Books

This book adopts a critical youth studies approach and theorizes the digital as a key feature of the everyday to analyse how ideas about youth and cyber-safety, digital inclusion and citizenship are mobilized. Despite a growing interest in the benefits and opportunities for young people online, both ‘young people’ and ‘the digital’ continue to be constructed primarily as sites of social and cultural anxiety requiring containment and control.

Juxtaposing public policy, popular educational and parental framings of young people’s digital practices with the insights from fieldwork conducted with young Australians aged 12–25, the book highlights the generative possibilities of attending to intergenerational tensions. In doing so, the authors show how a shift beyond the paradigm of control opens up towards a deeper understanding of the capacities that are generated in and through digital life for young and old alike.

Young People in Digital Society will be of interest to scholars and students in youth studies, cultural studies, sociology, education, and media and communications... read more

Foster Youth in the Mediasphere: Lived Experience and Digital Lives in the Australian Out-Of-Home Care System

Authors: Milissa Deitz, Lynette Sheridan Burns

This book is the first study of social media and development of ontological security in Australian youth in foster care.  It delineates how social media can help support belonging and resilience for foster youth, and contrasts mainstream media's representation of foster youth as the 'other' to self representation via social media.

This book considers the impact of digital media and technology on lived experience for young people in foster care. While the extent and intricacies of foster care — known as out-of-home care (OOHC) in Australia, where this study takes place — are not widely understood by the general public, youth in care might struggle to construct a personal identity that goes beyond reflecting the stereotypes and stigma by which they are often recognised.

In today’s digital environment, media can play a significant role in any individual’s developing sense of self, identity, and belonging. The authors examine OOHC through the lens of networked media environments and investigate the conditions that encourage belonging and resilience in order to establish the role that digital technology can play in supporting those conditions... read more

Doing Research In and On the Digital: Research Methods across Fields of Inquiry

Authors: Cristina Costa, Jenna Condie

As a social space, the web provides researchers both with a tool and an environment to explore the intricacies of everyday life. As a site of mediated interactions and interrelationships, the ‘digital’ has evolved from being a space of information to a space of creation, thus providing new opportunities regarding how, where and, why to conduct social research.

Doing Research In and On the Digital aims to deliver on two fronts: first, by detailing how researchers are devising and applying innovative research methods for and within the digital sphere, and, secondly, by discussing the ethical challenges and issues implied and encountered in such approaches.

In two core parts, this collection explores: (1) content collection: methods for harvesting digital data and (2) engaging research informants: digital participatory methods and data stories.

With contributions from a diverse range of fields such as anthropology, sociology, education, healthcare and psychology, this volume will particularly appeal to post-graduate students and early career researchers who are navigating through new terrain in their digital-mediated research endeavours… read more