Reimagining Family Media Ecology as Thirdspace: A Geo-Ethnographic Examination of Digital Learning Opportunities

• In Event: Race, Family, and Politics of Educational Opportunity: (Re)Conceptualizing Space

Abstract

In this paper, we re-imagine Thirdspace (Soja, 1996, 2010) theory as framework for examining the complex digital equity issues confronting the learning ecologies of families of low socioeconomic status (SES). At the intersection of home, school, and community, families confront embedded practices and existing temporal, sociocultural, and spatial structures, which shape their real and perceived opportunities to appropriate the digital tools and empowered learning practices needed to collectively transform existing hierarchies of knowledge production. Along with our theoretical perspective, we also present an empirical example using geo-ethnographic mixed methods to reveal hidden spatial patterns of empowered everyday digital learning practices by positioning findings within a Thirdspace framework, and in doing so illustrate the transformational possibility of our equity-oriented research agenda.

Authors

• Anna Montana Cirell, Arizona State University - Tempe

• Elisabeth R. Gee, Arizona State University