The KidTech project, a partnership of 4 international universities, York (Canada), UW-Madison (USA) Queensland University of Technology (Australia) and Gyeongin National University of Education (South Korea), seeks to address the rapidly shifting spaces of children’s digital cultures and media and how these spaces are impacted by the global expansion of digital capitalism.

EE With, is based on consultation and collaboration with various JF community partners honouring the knowledge and expertise of community leaders, organizations and the JFCRP (Jane Finch Community Research Partnership https://janefinchresearch.ca/). With the goal to better inform the processes and manner in which EE activities take place within the JF neighbourhood to ensure the well-being of the community, as well as to support York students in engaging with the community in ways that are respectful, sustainable, reciprocal and just.

The goal of this project is to explore how young people’s creative labour (both online and offline) is becoming entangled with the promotional activities of children’s media and entertainment industry. This project will seek wider clarity on the commercial epistemologies that ideologically define childhood through the logics of marketplace, the immaterial labour of young people’s fandom, and the fetishization of authenticity in the visibility economy.

My project seeks to rectify these oversights by exploring
(a) how children’s media and entertainment companies harness young people’s creative labour to promote intellectual properties
(b) the implications of this on how we define young people’s labour within digital capitalism.

Month: Sep   Year: 2019

Month: May   Year: 2022

The Jane Finch Community Research Partnership (JFCRP) is a collaborative endeavor between York university and community members of the Jane Finch Community. The goal is to produce the Community Research Portal called Jane Finch Collections (JFC) that can be accessed by the Jane Finch community. https://janefinchresearch.ca/

For at least ten years, residents of the Jane Finch (JF) community in northwest Toronto have made concerted efforts to influence and gain access to the wide array of academic research that is conducted on and about their community (as opposed to with their community). This project aims to provide support in accessing this research, and in doing so, create new ways for community members to fight the stigmatization of their community by outside researchers (intentional or not), and allow community members to take leading roles in building more productive, ethical, informed and respectful relationships between academic researchers and local community members and organizations.

A symposium that seeks to reposition, relocate, and reframe girls within the context of both girl and child studies by asking: How do we delineate the boundaries of girlhood? Which girls are visible and which are invisible in these boundaries? What are the everyday practices of actual girls that work to challenge these narrow definitions and representations? How do girls themselves negotiate, engage, take up, resist, or reassemble the cultural frames of girlhood offered to them? What do girls’ responses reveal about this contemporary moment of girlhood?

Month: Jan   Year: 2019

Month: Dec   Year: 2020

The purpose of this project is to explore the tensions between the commercial constructions of youth cultures and the lived experiences of the embodied young person. It will address how the tween girl is framed by and how she engages with such framings. This research has two foci. The first is an exploration of how the cultural industries of girlhood, including digital media and global transmedia properties contribute to the synergistic forces of global capitalism to produce the tween as a global assemblage. The sites of this research include online advergames such as Moshi Monsters and Movie Star Planet, and the websites of media companies such as Disney and Nickelodeon, and digital market research companies such as KZero. The second foci is to explore what girls do with the tween cultures that are produced for them but rarely by them by asking how they negotiate these resources of subjectivity in their everyday lives by looking at the immaterial labour of their participation in digital media and social media networks.

This is an important contribution to the field as it begins to fill a void in the fields of critical technology studies, media studies and girls’ studies. In the past decade academics in these fields have lamented the lack of scholarship on the use of media culture by young people and the role of media culture in the lives of young people (Buckingham 2000; Henteges 2000; Kearney 2011; Livingston 1998; Prout 2008;). This study will move beyond the work that is currently being done in the fields of critical technology studies, media studies and girls’ studies by exploring how girls engage with a construction of girlhood that dominates much of the transnational mediascape and meets the needs of the global marketplace. In doing so I will uncover some of the tensions between the commercial worlds of youth cultures and the lived experiences of the embodied young person.

Month: Jan   Year: 2013

Month: Dec   Year: 2016

Canadian children’s and youth media has largely been ignored as a field of study in Canadian communication studies. The children’s and youth cultural industries in Canada are successful both nationally and globally. Scholarship in this area needs to be constitutively integrated into to scholarship on the Canadian mediascape, as does young people’s presence as active participants in Canadian media culture.

Canadian children’s and youth media has largely been ignored as a field of study in Canadian communication studies. The children’s and youth cultural industries in Canada are successful both nationally and globally. Scholarship in this area needs to be constitutively integrated into to scholarship on the Canadian mediascape, as does young people’s presence as active participants in Canadian media culture.

Month: Jan   Year: 2012

Month: Dec   Year: 2016