Rights-based approaches to children’s digital media practices are gaining attention offering a framework for research, policy and initiatives that can balance children’s need for protection online ...with their capacity to maximize the opportunities and benefits of connectivity. But what does it mean to bring the concepts of the digital, rights and the child into dialogue? Arguing that the child represents a limit case of adult normative discourses about both rights and digital media practices, this article harnesses the radical potential of the figure of the child to rethink (human and children’s) rights in relation to the digital. In doing so, we critique the implicitly adult, seemingly invulnerable subject of rights common in research and advocacy about digital environments. We thereby introduce the articles selected for this special issue and the thinking that links them, in order to draw out the wider tensions and dilemmas driving the emerging agenda for children’s rights in the digital age.
Background
Public involvement in health research and its translation is well recognized to improve health interventions. However, this approach is insufficiently practised and evidenced in relation ...to young people. This paper presents an analysis of the process of co‐producing a framework, partnership model and a growing network of young people informing and guiding an adolescent health research community of practice.
Methods
A Living Lab is a participatory research approach that brings together a broad range of stakeholders in iterative cycles of research, design, development, pilot‐testing, evaluation and delivery to implement effective responses to complex phenomena. The geographical setting for this study was Sydney, NSW, Australia, and involved both youth and adult stakeholders from this region. The study spanned three phases between July 2018 and January 2021, and data collection included a range of workshops, a roundtable discussion and an online survey.
Results
The co‐production process resulted in three key outputs: first, an engagement framework to guide youth participation in health research; second, a partnership model to sustain youth and adult stakeholder collaboration; third, the growth of the public involvement of young people with a range of projects and partners.
Conclusions
This study investigated the process of co‐producing knowledge with young people in an adolescent health community of practice. A reflexive process supported youth and adult stakeholders to collaboratively investigate, design and pilot‐test approaches that embed young people's engagement in adolescent health research. Shared values and iterative methods for co‐production can assist in advancing mutual learning, commitment and trust in specific adolescent health research contexts.
Public Contribution
Young people guiding and informing an adolescent health research community of practice were involved in this study, and one of the participants is a paper co‐author.
This article explores the flows and frictions of children's data in the digital age, and how datafication becomes another way of knowing and governing children. There is an urgent need to better ...understand such digital orientations, who controls them, and how children's agency becomes enabled and constrained. In this article, we argue that a child rights framework operates to surface the tensions and stumbling blocks at play in the ostensibly seamless circulation of children's data through the socio-technical assemblages of corporate, government and university organisations. Smooth flows of data become problematised when we explore children's data journeys and associated frictions with data. This demonstrates the importance of moving beyond existing attempts to better steer children and their data, towards the much more difficult role of co-curating the social, spatial and material supports required to enhance their agency in the digital age.
In January 1976, the trial of Patricia Campbell Hearst caused a Western media sensation. Representing the culmination of her spectacular kidnapping and conversion to the terrorist cause of the ...Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), Hearst was on trial for her participation in the Hibernia National Bank robbery almost two years earlier. As of the commencement of the trial, the story of the heiress-come-female-terrorist had been captivating Western media audiences for two years. This article analyses the ways that mainstream media coverage of this event operated to contain both the threat of this particular female terrorist, and the threat of second-wave feminism more broadly. Within Western culture, there has historically been a concern with the need to regulate the mainstream media's coverage of terrorist events. In this line of thinking, the mainstream media are a precondition for, and a potential site of the contagion of, terrorism. However, as I demonstrate, ultimately, mainstream media coverage of terrorist events in which women are key protagonists operates to recuperate the threat of terrorism. In doing so, it reproduces and reasserts dominant patriarchal gender relations and thus works in the interests of dominant culture, rather than against them.
Positioned as she is, at the beginning of second wave feminism in North America, Solanas' manifesto gets ignored by second wave feminist histories because the implication of her manifesto is the ...destabilisation of the defining category, the differentiation between men and women, that forms the basis of feminism's ability to represent itself, right at a point in time when cultural feminists were struggling to construct women as a category in order to effect social and political change.
Digital citizenship and cyber safety are often used interchangeably in the context of young people's internet use, depicting the young person as passive, vulnerable and in need of adult intervention ...to navigate an unsafe online environment and perpetuating reductive and deterministic initiatives that rarely respond to young people's own online perspectives and experiences. This discussion maps recent definitions and debates about digital citizenship and cyber safety. It draws from 41 stories of young Australians aged 12-18 to think about young people's digital citizenship within the wider context of their lived citizenship. Reflecting the deeply relational nature of young people's experiences as digital actors and how they creatively perform their citizenship online, it suggests that young people's accounts provide an opportunity to consider how citizenship is understood through digital lives and to direct educational responses that encompass emergent civic cultures emerging from young people's performance as digital citizens.
Global food systems are failing adolescents. Poor diet quality driving malnutrition among adolescents around the world and the quality of foods eaten by adolescents not only determines their health ...and development, but also is the foundation of thriving communities. The present study aimed to engage adolescents across low-income, middle-income and high-income countries to determine their lived experience of food, food systems and the challenges they face within their food systems.
The study used the Distributed Data Generation method pioneered by the Young and Resilient Research Centre, at Western Sydney University, to conduct workshops with adolescents aged 10-19 years across the globe in collaboration with UNICEF. Participatory workshops were designed to capture qualitative data on adolescents lived experiences and perspectives of their food systems, food sustainability and food security, and how improvements can be made. Thematic analysis was undertaken to analyse qualitative data. Descriptive statistics were generated for demographic data captured.
Six hundred and forty adolescents across 18 countries participated. Three key themes emerged, which included experiences of food, challenges to food systems and strengthening food systems. Adolescents saw potential in empowering communities to create change and contribute to food system transformation. Adolescents called for inclusion in decision-making from local food practice to large global policy development.
The study results demonstrated how adolescents experience their food systems and want to see sustainable change, although they also want to be a part of the change. Adolescents described that there needs to be an active choice to work with them, listen to their lived experience and across all levels of society strengthen food systems. To achieve this, adolescents need to be involved in decision-making around their food systems for a sustainable future.
Young people's participation in urban design is usually either highly restricted or excluded altogether. This paper reflects on a pilot project that explored how communication technologies can be ...used to support young people to shape the development of their city. A research team at Western Sydney University developed an emotion-mapping platform (invisiblecity.org.au) and offered creative media workshops to young people in Western Sydney's City of Parramatta to support them to explore different ways of expressing emotion through text and image. The study found that emotion mapping provides opportunities to open up discussions about affective experiences of the city that can be integrated into urban planning. However, we argue that such initiatives must overcome the challenges associated with tapping into, making sense of, and amplifying complex, dispersed and always changing everyday media practices if they are to be embraced by young people in ways that ensure they are inclusive and representative. Further, it is critical that initiatives work out how to encourage urban developers to hear and value young people's perspectives on urban environments and how they use them.
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