ICS Seminar Series - Associate Professor Amanda Third

Date: Thursday 16 October, 2014
Time: 11.30am - 1pm
Venue: EB.G.05, UWS Parramatta South campus

Associate Professor Amanda Third 

Children’s Rights in the Digital Age: A Download from Children Around the World

The Governments of all countries shall ensure that a child who is capable of forming his or her own views should have the right to express those views freely in all matters affecting that child and that the views of that child should be given due weight in accordance with the age and maturity of the child.
- Article 12: Convention on the Rights of the Child

Abstract

Article 12 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child codifies children’s rights to express their views and to participate in the decision-making processes that will impact their lives. With digital media becoming an increasingly ubiquitous feature of children’s everyday lives around the world, there is an unprecedented opportunity to deliver on this promise for children everywhere. Digital media has the potential to open up new possibilities for increasing children’s awareness of their rights, and promoting their views and insights about how to improve their lived experience of their rights. Further, under the right circumstances, digital media can be mobilised to support children to enhance the ways they enact their rights in their daily lives. However, the global community is a long way from acknowledging and realising the potential of digital media to support children’s rights.

This seminar reflects on a Young and Well CRC project conducted by ICS researchers between May and August 2014 in partnership with the Digitally Connected Network, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, and UNICEF. In the project, 148 children (aged six to 18) from 16 countries and speaking eight different languages, participated in workshops to generate and share their views on their rights in the digital age. This crowdsourced footage was analysed and the resulting reports and short film were presented to the UN Committee for the Rights of the Child at the Day of General Discussion in Geneva in September 2014.

In this seminar, the project lead will reflect on the strengths and limitations of conducting an engaged research project on this scale, and critique the ways that the discourse of rights is being mobilised in relation to children’s technology practices internationally.

Seminar Reading: 

The report, Children’s rights in the digital age: a download from children around the world, along with the Digital champions supplement can be downloaded from the Young and Well CRC website.

Research Team:

• Amanda Third 
• Delphine Bellerose (Research Assistant, Transforming Institutions and Communities Project, Young and Well CRC/ICS)
• Emma Keltie (Research Assistant, Engaging Creativity Through Technologies Project, Young and Well CRC/ICS)
• Kari Pihl (Research Assistant, Transforming Institutions and Communities Project, Young and Well CRC/ICS)

Biographies

Associate Professor Amanda Third is Principal Research Fellow at ICS and a Research Program Leader in the Young and Well Cooperative Research Centre. Amanda’s research focuses on the socio-cultural dimensions of young people’s technology use, with particular emphases on the intergenerational dynamics shaping technology practice, and marginalised young people’s technological engagements. She is also Chief Investigator on an Australian Research Council Industry Linkage project entitled ‘Young People, Technology and Wellbeing Research Facility’ that examines cross-sector knowledge brokering practices. She has been a member of the Australian-based ‘Technology and Wellbeing Cross-Sector Roundtable’ since 2008.

Respondent: Dr Liam Magee is a Senior Research Fellow at ICS. Liam's principal research interests focus on the application of social methods and information technology to the areas of urban development and sustainability. His doctoral dissertation, completed in 2010, examined the importance of cultural assumptions in the emerging world of interconnected knowledge systems, including emerging systems such as the Semantic Web. His current work extends this research into the areas of urban development and sustainability. He is presently investigating how online games, simulations and other information technologies can facilitate greater clarity and visibility of sustainability objectives among urban communities and stakeholder groups. This research includes study of the underlying technological requirements for such tools (data structures, communication and visualisation), as well as the social research methods for evaluating those tools in practice.