Ioana Literat

“A Pencil for Your Thoughts”: Participatory Drawing as a Visual Research Method with Children and Youth

This article explores the use of participatory drawing as a non-mechanical visual research method in qualitative research with children and youth. Because of its co-constructed and playful nature, as well as its lack of dependence on linguistic proficiency, participatory drawing emerges as a highly efficient and ethically sound research strategy that is particularly suited for work with children and young people across a variety of cultural contexts. The analysis of drawn images, complemented by a subsequent discussion of these drawings in the context of their production, has the potential of revealing a more nuanced depiction of concepts, emotions, and information in an expressive, empowering, and personally relevant manner. As a review of the participatory drawing methodology, this article draws on several examples in order to highlight the inherent affordances of the visual mode and discuss the benefits and limitations of using this strategy in research with children and youth.

Participatory mapping with urban youth: the visual elicitation of socio-spatial research data

Participatory mapping attempts to engage youth in the generation of personalized maps, as a way to both harness the value of individual knowledge about geographic space, and to concurrently empower the research participants by inviting them to take an active stake in the representation and explication of their spatial environment. Engagement in the mapping exercise facilitates a nuanced process of reflection – often unrealizable through purely textual methods – and can stimulate youth empowerment by seeding critical conversations around personal safety, mobility and technologies of spatial representation. Findings from a study that implemented participatory mapping in the context of an after-school program for urban high school students are used to demonstrate the potential of this research strategy as a participatory pedagogical intervention, and to extract methodological recommendations for its effective implementation in urban educational settings.

Implications of massive open online courses for higher education: mitigating or reifying educational inequities?

The proliferation of massive open online courses (MOOCs) has stirred a fervent debate about global access to higher education. While some commentators praise MOOCs for expanding educational opportunities in a more open and accessible fashion, others criticize this trend as a threat to current models of higher education and a low-quality substitute for traditional learning. Drawing on a comprehensive literature review of both academic and popular media sources, this article will explore the impact of MOOCs on the field of higher education, with a particular emphasis on their promise to enhance educational opportunities worldwide. Specifically, the analysis will focus on the four issues that have – so far – proven to be most significant in shaping the future of MOOC as an equalizing force in higher education: credit, pedagogy, internationalization, and, finally, legal and financial aspects.

Interrogating participation across disciplinary boundaries: Lessons from political philosophy, cultural studies, art, and education

In view of the prominence of online media and their role in enabling new patterns of activity and engagement, the concept of participation has become an increasingly ubiquitous buzzword across a wide variety of disciplines. However, the specifics of its scope and applications are insufficiently interrogated. This article traces the use of the term, participation, across four domains—political philosophy, cultural studies, art, and education—discussing core assumptions about what constitutes meaningful participation in each instance. In particular, for each of these fields of inquiry, attention will be paid to (a) the definition and key debates around participation, (b) the degrees of meaningful participation, and (c) the strengths of each of these perspectives, particularly in terms of opportunities for productive cross-pollination among these disciplines.

Buy memes low, sell memes high: vernacular criticism and collective negotiations of value on Reddit’s MemeEconomy

ABSTRACT While existing scholarship has focused on distilling the attributes of successful memes and the dynamics of their propagation in online spaces, there is a lack of research on the vernacular criticism of memes beyond quantitative markers of popularity. By examining the MemeEconomy community on Reddit, where ‘meme traders’ appropriate stock market terminology to discuss and appraise memes, this article aims to understand how this particular subculture of self-proclaimed meme insiders assigns value to viral media. Our findings point to the salience of four key features that are seen to determine a meme’s value: its positioning in relation to the mainstream, its versatility and expansion potential, its topicality or cultural relevance, and its perceived quality. We discuss implications for the formation and reinforcement of subcultural identities around memes, and theorize the role of vernacular criticism as fulfilling significant social functions in online communities.

Facilitating creative participation and collaboration in online spaces: the impact of social and technological factors in enabling sustainable engagement

ABSTRACT This article investigates the role of social and technological factors in enabling sustainable creative participation in online environments. To facilitate a deeper understanding of these dynamics, I describe and analyse the implementation of a creative participatory project across three online platforms: as a series of tasks on Mechanical Turk, as a public collaboration on hitRECord, and as a participatory online course on Peer 2 Peer University. In discussing the three implementations, particular attention is paid to the norms and hierarchies of participation on each platform, the motivations driving participants to engage in online creative projects, and the significance of technological features in supporting the aims and ethos of participation in each case. This comparative analysis allows for a better understanding of the factors that facilitate or, conversely, hinder participatory creativity online, contributing to contemporary discussions aiming to explicate the parameters of creative participation and collaboration in online projects.

Analyzing youth digital participation: aims, actors, contexts and intensities

ABSTRACT Participation is often used as a blanket term that is uncritically celebrated; this is particularly true in the case of youth digital participation. In this article, we propose a youth-focused analytical framework, applicable to a wide variety of youth digital participation projects, which can help facilitate a more nuanced understanding of these participatory practices. This framework analyzes the aims envisioned for youth participation, the actors and contexts of these activities, and the variable levels of participatory intensity, in order to more accurately assess the forms and outcomes of youth digital participation. We demonstrate the value of this framework by applying it to two contemporary cases of digital youth participation: an informal online community (Nerdfighters) and a formalized educational initiative (CyberPatriot). Such analyses facilitate normative assessments of youth digital participation, which enable us to better assess what participation is good for, and for whom.

Youth online political expression in non-political spaces: implications for civic education

ABSTRACT Based on an in-depth qualitative content analysis of post-election discourse in three online creative communities (Scratch, Archive of Our Own, and hitRECord), we examine the significance of youth political expression in non-political online spaces, and its implications for civic education. We find that these spaces offer a valuable window into the main concerns experienced by youth around the election, which they voice through unique modes of expression. Online spaces facilitate connections between the personal and the political, while highlighting the social aspects of youth participation and learning in regard to civic issues. At the same time, participants exhibit uncertainty regarding the limits of online expression and the potential consequences of speaking out. We argue that online spaces should be acknowledged as a significant channel for youth political expression and socialization, and consider how the practices encountered there could shape our approach to civic education.

Make, share, review, remix: Unpacking the impact of the internet on contemporary creativity

This article advances a holistic framework that aims to facilitate a better understanding of the nuanced impact of the internet on contemporary creative participation. Functioning simultaneously as the context, locus, and medium for creative activity, the internet affects each stage in the life cycle of a creative product – creation, distribution, interpretation, and remix. In addition, this influence is felt in a wide range of creative products: off-line and online, professional and vernacular. Previous research has not examined these different processes and types of creative output in conversation with each other; by advancing an integrative analytical approach and synthesizing research from multiple domains, this work attempts to address this gap. As a way to illuminate this impact and demonstrate the value of the proposed framework, the article applies this framework to three case studies: a work of off-line art (The Artist Is Present), online art (Moon), and online nonart or vernacular online creativity (Pepe the Frog memes). This analysis facilitates a deeper understanding of these interrelated processes, attends to the complex ways in which new media blurs the borders between those categorizations, and discusses the potential implications of these complex contemporary dynamics.

Making Sense of Refugees Online: Perspective Taking, Political Imagination, and Internet Memes:

There are many dimensions to the ongoing European refugee crisis, including economic, political, and humanitarian. Underlying them, however, is the issue of self–other relations and, in particular, the ways in which Western societies imagine others and otherness, defined in cultural, religious, and political terms. At the core of this political imagination, we propose, are certain understandings of refugees, of how they think, feel, and intend to act. In this article, we aim to unpack the social and psychological mechanisms involved in taking the perspective of refugees on digital platforms. The focus here is on refugee-related memes shared on Reddit, and the conversations around these visual artifacts. Our findings indicate that participants in these forums most often construct the perspective of refugees from an outside position, based on a commitment to difference, and rarely try to identify with the situation of refugees.