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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the production of digitally-mediated social spaces through research on university students’ experiences of online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, and research on how young indigenous media makers from South America shape the digital publics that form around their content.

Paper long abstract:

This paper draws on two periods of research regarding how the construction of social space is mediated by digital communications platforms. The first period of research occurred immediately after the end of the first semester during which all instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee was shifted to online distance learning in responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. The second period of research is ongoing; based at the University of Manchester, I am engaged in a study of how indigenous youth from Ecuador and Argentina make use of new media platforms to explore and express their indigenous identities. While the first period of research revealed how students accustomed to face-to-face learning felt disconcerted by the social space of online learning, it did not provide answers to why a digital and in-person learning space feel qualitatively different to students. The second period of research provides much needed insight by attending closely to the construction of digitally-mediated social spaces.

First, I establish the need to attend to the affordances of digital communications platforms as well as the social production of loose “scripts” that shape users’ participation in digital social spaces. Then, I explore how indigenous media creators draw upon those affordances and scripts in their efforts to influence how digital publics take shape around their media productions. Finally, I reflect on what educators can learn from indigenous media producers.