Kevin M. Leander

Tracing the Everyday 'Sitings' of Adolescents on the Internet: a strategic adaptation of ethnography across online and offline spaces

This article argues for the need to move beyond place-based ethnography and develop ethnographic methodologies that follow the moving, traveling practices of adolescents online and offline. In the first part of the article, challenges to traditional ethnographic constructs such as place, identity, and participant obervation, and the ways in which these constructs are further destabilized in research online are reviewed. Secondly, at the center of the discussion, a common misconception of the Internet as somehow radically separate from everyday life is critiqued. Thirdly, possible interpretive methodologies are discussed for following connections and circulations in research that travels, with adolescents, across online and offline spaces. These methodologies include tracing the flows of objects, texts, and bodies, analyzing the construction of boundaries within and around texts, and focusing upon the remarkable ways in which texts represent and embed multiple contexts.

The Changing Social Spaces of Learning: Mapping New Mobilities.

Writing on contemporary culture and social life, sociologists and cultural theorists have been describing new or changing forms of movement, variously described as cultural “flows” (e.g., Appadurai, 1996), “liquid life” (Bauman, 2005), or a “networked society” (Castells, 1996). The change in such movements or mobilities of people, media, material goods, and other social phenomena, including the reach or extension of such movements, connections between “global” and “local” life, the creation of new spaces and places, and new speeds and rhythms of everyday social practice, is arguably the most important contrast between contemporary social life and that of just a decade or two ago. Despite these changes and longer conversations about their meanings in a range of disciplines, mobilities and their relations to learning within education are still understudied and undertheorized. The present review maps current and relevant engagements with mobility and learning across conceptual and empirical studies. The first section considers the relationship of learning to space and place in educational research, and focuses in particular on the classroom-as-container as a dominant discourse of the field. By “dominant discourse” we intend that the classroom-as-container constructs not only particular ways of speaking and writing in educational research, but also systems of rules concerning how meaning is made (Foucault, 1972). This discourse functions as an “imagined geography” of education, constituting when and where researchers and teachers should expect learning to “take place”. This dominant discourse shapes educational research practice and perspectives, we posit, even when research questions cross “in school” and “out of school” borders. Next, in the second section, we consider disruptions and expansions of the classroom-as-container discourse within

Rereading “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies” Bodies, Texts, and Emergence

In this article, we explore our concern with the way youth identities and literacy research and practices are framed through a dominant conceptual paradigm in new literacy studies, namely, as articulated in the 1996 New London Group’s “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures.” More than any other text, “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies” streams powerfully through doctoral programs, edited volumes, books, journal reviews, and calls for conference papers, as the central manifesto of the new literacies movement. In what follows, we draw heavily from the work of Deleuze and Guattari to take issue with the New London Group’s disciplined rationalization of youth engagement in literacies. We organize our critical exploration of “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies” around Lee, a 10-year-old boy we follow through one day as he engages in reading and playing with text from Japanese manga. Our goal with this rereading is to reassert the sensations and movements of the body in the moment-by-moment unfolding or emergence of activity. This nonrepresentational approach describes literacy-related activity not as projected toward some textual end point but as living its life in the ongoing present, forming relations and connections across signs, objects, and bodies in often unexpected ways. Such activity is saturated with affect and emotion; it creates and is fed by an ongoing series of affective intensities that are different from the rational control of meanings and forms. It helps us to keep the distinction between description and prescription sharp and to begin imagining what else might be going on.

“This is Our Freedom Bus Going Home Right Now”: Producing and Hybridizing Space-Time Contexts in Pedagogical Discourse

Contexts of school-related discourse are not static backgrounds; rather, contexts are produced, negotiated, and hybridized within the flow of dialogue. In this study, an approach to the analysis of discursive intercontextuality is advanced through theories of space-time production. In addition, the management of multiple contexts within school-related discourse is argued to be an important means of discursively producing identity, agency, and power relations. Data are drawn from an ethnographic and discourse-based study of students and sponsors on an extended school field trip. Drawing upon Bakhtin, the first part of the analysis compares the production and hybridization of space-time in two segments of pedagogical discourse. Whereas one segment suggests the imaginative possibilities of discourse to expand identity across hybridized contexts, another segment suggests how school contexts are bracketed and privileged. The analysis turns to work in conceptual integration networks for a method of closely analyzing hybrids, and to consider conceptual dimensions of intercontextuality.

Polycontextual Construction Zones: Mapping the Expansion of Schooled Space and Identity

By analyzing the activity of students building a cabin in a school setting, this article examines how conflicts among schooling and extraschooling activity systems can create an expansive space of identity development and learning. Drawing together activity system theories and theories of social space, the article illustrates how polycontextual conflicts and expansions are spatially contingent and productive of space. Symbolic and material dimensions of social space provide a sharpened lens through which to conceptualize intersystemic conflict and development. As the traffic of conflict and negotiation between modal schooling activity and cabin building is heightened around productions of social space, potential expansion of the systems and persons across them is related to the resolution of spatial dilemmas.

The Aesthetic Production and Distribution of Image/Subjects among Online Youth.

In this article the authors consider how youth engage in social practices of identity through their online practices with images. Although they build on social practice perspectives, informed by the new literacy studies, they question the extent to which such perspectives have created new autonomies and separations, including the separation of texts from sensation and from the body. An essential part of interpreting imaging identity practice, they argue, involves understanding how people relate to images aesthetically. Through affect, desire, and sensory immersion, we might begin to understand how images become both intensely personalized and broadly distributed. Data in the article are drawn from a larger ethnographic study of the offline and online literacies of youth across school and home contexts. Analyses focus on two cases: Sophia, who remixes, modifies, and trades images to build a website for a punk rock band, and Brian, who modifies and constructs images for online game-play. Analyses of these data are informed by social practice perspectives on identity, by the domains or ‘strada’ of media practices, and by postmodern perspectives on figural signification.

The construction of ethnic boundaries in classroom interaction through social space

This article adds a social-spatial dimension to ethnicity construction while acknowledging the production of ethnicity as constructed through a relation of the ‘‘here and now’’ and an imagined (common) past. Empirically, social-spatial analysis is elaborated by looking at how social difference is produced in multi-ethnic schools through classroom interaction both in the USA and in the Netherlands. In our analysis, we are concerned with how ‘‘school’’ becomes evoked or produced in student discourse while ethnic positions are established. At the same time we show how spaces such as migrant neighborhoods and homelands are evoked and related to school spaces. The results show that more general mechanisms can be distinguished of how students use these spaces in their constructions of otherness across the data sets, but that the quality and complexity of these mechanisms are specific and can be related to the more general (migration) histories of the ethnic groups.

Networked Identity How Immigrant Youth Employ Online Identity Resources

In recent years, practices of online social networking and their implications for migrant youth identity development have been heavily debated. The nature of access to resources for identification is changing, and by using a social network perspective, this research conceptualizes identity as a networked phenomenon in which resources are understood as specific kinds of social formations: identity networks. Social network interviews were conducted with Dutch-Moroccan inner-city teenagers, probing their online and offline identity practices as related to their actual social networks. Social network analysis was applied, assuming that structural properties of networks affect behaviour; they can limit or shape, but do not fully determine the actions that individuals can engage in. By combining numeric, discursive and visual data, we aim to understand how structural and compositional aspects of networks are related to the ways in which youth create opportunities for identity development. Four network types, with associated (online) identity practices, are presented.

Community Construction in the Virtual: Reconceptualizing Joint Action

Analyzing the activity of a group of students involved in an online university course with a simulation environment, this article considers and problematizes the idea of online community and its relations to learning. The analysis builds upon Deweys conception of organic community and related perspectives. In valuing ‘joint action,’ such perspectives bury the relational nature of community construction under more concrete and stable notions of common mediating artifacts, geographic locations and membership among diverse communities. When the held-in-common is destabilized in the virtual, relations of student learning to community construction must be significantly reconceptualized. Moreover, for participants the meanings of ‘online’ and ‘offline’ activities and communities are interwoven within the process of interpretation, and should be understood as developing through this tension. Students and instructors alike face significant challenges in forging new online democratic learning environments.

Editorial Media and Migration: Learning in a Globalized World

The background for this special issue extends at least a decade back in time, when the two of us (Mariëtte de Haan and Kevin Leander), along with other colleagues such as Sandra Ponzanesi of the Wired Up project, were reading works such as Appadurai’s Modernity at Large (1996). Then, nearly a decade after Appadurai had penned his landmark book, we were trying to conceive of the relations of the movements he was concerned with to youth culture and to youth learning opportunities. How might we translate such insights on the fluid and shifting ‘scapes’ of modern life, including especially, the movements of people (ethnoscapes) and movements of media (medioscapes) into an understanding of learning opportunities and learning connections in a world of increasing flows? In particular, how are these flows or forms of migration co-constituted or otherwise related to one another in modern, global life? And for whom? We are pleased to bring together a set of studies that address such questions for us that have been growing for a long time, including during the course of our research about borders and across borders. This special issue brings together studies located at the intersection of migration, media and learning that consider how learning practices of youth in migration are shaped by new media. The change in the mobilities of people, media, material goods that allow new connections between ’global’ and ’local’ life marks contemporary migration as well as social life more generally. From the perspective of how young people’s lives are formed and develop, these developments provide differently distributed resources from which youth can draw, and different processes through which identities, social networks, and knowledge may be constructed. One of our goals with this issue was to bring together different perspectives on how learning trajectories of individual learners become defined by broadly distributed networks and broadly distributed knowledge systems. It is commonly assumed that as our information systems and knowledge communities extend over larger geographical distances, are increasingly mobile, and have more flexible boundaries, the learning processes and the competencies needed to take part in these systems also change. People need to learn to handle increasingly complex systems of information, and learn to participate in multiple communities that are potentially diverse and instable. We were interested in studies that could provide insights into how these complex systems for