Research in Focus is a YFile series that explores the vibrant research landscape of York University’s Organized Research Units (ORUs).
These centres of research excellence serve as dynamic hubs where interdisciplinary experts collaborate with partners to tackle some of the globe’s most pressing challenges. Each edition invites readers to explore the transformative work undertaken at York University through a Q-and-A with ORU directors.
This edition explores the mission and impacts of the Institute for Research on Digital Literacies (IRDL) and features director Alison Harvey, associate professor at Glendon College.
Q: What is the mission of your ORU and its core areas of research?
A: The Institute for Research on Digital Literacies (IRDL) has a broad interdisciplinary mandate to engage and facilitate research, exchange and pedagogic innovation related to digital technologies, digital media and digital cultures as sites of formal and informal pedagogy and learning. Our goal is to respond quickly to changes in technology, media and culture, and to promote research, scholarship and pedagogic innovation in a digital age.
At IRDL, we see digital literacies research as exploring the diverse and evolving uses and implications of media and technology in a range of environments, in diverse global digital cultures and across the generations. We support research on digital practices attuned to this diversity and that places questions of equity, justice and inclusion at the forefront of these studies.
Q: How does your ORU foster collaboration and partnerships to enhance research impact?
A: Interdisciplinarity is a core value at IRDL, and we therefore prioritize fostering relationships and collaborations across the different campuses and Faculties at York University. A signature event that enables this is our Get it Done Together collaborative working sessions, where we regularly host students and faculty from a range of ORUs and units to facilitate an impactful research environment.
We also organize events and plan activities that support scholars in connecting with partners outside the University to enable community-engaged research, experiential education and robust knowledge mobilization. This coming year, for example, we will be hosting a number of hands-on courses and workshops with external partners focused on the theoretical and practical elements of contemporary digital citizenship and literacy, including how to manage the risks of online presence while engaging in public communication about our research.
Q: What real-world challenges is your ORU working to address and how does it align with York’s institutional priorities?
A: IRDL is home to scholars tackling research into the opportunities and challenges wrought by the fast-moving digital world and its impacts on our daily lives. While digital games, online platforms, social media and other emergent and impactful technologies, media and cultures have ushered in exciting promises of democratized participation in a range of activities, these also present urgent social, economic, political and environmental concerns.
By exploring everyday experiences in our digital world, IRDL researchers are at the forefront of investigations revealing the consequences of challenges such as AI bias, techno feudalism, algorithmic injustices and data-driven environmental damage, and interventions that can challenge inequities and exploitation in this context. Our work therefore reflects York’s core values of forward-looking solutions in support of sustainability, social justice and equity, and diversity and inclusivity.
Q: What innovative approaches or methodologies distinguish your ORU’s research?
A: The researchers and educators participating in IRDL activities are distinctively critical, interdisciplinary and collaborative – a necessary ethos for undertaking research informed by the tenets of community-engaged practice. At IRDL we often support scholarly work entailing action research, research creation, policy interventions and other types of methods connecting intellectual inquiry with the communities we engage with.
Q: What accomplishments or upcoming projects can you highlight and how do you see your ORU shaping the future?
A: IRDL has, over the last few years, supported a range of collaborative and community-engaged work related to digital justice, including the Bearing Witness project which looked at the graduate student experience of online harassment related to their research. The work led to an exhibit of several research creation outputs and an academic symposium. We also hosted a roundtable conversation with organizers at the Design Justice Network, who shared insights into how designers, activists, educators and researchers could come to together to challenge digital design injustices.
We are excited to carry on with this thread of interventionist, creative and interdisciplinary work in the coming year where we will feature a number of courses, workshops and talks about digital literacies, democratic citizenship in digital spaces and online safety. These events are featured in collaboration with scholars across York and partners from non-profit organizations and community groups beyond the University. We are also fostering future collaborations related to artificial intelligence (AI), digital gaming and platform capitalism, and foresee the urgency of IRDL’s work in the next five years as the impacts of emergent technologies are felt in our everyday lives.
Learn more about Research & Innovation at York University.