Digital Play, Working Kids (2019 - 2021)
Digital Play, Working Kids seeks to understand two core elements. Firstly, how children’s media and entertainment companies harness young people’s creative labour to promote intellectual properties. Secondly, what the implications of this dynamic are on how we define young people’s labour within digital capitalism. You can learn more about this project here.
Bearing Witness (2023 - 2024)
Bearing Witness is a project that centres the experiences of graduate students who have encountered harassment when conducting or sharing their research online. Social media has become an important tool for scholars to extend their networks and build a public profile, but these same platforms enable coordinated harassment campaigns that disproportionately target women, queer, racialized, disabled, and other marginalized scholars. Even though research harassment affects many graduate students, these experiences are rarely acknowledged or documented. You can learn more about this project here.
Questioning KidTech (2022 - 2025)
Questioning KidTech explores the shift where much of children’s daily lives have moved into online spaces; and in this shifting reality, we ask what it means to be a child in these spaces. We need to understand what these digital spaces are, how they are experienced, and how they are shaping children’s social, cultural and economic lives. You can learn more about this project here.
Digital Futures: KidTech, AdTech, and Branded Content in the DigiVerse (2025 - 2029)
Platforms like Roblox are developing at a dizzying pace, outpacing much of our scholarship. There is an urgent need to quickly understand kidTech platforms in order to protect children’s digital rights by supporting parents/caregivers, educators and policy makers in comprehending the implications of these shift digital infrastructures of Web3. But it is also urgent that we understand the commercial economies, technological affordances and digital cultures of this new form of communication and entertainment as Roblox, along with other kidTech platforms, have their sights on reshaping our digital worlds. This project aims to understand how content is produced, circulated, monetized and experienced on Roblox. You can learn more about this project here.