The overall Digital Girls program is internationally-focused and funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. We examine the knowledge of digital technology that Canadian, British, and South African pre-teen and teenage girls are acquiring through computer play on and off the Internet. We consider – and contest – the “digital gender divide” that is said to exist and examine girls’ voluntary engagement with technology. We are interested in mapping out the emergence of a particular digital literacy that includes technical knowledge, social uses of technology, and moral and ethical decision-making. For more information about the Digital Girls program, please see the Overview of the Digital Girls Program.
A number of projects are being conducted within the overall Digital Girls program. Please see below for more information on these. More project descriptions will be coming soon.
This project focuses on the ways in which the photo/video prompt of ‘picturing hope’ can help to illuminate some of the ways that girls and young people in various contexts see their futures. We are also interested in the ways in which the uses of digital technology can in and of themselves contribute to a deeper understanding of the idea of ‘hope’ and ‘the future’ and in particular how digital technology might itself become a tool for social change.
We are intrigued by the notion of working imaginatively, poetically and digitally with the theme of ‘what do you hope for’. This is something that implies a future and has some interesting overlaps to other HIV and AIDS initiatives globally (the Steps for the Future documentary project in Southern Africa to encourage young film makers to produce documentaries on HIV and AIDS; the Living for Tomorrow project with youth in Eastern Europe).
Additionally, though, we are interested in the ways that the ‘picturing hope’ prompt can in itself contribute to a deeper understanding of ‘emotional well-being’ in our work with particularly vulnerable populations of children and young people as identified by the various local and global organizations. In rural KZN for example where the effects of HIV and AIDS are at a crisis proportion, there are new challenges to providing support to children who are orphaned, children who are heading up families, children who are caring for sick parents and siblings and so on. How to actually ‘operationalize’ emotional well-being is a challenge (Population Council, 2005), and we are seeing that this ‘digital hope’ work may help researchers, practitioners and even policy makers to think anew about support services. Equally it may help to shift the relationship with children and young people away from a discourse of victimhood to a discourse of resources and change-agents.
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