Child and Youth Engagement: Civic Literacies and Digital Ecologies

With a rise in participatory media, there has been a hopefulness about how networked media spurs on youth leadership and civic engagement, offering opportunities and power to marginalized voices and communities that are historically under-represented. As more communities began to use these networks, and as organizations and institutions began to harness digital media and creative practices for the explicit purpose of empowerment, arguments around the technological determinism and the politics of hopeful futurity began to emerge. In this special issue, international researchers foreground their interpretations of the notion of civic literacies within digital ecologies. As
young people play on the terrain of global mediascapes (Appadurai, 1996), they contribute and shift them, offering us new ways to imagine our lives, creating and transforming what is possible through the contribution of their own narratives, perspectives, and stories. This is especially true in March 2020 when so many young people took to social media to share their COVID-19 anxieties in a time of uncertainty. The special issue goes some way in confronting tensions and urgencies such as racism and political uncertainties of the contemporary moment.