selected cases that involve a range of technologies and contexts, from adult-mediated activities in schools and community centers to spontaneous media production done in private at home. Whether it be postings on websites, improvisations in video production, or the incorporation of objects in a multi-media presentation, these cases illustrate that, like digital cultural production, identity processes are multifaceted and in flux, constructed and deconstructed through a process of bricolage that we label as "identities-in-action." Analysis of the cases reveals certain shared features of digital production that contribute to identities-in-action: the "constructedness" of production, the collective and social aspects of individual productions, the neglected but crucial element of embodiment, the reflexivity and negotiation involved in producing and consuming one's own images, the creativity in media convergence, and the value of constructivist models of learning

Hopefulness and suspense in the autoethnographic encounters of teaching in higher education

I remember hearing far off the sound of the tires of a car on the gravel of thelong, straight, open road that my family always referred to as the ‘mainroad’. This main road is some distance from our farm yard, connected byanother long and very straight and open lane way. No trees or bushes oranything to block the view of the prairie expanse. For several minutes there issuspense. The tires offer a hopeful sound, breaking the silence, and breakingthe monotony of the long summer day of a little girl who longs for something,anything, to happen. First the car is quite a way off. Then it sounds like it isslowing down – and I see that it is turning into our lane way. It stops there,and at that moment I am lost in anticipation. I don’t recognize the car. Is itgoing to come up the lane or is the driver just turning around? Will there bethe sound of the wheels speeding up, kicking up a little dust as it heads backdown the main road towards town, or will the vehicle slowly make its way upthe narrow passage of the lane way, towards the barn and house

Ayotzinapa #43 Disappeared in Headlines: discursive recognition, awareness, erasure and violence in popular media production

This paper explores how one incident became a symbol of recognition and awareness while simultaneously one of erasure and violence and how people mobilize to challenge neoliberal state projects and violence. A critical analysis of the media discourse surrounding, the kidnapping and disappearance of 43 male students from Raul Isidro Burgos Escuela rural de Ayotzinapa on September 26, 2014 reveals a symbolic simultaneity of recognition and erasure, which has profound gender implications. This exploration of select media on the #43 students reveals how narratives whose purpose is to inform the public actually minimize epidemic like violence occurring against women by shifting public attention to localized sites and tensions. The medias complicity in drawing uncritical attention to the events surrounding the 43 students bolsters the state\u27s assertion that this violence is random, localized and tied to gang warfare. While families of the 43 have gained unprecedented public attention for the violence enacted against their male relatives, families of women murdered in Mexico have received very little mass public attention. Rather than support the state\u27s project of drawing attention away from a systemic analysis of public violence against the most vulnerable populations of the state-including women, indigenous and mestizo peasants and social activists- the families of the 43 have sought to tie their struggles with those occurring statewide including violence against young women. Their joint struggles have the potential of challenging a neoliberal state seeking to disempower and disappear those who stand in the way of economic and political modernizing initiatives.\u2

From spaces of sexual violence to sites of networked resistance: Re-imagining mobile and social media technologies

To date, much of the work on mobile and social media in the context of sexual violence has focused on its threats and harmful effects, particularly in relation to cyber-bullying and other forms of online harassment. But what if we think of such technologies as technologies of non-violence? In this article we make a case for exploring this work in rural South Africa, where, in spite of some challenges of access, the availability of technology is increasing the number of possible ways of addressing sexual violence. Building on what we offer as a primer of technologies currently available, we consider the implications of this work for researchers (especially those in education), interested in how technology can help to address sexual violence

Seeing how it works: A visual essay about critical and transformative research in education

As visual researchers in the field of education we have initiated and completed numerous participatory projects using qualitative visual methods such as drawing, collage, photovoice, and participatory video, along with organising screenings and creating exhibitions, action briefs, and policy posters. Locating this work within a critical paradigm, we have used these methods with participants to explore issues relating to HIV and AIDS and to gender-based violence in rural contexts. With technology, social media, and digital communication network connections becoming more accessible, the possibilities of using visual participatory methods in educational research have been extended. However, the value of visual participatory research in contributing to social change is often unrecognised. While the power of numbers and words in persuasive and informative change is well accepted within the community of educational researchers, the power of the visual itself is often overlooked. In this visual essay, we use the visual as a way to shift thinking about what it means to do educational research that is transformative in and of itself. As an example we draw on our visual participatory work with 15 first-year women university students in the Girls Leading Change1 project to explore and address sexual violence at a South African university. We aim to illustrate, literally, the possibilities of using the visual, not only as a mode of inquiry, but also of representation and communication in education and social science scholarship

Critical perspectives on digital spaces in educational research

From text: Globally, the digital is encroaching, reformulating, and recreating spaces in contemporary society (Kalantzis-Cope & Gherab-Martin, 2010). This is so in South Africa with the various applications of the digital having their roots in different places and spaces. Historically, we can look back to the development of portable video technology in the late 1960s in Canada. Organised through the National Film Board of Canada, a group of filmmakers initiated a new approach to documentary film production, engaging communities themselves in the process of filmmaking (Rusted, 2010)