Be Well and Stay Safe: Facebook, Public Pedagogy, and Inuit Girls in the Time of COVID

• In Event: More Than Words: Indigenous Girls, Public Art, and Public Pedagogy

Abstract

Objectives
This presentation focusses on a group of Inuit girls from Rankin Inlet, Nunavut Canada who are participants in an on-going project that uses art to explore social issues in their community. When COVID struck and the planned in-person workshop had to be cancelled, Facebook was used as a forum where participants could address their community about the issues they all faced. The objectives of this paper are:
1) To explore how Facebook was used by Inuit girls as a site of public pedagogy in the time of COVID,
2) To analyze the Inuit girls’ artful pedagogical strategies for conveying health and safety protocols to their community as well as their own strategies of managing the health crisis,
3) To analyze the community response to the girls’ Facebook project.
Perspectives
In this presentation, concepts from the sociology of technology such as co-construction (Oudshoorn & Pinch, 2003), co-constitution (Akrich, 1992), or mutual shaping (Wajcman, 2015) are combined with the panel’s thematic concepts of public pedagogy (Giroux, 2004) and public space to give an account of how Inuit girls used Facebook as a site for building community well-being in the time of COVID.
Methods
This presentation draws on principles of participatory visual methodologies (Mitchell 2011), discourse analysis and some principles of decolonizing methodology (Smith, 1999).
Data Source
The data consists of an on-line Facebook series of postings that were made by a group of approximately 25 Inuit girls. As part of a research project, the girls organized a challenge for other youth in the community to post photos, art-work and videos to address the question of what they were doing to stay safe during the time of lock down due to COVID 19. The paper draws on ethnographic notes from planning sessions with project participants, the posted on-line art-projects and community on-line comments relating to the posted art-works.
Results/Conclusions
The paper concludes that Facebook can be an important tool in the lives of Inuit girls and can be used to develop leadership skills, highlight positive community contributions and as a site for community dialogue. It can also be used for storytelling and to co-construct identities. Furthermore, the Facebook project was a way to engage with older generations and to mutual shaping inter-generational connections. The Facebook arts-activity granted the girls and the community different affordances to relate to each other, their traditions and futures and to share valuable information and experiences about the extraordinary circumstances of living through a global pandemic.

Author

• Marnina Gonick, Mount Saint Vincent University