Social media and Education workshop
UCL Anthropology, Daryll Forde Seminar Room, 7th May 2015
PROVISIONAL PROGRAMME
Proposed schedule
Registration, coffee and tea
Session 1
9:45 – 10:00
10:00 – 11:30
Break/coffee/tea
Session 2
11:45 – 13:15
Lunch
Session 3
14:15 – 15:15
Break/coffee/tea
Session 4
15:30 – 16:30
Closing of workshop – wine reception
Structure of the sessions
Session 1: Chaired by John Potter
Papers by (15 min each): Daniel Miller, Xinyuan Wang, and Elisabetta Costa
Q&A and discussions
Session 2: Chaired by Jessica Ringrose
Papers by (15 min each): Razvan Nicolescu, Shriram Venkatraman, and Juliano
Spyer
Q&A and discussions
Session 3: Chaired by Alicia Blum-Ross
Papers by (20 min each): Tom McDonald and Jessica Ringrose
Q&A and discussions
Session 4: Chaired by Tom McDonald
Papers by (20 min each): Alicia Blum-Ross and John Potter
Q&A and discussions
Abstracts of the papers
Daniel Miller (UCL/Anthropology): From Cyber-Bullying to Cyber-Drama
The literature on cyber-bullying tends to identify and categorize specific persons
and behaviours with the aim of advising relevant policy. But a study of four
secondary schools in England revealed a much more diffuse and ubiquitous
range of behavior and roles, suggesting that the category of cyber-bullying may
be misleading. Within the study we were able to locate three new activities where
there was evidence social media appears to exacerbate negative relations: the
indirect, the 24/7 contact, and `hiding-behind-a-screen.’
Xinyuan Wang (UCL/Anthropology): From Post-school Education to the
Coming of Age on Social Media
For Chinese rural migrants who drop school at a very early age, the shortened
schooling time not only means the lack of education, but also the lack of the
important life phase of learning the social skill to establish stable social
connections. In which situation, social media has become not only an important
‘open source’ resource serves as informal post-school education, but also ‘the
place’ where young people ‘educate’ themselves into adulthood.
Elisabetta Costa (UCL/Anthropology): Social Media and the Public Display
of Knowledge in a Medium-sized Town in South-east Turkey
This paper shows how townsfolk use Facebook memes to publicly project oneself
as moral, educated, and knowledgeable. Individuals express themselves by
repeatedly sharing authorized discourses from multiple sources: political parties,
government, Greek philosophers or Iranian poets. Being knowledgeable, literate,
and committed is afforded great value in the town, especially among Kurdish
inhabitants. Those who don’t confirm to these ideals are criticised as being ‘cahil’
(ignorant, illiterate). This paper argues that the public display of knowledge
reflects the importance given to education by the Kurdish population of Turkey,
which sees learning as an important tool for political struggle and effective social
mobility.
Razvan Nicolescu (UCL/Anthropology): The Obligation to Study and
Chance to Work. Questions from Southeast Italy
The paper will discuss the central place of education and its particular relation
with work in southeast Italy. Then, it suggests the main reasons why these issues
are reflected by a contested use of communication technologies but not on public
social media.
Shriram Venkatraman (UCL/Anthropology): Social Media and Education Perspectives of Parents across Social Classes
This paper argues that the perceptions of parents of school going children about
Social Media aren't uniform across social classes. It also discusses how
perspectives of parents change based on the type of school their children attend
and the opportunities that the school creates for them.
Juliano Spyer (UCL/Anthropology): Breaking the Code of Learning in a
Working Class Neighbourhood in Bahia
This paper shows why the internet has been more useful that public schools as
sources for learning for locals in a working class neighbourhood in the Northern
coast of Bahia to embrace work opportunities brought by the tourism industry, as
the internet resembles local modes of learning.
Tom McDonald (UCL/Anthropology): Social Media, Education and Morality
This paper uses ethnographic evidence from fieldwork in a rural Chinese town to
examine the widespread concern amongst parents that social media is damaging
to their child’s education progress, the restrictions parents place on their
children’s social media use, and the responses young people have in spite of
this.
Jessica Ringrose (UCL/IoE) and Jessalynn Keller (Middlesex University):
Teen Feminist Activism, Social Media and the Digital-material-affective in
Secondary School
Drawing on interviews from a project on feminist clubs in secondary schools, this
paper explores how teen girls enact feminism and gender activism in and around
school through a range of social media including Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr.
We explore how the girls intra-act with both the inside space of school and an
outside audience through various forms of digital learning and sharing. Drawing
on theories of cyber-feminism (Braidotti, 2013) and the posthuman extension of
the body through digital cybernetics (Clough, 2010), we discuss the girls virtual
engagements through social media as part of the wider material, spatial and
sensory assemblage of creating a feminist group at school. We take a different
direction in emphasis than media studies accounts of hashtag feminism
(Portwood-Stacer & Berridge 2015), for instance, which start with the content of
digital media platforms sometimes devoid of any kind of embodied, located social
contexts and narratives. Rather we explore the girls' affective experiences of
using social media (Paparachisi, 2015) and their complex intra-acting with school
space and with social media to transmit feminist views.
Alicia Blum-Ross (LSE): Digital Media and Learning: Parental Imaginaries
of Digital Technologies in the Home
In this presentation I will discuss the first phase of fieldwork from a qualitative
research project studying parenting for a ‘digital future’ with parents from diverse
backgrounds in London. Based on in-depth interviews and home visits with both
parents and children, this research (conducted together with Professor Sonia
Livingstone as part of the MacArthur Foundation’s Connected Learning Research
Network) examines how parents approach raising their children in a digital age.
In introducing digital media to their homes, parents may experience new forms of
communal enjoyment, possibilities for accessing knowledge and ‘learning,’ as
well as sources of conflict and competition. Equally, many parents feel aware of
how their own practices and decisions line up (or do not) with the parents of their
children’s peers, bringing to life worries of their child being ‘left behind’ or of the
imagined permissive parenting of others. In particular we examine how parents
negotiate the often-polarized policy and popular media discourses about online
dangers or the detrimental effects of ‘screen time’ on the one hand, and a vision
of digital media as opening radically-new pathways to academic achievement or
self-expression, on the other.
John Potter (UCL/IoE): Digital Media, Literacy and Education: Third spaces
and Learners in Transition
This paper proposes self curation as a new literacy practice evident within selfrepresentational digital media production; it suggests that this practice represents
one aspect of the “third space” between formal and informal learning. These
“literacy events” are enacted and mediated in a complex way in the context of
screen technologies and the paper will explore how such dynamic literacies may
impact on how learning is organized, formally or informally. Examples are drawn
from young people’s formal and informal digital text making in recent projects in
London.