Digi-Spaces and Newcomer Youth Encounters: Considerations for Place|Making in Educational Spaces

Abstract

In order to consider the conditions upon which education is currently situated, a period of socio-political uncertainty and technological re-‘tool’ing, re-structuring, and self-world-machine-other acclimatizing, this research considers the question: Where and how might youth, in particular Newcomer|Immigrant (N|I) youth, develop counter-responses in the digital and offline spaces they transverse, both alone and in connection with others? The following study employs a philosophy of desire alongside the schizoanalytic ontology of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1972/2009, 1980/1987) to contemplate the impacts that the social digi-spaces of TikTok can have upon a N|I subjectivity. Drawing from the work of Deleuze and Guattari, this project maps how the online works upon a N|I youth body to code, modify, consume, and block their subjective desires and, in doing so, aims to find potential spaces of rupture whereby creation might occur. In other words, by thinking through, and with, youth desiring-production in online spaces, this study interrogates how these spaces constitute a N|I subjectivity so as to experiment with the conditions for a “minoritarian becoming” online. A minoritarian becoming is one that works against the representational or standardized spaces of the digi-sphere (Deleuze & Guattari, 1975/1986). In the process of observing and mapping (i.e., exposing and analyzing), there is the potential for avenues of “singularization” (i.e., rupture) to emerge from within the vehicles of subjectivity formation (e.g., external influences of capital or media) to produce new and creative expressions or enunciations (Guattari, 1992/2006; Guattari & Rolnik, 1986/2008). This research is inspirited by a form of posthuman ethics influenced by new materialist media theory that displaces the centrality of the human and, instead, analyzes agency astride an array of interconnected forces (i.e., affects), beings, or online material spaces (Clough, 2016; Deleuze, 1990/1995; Eaton, 2016; Mazzei, 2010, 2013a, 2013b, 2013c). The collection of research data is based upon the exploration and analyses of public digi-spaces using virtual online ethnographic techniques and methods (e.g., passive observation of postings, likes) as inspired by netnography (Fenton & Proctor, 2019; Kozinets, 2015) in order to: i) conduct an overall analysis of online social spaces, in particular, TikTok; ii) observe and collect examples of youth enunciations online (e.g., posts, comments, images); and, iii) conduct a focused case desire analysis on TikTok as a social media space in connection with N|I youth. By interfacing the aforementioned approaches with the emergent data findings, this dissertation seeks to better understand how N|I youth are using digital spaces to construct potentially new on and offline subjectivity expressions for themselves and others. In following this process, I aim to develop a public pedagogy and digital media literacy that opens upon the questions of how N|I youth are negotiating the complex terrain of social media. By way of observation, exploration, and engagement, there is a potential for a becoming-with or becoming-other (a yet-to-be-determined potential) to emerge in connection with N|I youth as digital subjects online (Deleuze & Guattari, 1975/1986, 1980/1987; Guattari, 1992/2006; jagodzinski, 2014; Hickey-Moody, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017).