Beam Center brings together youth, artists, engineers, and educators to produce ambitious, collaborative projects that support youth to take bold steps towards meaningful futures and foster conditions for educational equity. The Digital Futures project consisted of a group of young researchers who collected data on how often youth engage with digital spaces, how it affects their physical and emotional health, and their experiences with online propaganda.
Digital Futures is a paid opportunity at Beam Center in which youth research issues of digital culture that affect their lives and create projects that transform their observations into something beautiful for their peers. Using the Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) framework, the team defines research as a tool for making youth voices heard, honoring their expertise and capacity to reflect on challenges and perceived problems.
The first cycle of Digital Futures started in Summer 2020 by introducing a team of 14 youth to formal research methodology in partnership with the Intergenerational Change Initiative and CUNY Professor Amir Billups. Participating youth received Collaborative Institutional Training Initiative certificates for completing a Responsible Conduct of Research course, which allowed youth to learn about the ethical conduct of research using human subjects. Youth identified three research areas in social spaces created through digital interaction: screen time, mental and physical health, and misinformation. They developed research questions, created a survey hosted on the Amplify App 2.0 platform, and conducted fieldwork in which they gathered responses from around 100 NYC youth who participated in Beam Center programs.
The research team continued in Fall 2020, having thoughtful discussions about research communication and data visualization. The team of youth worked together and decided to create a podcast called “Next Stop, Youth Avenue” that reflected their discussions and experiences. They designed the art and the content, then recorded and edited the audio pieces with support from the Beam Staff.
A second cycle of the program ran in Summer 2021 that involved the creation of new research around bias in internet media. A cohort of new and returning participants designed and ran a focus group-based research session and then coded visual tools to detect bias in articles about specific subjects related to social media and artificial intelligence.
The third cycle, which ran from February-April 2022, revolved around exploring how our early experiences of social media and the internet compared to how we use it today. Youth explored their personal histories online, discussed the past, questioned the present, and predicted the future of online social spaces and how they affect us. The young people created research questions through a hands-on brainstorming process and expressed that knowledge and research by making an Internet Quilt. The interactive Internet Quilt was pieced together from cyanotypes with QR codes linking to handmade HTML websites. These sites contain cyanotype screenshots of digital memories, machine embroidery, airbrush art, cut vinyl, woodblock printing, and fabric collage. The finished installation is on display on Governors Island.
Learn how the Beam Center implemented the YPAR method in order to engage youth as researchers.
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Listen to young people from the Beam Center discuss cancel culture - how they've seen and experienced it on social media, the pros and cons of cancelling someone, and how to make the act of cancelling better serve its purpose.
Listen Here
Listen to young people from the Beam Center discuss cancel culture - how they've seen and experienced it on social media, the pros and cons of cancelling someone, and how to make the act of cancelling better serve its purpose.
Listen Here
