Ioana Literat

Columbia University | CU · Teachers College

In this article, we employ the lens of distributed creativity to explore how youth use online creativity to express themselves politically and engage in political dialogue with peers. We examine youth participation around the 2016 U.S. presidential election results on three online affinity networks representing different creative genres (games, fan...

Participation is often used as a blanket term that is uncritically celebrated; this is particularly true in the case of youth digital participation. In this article, we propose a youth-focused analytical framework, applicable to a wide variety of youth digital participation projects, which can help facilitate a more nuanced understanding of these p...

In view of the prominence of online media and their role in enabling new patterns of activity and engagement, the concept of participation has become an increasingly ubiquitous buzzword across a wide variety of disciplines. However, the specifics of its scope and applications are insufficiently interrogated. This article traces the use of the term,...

While existing scholarship has focused on distilling the attributes of successful memes and the dynamics of their propagation in online spaces, there is a lack of research on the vernacular criticism of memes beyond quantitative markers of popularity. By examining the MemeEconomy community on Reddit, where ‘meme traders’ appropriate stock market te...

This article advances a holistic framework that aims to facilitate a better understanding of the nuanced impact of the internet on contemporary creative participation. Functioning simultaneously as the context, locus, and medium for creative activity, the internet affects each stage in the life cycle of a creative product – creation, distribution,...

On March 13, 2020, Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old Black woman from Louisville, Kentucky, was killed by police officers during a raid on her apartment. In this study, we analyze the complex intersections between race, gender, and the aesthetic norms dominant on Instagram, as they played out in the political expression around the killing of Breonna Ta...

Though news representations of protest have been studied extensively, little is known about how media audiences critique such representations. Focusing on TikTok as a space for media criticism, this article examines how users employ the app to respond to representations of protest in mainstream news media. Content collected in the spring of 2021 il...

This study examines meaning-making in and through coronavirus memes, as part of broader representations of the pandemic circulating online. It also aims to make a broader conceptual contribution by advancing a theory of mimetic representation that considers memes to be cultural meaning units and, building on social representations theory, proposes...

In contrast to academic and popular accounts that present generational characteristics from the outside, in a top-down manner, we explore how Gen Z constructs, narrates, and projects itself in real-time on TikTok—a prominent social media platform, dominated by Gen Z, that provides a valuable window into youth experience and cultural production. Bas...

When it comes to youth and media literacy, the focus of both research and practice has been on the integration of media literacy instruction into young people’s various educational experiences, rather than studying, implementing and evaluating such initiatives in situ, on social media—which is known to be youths’ central news source. Furthermore, e...

Given the need for innovative, engaging, and youth-centered approaches to media literacy, as well as the potential of active pedagogies to facilitate youth civic education and efficacy, games emerge as a particularly promising and under-utilized avenue for news literacy education. Our research asks, how might we use game-based learning to tackle fa...

More than just humorous online content, memes fulfill significant affective, sociocultural and political functions at both the individual and collective level. By analysing personally significant COVID-19 memes within their larger vernacular communication contexts, this autoethnographic visual essay illuminates these digital artefacts as vibrant re...

To better understand youth attitudes towards media literacy education on social media, and the opportunities and challenges inherent in such initiatives, we conducted a large-scale analysis of user responses to a recent media literacy campaign on TikTok. We found that reactions to the campaign were mixed, and highly political in nature. While young...

Adopting a comparative cross-platform approach, we examine youth political expression and conversation on social media, as prompted by popular culture. Tracking a common case study—the practice of building Donald Trump’s border wall within the videogame Fortnite—across three social media platforms popular with youth (YouTube, TikTok, Instagram), we...

Social media, and especially popular youth-focused platforms like TikTok, can offer a valuable window into youth experiences, including their perceptions of online learning. Building on a large-scale thematic analysis of 1,930 TikTok videos posted in March-June 2020, this study examines how young people shared their experiences of online learning d...

This article advances a narrative approach to internet memes conceptualized as partial stories that reflect, capture, and contribute to wider storylines. One key difficulty in studying memes as stories rests in the fact that narrative analysis often focuses on plot at the expense of roles and characters. Building on narrative psychology and, in par...

This study investigates underrepresented youths’ perspectives on social media design and how these may inform the development of more ethical and equitable social media apps. In contrast to the tradition of universal design in the field of human-computer interaction, this research centers difference to investigate how users’ perspectives and expect...

We are living through a highly politicized time, with deep divisions foregrounding the significance and importance of political expression and dialogue. Youth have been at the forefront of these important conversations, in both academic research and in the popular press. On the one hand, we are seeing a resurgence of activism and engagement among y...

This article discusses the potential of participatory game design to encourage and capture youth reflection, discussion, and participation around news literacy topics. Based on data obtained during a game design workshop with youth participants, we analyze two youth-produced games about fake news and discuss the personal, social, and cultural dimen...

One of the far-reaching implications of the current global COVID-19 pandemic has been the sudden boost in use of digital media due to social distancing and stay-at-home orders. In times of routine, youth are often the first to adopt new technologies and platforms, to experiment with modes of production and practices of sharing, and often spend sign...

We designed, implemented and evaluated a game about fake news to test its potential to enhance news literacy skills in educational settings. The game was largely effective at facilitating complex news literacy skills. When these skills were integrated into the design and fictional narrative of the game, diverse groups of students engaged with the l...

This study investigates underrepresented youths’ perspectives on social media design and how these may inform the development of more ethical and equitable social media apps. In contrast to the tradition of universal design in the field of human–computer interaction, this study centers difference to investigate how users’ perspectives and expectati...

This study aims to surface youth perspectives on their own activism, their experiences of age-based power dynamics in activist spaces, and their understandings of adult allyship. Using semistructured interviews and innovative participatory visual methods that invite youth to create and discuss original memes, we investigate these questions from the...

Although youth of color, youth from lower socioeconomic brackets, and young women are among the heaviest users of social media technologies, their voices are almost entirely absent from current conversations about ethical design. Based on a close analysis of youth-produced technological autoethnographies, this article examines underrepresented yout...

Social media are recognized as important outlets for youth political expression, yet the affordances of different platforms may shape the forms and styles of expression that young people deploy. In order to gain a deeper understanding of the ways social media affordances shape youth voice, this article examines young people’s political expression o...

A powerful visual symbol of social protest and a success story of online organizing, the Pussyhat is a prominent illustration of the revival of craftivism in the current political climate. Analyzing the activity of the Pussyhat Project group within the online craft community Ravelry, this article aims to facilitate a deeper understanding of emergin...

Based on an in-depth qualitative content analysis of post-election discourse in three online creative communities (Scratch, Archive of Our Own, and hitRECord), we examine the significance of youth political expression in non-political online spaces, and its implications for civic education. We find that these spaces offer a valuable window into the...

This study examines the impact that producing a print newspaper using cell phones had on marginalized students in a high school journalism classroom. Analysis of data from participant observation, artifact analysis and student interviews revealed that a) students negotiated cell phone use for educational purposes, despite school bans on such device...

There are many dimensions to the ongoing European refugee crisis, including economic, political, and humanitarian. Underlying them, however, is the issue of self–other relations and, in particular, the ways in which Western societies imagine others and otherness, defined in cultural, religious, and political terms. At the core of this political ima...

In this article, we suggest that we are witnessing a challenge to the hegemony of text-based knowledge in academic scholarship, brought about by newly available modes of expression, and a cultural shift in our notions of reading and writing, authorship, and networked knowledge production. The central question we address here concerns the implicatio...

Yik Yak, a location-based, anonymous social media app, has been gaining negative attention as a platform that often gives voice to bullying, racism and sexism on college campuses across the country. Integrating research on digital anonymity and cyberbullying, this paper analyzes the key features of Yik Yak and discusses the ethical dimensions of te...

This forum reviews a mix of resources (written texts, graphic novels, documentaries, and mixed-media pieces) to inform pedagogy and related educational practices that foreground representations of youths and their literacy practices within and outside of school.

This article investigates the role of social and technological factors in enabling sustainable creative participation in online environments. To facilitate a deeper understanding of these dynamics, I describe and analyse the implementation of a creative participatory project across three online platforms: as a series of tasks on Mechanical Turk, as...

As a cultural object, the selfie is a contested image, most often encountered and analyzed in an archetypal and reductionist form, as vain self-portrait or vapid social celebration. However, it is important to acknowledge that there is a wide range of selfie genres, informed by specific motives and circumstances, and socially read and policed in co...

To better understand the conditions that most effectively stimulate creative participation online, a crowdsourcing project was implemented on Amazon's Mechanical Turk, collecting 4200 written and visual submissions from online participants. An experimental research design tested the impact of specific incentive structures (i.e. financial rewards, b...

This article aims to contribute to a better understanding of the impact of the Internet on distributed creativity. While the social mechanisms that are fundamental for creative expression are not radically different online, and while we want to avoid overly romanticizing the role of the Internet or falling prey to technological determinism, we argu...

The proliferation of massive open online courses (MOOCs) has stirred a fervent debate about global access to higher education. While some commentators praise MOOCs for expanding educational opportunities in a more open and accessible fashion, others criticize this trend as a threat to current models of higher education and a low-quality substitute...

In light of a widening generational disconnect and the increasing fragility of the textile artifact itself, the cultural legacy of the AIDS Memorial Quilt is under threat. This article describes the collaborative creation of digital experiences that aim to augment and revitalize the AIDS Memorial Quilt as an artwork of continued social, cultural, a...

In an effort to increase the local sustainability of a digital storytelling program in Indian public schools, the author piloted a professional development program to train young Muslim women and employ them as digital storytelling teachers in all-female public schools in Hyderabad. Drawing on this experience, and on interviews with the trainees an...

By analyzing the contests that appeared in Popular Science Monthly from 1918 to 1938, this article discusses the rhetoric of public engagement with technological innovation, and the magazine's construction of a readership community. A close analysis of these contests reveals a burgeoning participatory culture within the context of the popularizatio...

This article suggests a hybrid model for entertainment-education, where the integrated activation of communication channels across different levels of influence can increase the reach and effectiveness of entertainment-education campaigns. The synergy between communication infrastructure theory (CIT) and entertainment-education offers a systematic,...

Participatory mapping attempts to engage youth in the generation of personalized maps, as a way to both harness the value of individual knowledge about geographic space, and to concurrently empower the research participants by inviting them to take an active stake in the representation and explication of their spatial environment. Engagement in the...

This article explores the use of participatory drawing as a non-mechanical visual research method in qualitative research with children and youth. Because of its co-constructed and playful nature, as well as its lack of dependence on linguistic proficiency, participatory drawing emerges as a highly efficient and ethically sound research strategy th...

Online crowdsourced art is the practice of using the Internet as a participatory platform to directly engage the public in the creation of visual, musical, literary, or dramatic artwork, with the goal of showcasing the relationship between the collective imagination and the individual artistic sensibilities of its participants. Discussing key examp...

Talk to Me, an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York, is a paradigmatic collection of new media artistic experiments and an open experimental space in itself. The theme of the event, now one of the foundations of 21st century design concepts, is the communication between people and objects. "Whether openly and actively or in sub...