The Institute for Research on Digital Literacies has for two decades brought together scholars, teachers, learners, tech industry experts, school boards, and feminist gaming pioneers from around the world to understand the transformative power and consequences of emerging digital technologies. It is my honor to join this community and to launch a new phase of IRDL’s proud story by welcoming a community of researchers whose interests extend our mandate to include digital cultures related to youth, social media, surveillance, and privacy issues, AI, generational analysis, diverse literacies, and ongoing innovations in learning technologies. Our work at IRDL is supported by York University’s research excellence mandate, our award-winning faculty, and our dedicated post-doctoral fellows, graduate students, undergraduates, and staff. In a rapidly changing digital world, the Institute for Research on Digital Literacies looks optimistically toward a future of discovery, collaboration, mentorship, and innovation. On a personal note, in the past few months it has become clear that the digital world is radically shaping the way we live our lives. Like many of you, my whole world has moved into digital spaces – my family life, my work life, my social life. And, there are many others for whom this isn’t possible, who aren’t able to access these spaces easily. It is with this in mind that I approach this new academic year both excited and daunted by the challenging work ahead to understand the complexities of 2021’s digital experience as our lives weave in and through digital spaces. Sincerely, Dr. Natalie Coulter Director of IRDL
Spotlight
2019-21 Sounding off: Learning, Communicating, and Making Sense with Sound This project investigates existing professional subject matter experts (SMEs) and artistic “communities of practice” where sound/aural experience is central. It examines what and how people learn through inquiry into sounds, sound-making materials and aural/acoustic experience, and how (re)claiming sound as a vital ‘mode’ of sensory experience can afford new opportunities for sound-based inquiry across disciplines, as well as afford more inclusive and innovative music pedagogies adequate to 21st century learning contexts.
2015-2020 Refiguring Innovation in Games (ReFiG) is a 5-year project supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Composed of an international collective of scholars, community organizers and industry representatives. ReFiG is committed to promoting diversity and equity in the game industry and culture and effecting real change in a space that has been exclusionary to so many. More information about the project is available on the website: www.refig.ca
This project explores the tensions between the commercial constructions of youth cultures and the lived experiences of the embodied young person. It addresses how the tween girl is narrowly defined as a white heterosexual consuming subject and how she engages with such framings. This research has two main goals. The first is to explore how the cultural industries of girlhood, including digital media properties and global transmedia conglomerates, contribute to the synergistic forces of global capitalism to produce the tween as a global assemblage. The second goal is to explore what girls do with the tween cultures that are produced for them—but rarely by them—by asking how they negotiate these resources of subjectivity in their everyday lives and by looking at the immaterial labour of their participation in digital media and social media networks. This study will move beyond the work that is currently being done in the fields of critical technology studies, media studies, and girls’ studies by exploring how girls engage with a construction of girlhood that dominates much of the transnational mediascape and meets the needs of the global marketplace. In doing so we will uncover some of the tensions between the commercial worlds of youth cultures and the lived experiences of the embodied young person.
Communication practices are changing rapidly and dramatically, and the bulk of this change has taken place over the course of a single generation. Documenting evolving communication practices in our digitally-enmeshed social worlds is the goal of this research project. Research Team Heather Lotherington (York University, Canada) Natalia Ronda (Council of Ministers of Education, Canada) Sirpa Leppänen (University of Jyväskylä, Finland) Constant Leung (King’s College London, United Kingdom) Lars Elleström (Linnaeus University, Sweden) To capture quotidian communication practices, we are exploring lifelogging as a methodology. Lifelogging requires participants to wear a small, unobstrusive digital camera that snaps pictures at 30 second intervals from the wearer’s perspective. We are collecting slices of life from different wearers as they go about their daily interactions to document mediating interfaces and discourse practices in human interactions. Our work addresses educational and linguistic questions about how we communicate, and aims to critically rewrite outdated notions of communicative competence. Given that education is historically linked to print literacy, there is an insistence that language is grounded on the page, and assessed in terms of alphabetic and grammatical encoding conventions (i.e., spelling, essay writing, etc) that is difficult to dislodge and update. Critically, common benchmarks in teaching and assessing linguistic and literate communication are based on increasingly obsolescent and supplemented practices. We are using lifelogging as a keyhole on quotidian communication practices—variously mediated: face-to-face interactions; via mobile as well as desktop devices; with traditional textual interfaces; and as we transit through our encoded world to create a larger picture of our contemporary communicative world.
Social Media Engages Oral Culture at Ugandan Heritage Sites IRDL Research Team Members: Mary Leigh Morbey (research lead), Maureen Senoga (PhD candidate), Mary Pat O’Meara (MEd graduate and project videographer), Dennis York (PhD graduate), Stephan Chan (MEd student), and Abeer Naushahi (Seneca College Media student) Abstract Uganda in East Africa possesses 100 heritage sites illustrating the rich culture of Uganda little known by Ugandans and the world. Collaboration between the Uganda National Museum and a York University Institute for Research on Digital Learning research team is capturing the heritage sites through video and photograph, and stories of older people living in the shadow of the sites through videoed interviews in English and Luganda. The collected data situated in a Social Media structure centered in the museum website, preserves potential lost heritage. …………………….. Supported strongly, and politically, by the Uganda Commissioner of Museums and Monuments, along with the Uganda Ambassador to France representing UNESCO Uganda, the project team has developed a non-colonizing framework, methodologies, and Web Social Media conceptualization to represent Ugandan heritage sites and related oral stories of those who have lived in the shadow of these sites. The current focus is the virtual preservation, presentation, and education of 10 of 100 heritage sites beginning with the Kampala Kasubi Tombs destroyed by fire in 2010 and now under re-construction, so that Ugandan heritage sites and cultural history along with oral stories about them live on as structures are lost and older Ugandans who know these stories die. Little is known about the sites by Ugandans, and by the rest of the world. Working with Social Media the project objective is to virtually, through video and photographs, record the historic sites, and orally, through interview and story telling, video record local stories about the sites. The field research data collection of the first 10 heritage and memorial sites was completed in […]