Mapping Futures, Mapping Life: Digital Survival Skills for #QueerYouthGeographers

• In Event: Digital Queerness: Leveraging Mobile Technologies and Social Media for Practices of Resistance and Reimagination

Abstract

Objectives: This paper centers a digital mapping project of LGBTQ street youth. Thinking with the FemTechNet Collective (2018) and Taylor (2017) about mobile/digital practices as mappings across the hemisphere, I have found that queer homeless youth are not only developing practices of digital improvisation to leverage their own basic needs of food, shelter, and basic health care needs (Author, 2016), but are also using mobile technologies as markers of movement and relation in digital spaces. Few digital learning studies collect data from homeless communities (Eyrich-Garg, 2010) and youth research on technology and digital practices are relegated to elite communities of children and youth who are able to leverage their technological knowledge and participation with digital technologies, maker culture communities, and networked social media sites into academic achievement, career possibilities, and even civic engagement (Ito, M., Gutierrez, K., Livingstone, S., et al, 2013; Zimmerman, 2012).

Methods and Data Sources: This ethnographic data was collected as part of a longitudinal study of 45 LGBTQ homeless youth between the ages of 14-21 in a large urban youth center in the United States. Focus groups and selected participants were interviewed to ascertain the digital practices of queer homeless youth and the role that technology plays in their daily experiences. Youth were also asked to “map” their experiences through a Google map platform. Data was organized and analyzed with In Vivo coding and within a situated and interpretive interactionist approach (Denzin, 1989) through a distinctly U.S. feminist of color lens for all interviews. The Google maps made by youth were analyzed via a method of interpretive/close readings.

Results: Under new conditions of forced displacement and the practices of “exchange and barter” that are necessary for survival, I have found that LGBTQ youth digital mapping not only documents migration across the U.S., but also documents the urgency of movement across time and space, where they are developing tools to facilitate new kinds of relationships (economic, intimate, and resistant) with queer youth practices. These digital maps are queer youthscapes, where young people successfully negotiating issues of safety and surveillance in youth geographies, where vital information is shared, posted and documented in Google maps for other queer migrant youth.

Scholarly Significance: I am arguing that the urgency and precarity of this kind of geo-documentation across digital spaces needs to be recognized as youthscapes of knowledge, literacies, resistance, and trans-survival. The use of mobile technologies in the new climate of surveillance both on and offline reflects new conditions of increased state control, where youth share knowledge with others in order to navigate access to the technologies necessary to survive massive change, forced migration, and displacement.

Author

• Cindy Cruz, University of Arizona