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Title

Latino Youth Digitally Mediated Everyday Lives: Understanding Diverse Forms of Participation in Networked Culture and Society.

Abstract

The goal of this research project is to understand the digitally mediated everyday lives of Latino (mexican-american) youth from Texas City High School (TCHS), a low-income, low-performing, and majority-minority public high school in central Texas. The project intends to fill in a substantial void related to the social, cultural, and digital media experiences of contemporary Latino youth in the United States of America. In order to do so I describe the media practices of a group of Latino teenagers (case studies of 6 boys, and 3 girls) across their school, after-school, home, and peer worlds. By analyzing some of their mediated sociocultural practices (creation, circulation, searching) this study tries to understand the experiences, skills, and knowledge that these teenagers are developing and how they are supporting, if so, their participation in a networked culture and society. The study places a particular emphasis in the diversity of digitally mediated identities Latino youth is able to construct. The main questions I intend to answer are, What is Latino youth from unprivileged communities doing with digital media? and How are they participating in networked culture through and with digital media?


This project uses a multi-method approach that combines first hand qualitative data from a longitudinal ethnographic study with secondary quantitative data on Latino population from the Census Bureau, Civic Rights Data Collection, the Pew Hispanic Center, and the Kaiser Family Foundation. I gather the qualitative data from semi-structured interviews and focus groups with teens, parents, and teachers; observations of two after-school programs and two media production classes (video game design, and video technology); a three week action research intervention (digital design summer camp); and content analysis of Latino youth media texts (videos, tumblrs, Facebook profiles, music, websites) and participant-generated contributions (journals, photographs).

The Scene

The Sample

Core Themes

Prospectus

Getting started