Digital Media Practices of Chinese- and Mexican-Heritage Youth Across Spaces and Scales

• In Event: 41.084 - Roundtable Session 16
  In Roundtable Session: 41.084-5 - Multilingual and Multicultural Resources in Technology-Mediated Engagements: Exploring and Supporting the Digital Literacies of Nondominant Students and Families

Abstract

This paper draws from a study of the digital media practices of youth of Mexican heritage and Chinese heritage to consider issues of scale in understanding the ways in which multilingual learners relate to language and literacy norms and practices that are prevalent within different geographical spaces, locally and translocally, and that have symbolic and functional purpose for them. The concept of scale is developed in social geography to analyze how geographical spaces, and the social practices associated with these spaces, are socially differentiated as well as contested and reconfigured through human activity and institutional practices (Herod, 2011; MacKinnon, 2011). Recent work in sociolinguistics and education has further developed the concept of scale in understanding the spatialized nature of language practices and how these practices are structured in relations of power (e.g., Blommaert, 2010; Canagarajah & De Costa, in press; Stornaiuolo & LeBlanc 2016). In particular, we use the perspective of scale to examine how the youths’ digital language practices and affiliations span different geographical distances, and how through their practices and activities they also reconstruct relationships between these spaces.

The data and analysis we present are drawn from a larger study that included a survey of media use among 302 students in a comprehensive high school, group interviews with 47 of the survey participants, and home observations with 19 students over a nine-month period. In this paper, we focus on videotaped data from home observations during which the youth explained and demonstrated to us their activities online. We start with analysis of several information-rich cases from the observations (youth who engage in extensive and diverse activities online) to develop a dimensionalized coding scheme that we use to analyze commonality and variation across cases. Based on event mapping (Miles, Huberman & Saldana, 2014) and thematic analysis of the media activities that the youth demonstrated, we identified several prominent domains of activities that include: (1) flow of information, emotional care, and material resources among families, particularly among Mexican youth; (2) organizing of social groups and exchanges around school work on WeChat (the Chinese equivalent of Snapchat), particularly among Chinese youth; (3) participation in interest-based and fan communities (e.g. youth drawing from life style models of YouTube broadcasters from Latin America and the United States); (4) connection to civic and youth-serving organizations through Facebook and other online media. We analyze how some of these networks or practices are connected to a particular geographical scale, and how other networks support or channel flows of discourses and practices (including language practices) across scales. We draw from the reflective interview with the youth during our observations to understand how the youth think about relations between different spaces, and how they mobilize different networks and discourses/materials in practice for particular purposes. We suggest that these processes of traversal and reconstruction of social spaces have important implications for research and educational practice that seek to enhance people’s mobility in a global world.

Authors

• Wan Shun Eva Lam, Northwestern University

• P. Zitlali Morales, University of Illinois at Chicago