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"Willett, Rebekah"
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Video cultures : media technology and everyday creativity
Over the past decade, there has been a huge increase in ordinary people's access to video production technology. These essays explore the theoretical significance of this trend and its impact on society, as well as examining a wide range of case studies, from camcorders and camera phones to YouTube and citizen journalism --Provided by publisher.
Book
Making, Makers, and Makerspaces
Focusing on current discussions about public library makerspaces, this article reveals how common themes are being discursively constructed in relation to the future of public libraries, maker cultures, and informal learning. The analysis highlights tensions and questions that emerge through the discursive construction of making, makers, and makerspaces in the field of library and information studies. The article employs discourse analysis to examine professional library journal articles and blog posts published from 2011–14 that focus on makerspaces in public libraries. The first part of the article reviews literature in relation to the history of maker movements and research on informal learning. These areas provide the context for the analysis of makerspace discourse in the second half of the article. The analysis highlights the importance of viewing public library makerspaces as connected with the mission of providing access to resources to meet the needs of diverse communities.
Journal Article
Democratizing the Maker Movement
The maker movement has found a home in public libraries. Field leaders including public libraries in Chicago, Chattanooga, Houston, Louisville, and Toronto have built robust makerspaces, developed maker programming for a diverse range of patrons, connected community experts with library users for the purpose of sharing information, and fostered communities of practice. Characterized by open exploration, intrinsic interest, and creative ideation, the maker movement can be broadly defined as participation in the creative production of physical and digital artifacts in people’s day-to-day lives. The maker movement employs a do-it-yourself orientation toward a range of disciplines, including robotics, woodworking, textiles, and electronics. But the maker ethos also includes a do-it-with-others approach, valuing collaboration, distributed expertise, and open workspaces. To many in the library profession, the values ingrained in the maker movement seem to be shared with the aims and goals of public libraries. However, critiques of the maker movement raise questions about current iterations of makerspaces across settings. This article highlights critiques and responses regarding the “democratic” nature of the maker movement, and in particular, the article analyzes ways librarians involved in a prominent public library maker program discursively construct making and makerprogramming in relation to the maker movement more generally.
Journal Article
\As soon as you get on Bebo you just go mad\: young consumers and the discursive construction of teenagers online
Abstract - The purpose of this paper is to analyse how young people as consumers are using one particular social networking site (Bebo), and how these young consumers are engaging with discourses which position them variously as vulnerable to online risk and as members of the knowledgeable \"net generation\".Design methodology approach - The article provides an in-depth analysis of data collected from 24 Bebo participants, ages 14-16, focusing mainly on interviews. Discourse analysis is used to uncover the ways that the participants in the study position themselves in relation to discourses surrounding teenagers as consumers on social networking sites.Findings - The analysis demonstrates that teenagers are using Bebo in very specific ways as part of a range of modes of communication with different audiences. Often their use of Bebo is quite banal, highlighting the possibility that adults (parents, researchers, government, NGOs) over-invest in the meaning of Bebo for young teens. However, typical of the tensions involved in people's subject positioning, the interviewees also indicate that Bebo is serving particular purposes in relation to their identities as teenagers. Therefore, the article considers dimensions of the \"life stage\" of adolescence as a way of understanding the significance of Bebo in teenagers' lives.Originality value - The article provides an in-depth analysis of qualitative data related to a small age-range of consumers on a specific social networking site. This focus highlights the specificity of Bebo as a social networking site, as well as the particular ways that these 14-16 year olds engage with various technologies and discursive practices surrounding young consumers online.
Journal Article
Remixing Children's Cultures
In
Children's Games in Street and Playground (1969) the Opies documented a variety of media-related practices: performances of advertising jingles and pop songs, passing references to public figures, guessing activities centring on film stars and advertisements and numerous pretend games involving media characters. Similarly, data from our two playgrounds reflect the dominant 'mediascapes' of UK children in 2009-2011 (Appadurai, 1996). Some games refer to specific media texts, but more often their play draws on much wider resources and includes enduring narrative themes (e.g. good versus evil, going on adventures), characters (e.g. witches, superheroes, family members) and actions (e.g. casting spells, escaping, caretaking). In our study, children often use referents broadly, drawing on current media texts as well as long-standing practices, so as to incorporate and remix referents to suit their play scenarios.
Book Chapter
Children's use of popular media in their creative writing
This study is an examination of the social world of children's story writing, focusing on the way children use the agency offered to them in the context of the' writing process' pedagogy as a way of negotiating existing practices to position themselves in the discursive field of the classroom. Using methods from teacher-research and ethnographic traditions, I collected data from the class I was teaching, focusing on six children aged eight to nine. Data collection included observations of social interactions, photocopies of stories children wrote, interviews with children, group discussions, tape recordings of children talking while writing stories, and a diary of my experiences as a teacher-researcher. Using a form of discourse analysis, I focused on three areas in my data analysis: writing process, media consumption and production, and identity work. My analysis shows the ways children negotiate with and manipulate school practices in order to include their peer cultures in writing workshop, indicating children's understanding of school practices and concern with their social positions. In my study I show how popular media, a significant element of peer culture, is used by children in story writing as a way of establishing and defining personal identities and friendship groups. It is through friendships and often within the context of talk around media that children define, perform, and to some extent play with their gendered identities. The conclusions of my study point to a need for educators to recognise the way discursive practices of school create a very narrow definition of' acceptable stories' in classrooms. The practices problematise stories which contain media, and therefore teachers overlook and misunderstand many of the things children are doing during the process of writing media-based stories.
Dissertation
'Digital natives': a myth?
A report of the panel held at the London School of Economics and Political Science, on 24th November 2009.
Paper
The Moral Project of Childhood: Motherhood, Material Life, and Early Children's Consumer Culture by Daniel Thomas Cook (review)
OUTLINE OF THE BOOK In his book, Cook tracks the history of children's relationship to market considerations, and the economy more generally, to demonstrate how childhood is a contested site that develops in relation to consumption. Linking this idea to panics about materialism or media consumption, the book ties in with ideas of other works that use the cultural history of childhood to point out childhood's centrality in definitions of morally acceptable behavior (Buckingham 2011; Bak 2020; Jensen 2017). Cook found a concentrated discursive effort by periodicals such as Godey's Lady's Book towards a childhood where social status and a child's potential for social standing converged in the \"world of goods\"—the conspicuous consumption and act of owning quality material objects that could contribute to their moral wellbeing (58). Mothers had to ensure that children not only had the right goods, be it dress, food, amusements, and bedroom décor, but had the right relationship with the marketplace itself (53).
Journal Article