Youth Positioning On And Vis-À-Vis Social Media – A Participatory Connective Ethnographic Research in India

• In Event: Student Learning and Experiences in South Asia

Proposal

Purpose
This study emerged from a writing project started in 2016 with 6 adolescent boys at a home for ‘children considered at risk’ in an urban city in India. They attend school through the Right to Free and Compulsory Education Act that mandates 25% reservation in private schools for students from economically weaker sections (EWS) of society. This study looks at how youth marginalized by their religion, caste, class, or gender position themselves on and vis-à-vis social media and literacy practices that circulate locally and globally.

Context
These youth and I have been working on various writing projects since 2016. We meet once a week, online when I am in United States, and in-person during the winter and summer break when I go back to India. In a semi structured group interview that I conducted in summer 2019 about their online practices, they brought up their social media interactions, sharing that social media was important for them as it allowed them to stay connected with peers at school though they did not see themselves as active users. In December 2019, the current Government in India passed the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), that was xenophobic and put in question the citizenship of (certain) Muslims (Kuchay, 2019). Schools were shut for almost 2 weeks in Delhi as protestors took to the streets with voices both pro and anti the CAA Act (Indian Express, 2019). Online spaces were rife with anti-Muslim rhetoric. The boys (3 of whom are Muslims) shared their dismay as they found some of the peers (online) supporting the Act. As we started delving into the current issues and thinking about the complexities young people navigate given the ubiquity of social media in their lives, the boys posed questions very similar to my own inquiries. They were interested in understanding youths’ engagement on social media and how young people who encounter certain challenges based on class / caste / religion / gender might position themselves on social media.

Perspectives
In line with Tierney’s (2018) model of global meaning making committed to democratic decision making, participatory notions of literacy, and research and pedagogy that counters exclusionary practices, this ethnographic study decenters researcher voice as the youth bring in their choice of participants, platforms, interface, and media/digital movements supported by them.

Methods
In this participatory ‘connective’ ethnography - a methodological approach to study internet-related and offline literacy practices and sites (Leander, 2008) - along with interviews, surveys, and focus groups, we combined different digital methods. Video Cued Elicitation (VCE) was used to (de)construct participants' interactions with and on social media. An online data visualization tool (www.Voyant-tools.org), further positioned youth researchers as authors of their data and made central their perspective on their data (Stornaiuolo, 2020).

Data Sources
Data included field notes, pre-research surveys, participant designed questionnaires (as artifacts), interview transcripts, audio/video recordings of researchers’ discussions, screen capture videos, VCE transcripts, and data visualization charts.

Findings:
Social media allows participants to stay connected with peers and on top of schoolwork (e.g., schoolwork shared over Facebook messenger). However, their life conditions impact social media usage and their relationship to it; they situate themselves not as ‘active users’ but as ‘lurkers’ who can never be fully present (“I feel, I don’t have interesting things to post on social media”). Political events in India in 2019 (e.g., Citizen Amendment Act) further highlighted this complexity that marginalized youth navigate on social media. While participants' social media activity (likes and follows) reflects a desire to be part of online activist conversations, locally and globally, by not ‘sharing’ or ‘creating post’, they make themselves invisible.

Significance
Youth’s engagement on the internet is often studied within the framework of ubiquity and proliferation of digital media, however differing levels of access means that youth adopt and use technologies in diverse ways (Magee, Agosto, & Forte, 2017). Understanding choices (including no use and self-regulating, restricted use) is important to understand their practices (Anderson & Jiang, 2018; boyd, 2014; Magee et al., 2017). These youth are both hyper-visible - in schools as ‘EWS kids’ and digital spaces (under surveillance) – and invisible – their experiences of marginalization buried under the global rhetoric of education or access to the digital world. Though these youth do not see themselves as active social media users, they are actively engaged. This study calls for approaches to understanding youth digital engagement that remix, adapt, fuse or refute existing frameworks, and are at once local and global (Tierney, 2018).

Researcher Notes
Though the initial inquiry emerged from (my) researcher interest, the research-participants collaboration and co-inquiry in the process challenged the “Researcher’s I” to construct a more accessible scholarship, meaningful research (for all of us). Further, since in this study I am working with youth who are considered ‘at risk’ and an NGO that is hyper-monitored by government agencies, I am aware of the dynamics of video research as a potential tool for surveillance especially the access to social media.

Author

• Rabani Garg, University of Pennsylvania