Children's digital landscapes: Risk, resilience, and agentic participation

This doctoral research project aimed to investigate children’s perceptions of digital landscapes. Taking a qualitative interpretivist stance, grounded in feminist epistemologies this research addressed questions relating to how children use digital landscapes, and what they felt was important about this. It evaluates how children’s digital landscapes are shaped by, and shape childhood as a construct. This thesis looks at children’s perceptions of risk, and how they mitigate that risk. Children’s views were salient to this research; this was underpinned by the theories of the Sociology of Childhood, viewing children as agentic and are able and competent and therefore are expert in matters which impact them. Focus groups and interviews were conducted with eighteen young people aged 11-14 years, in order to seek children’s views on the digital landscape; the risks and the opportunities it affords. This research argues that children and young people can recognise the risks of the digital landscape, they are able to show understanding of what these risks might mean. Furthermore, in understanding these risks they can mitigate them. This thesis argues that in a globally connected digital world children are accessing digital spaces in ways hitherto unimagined. Not only are children engaging with digital landscapes, but the way also they construct and co-construct these environments represents a deep engagement moving towards agentic participation. Agentic participation is argued to be a concept beyond just agency and beyond participation. It is recognising that children are central to shaping the digital landscape itself, through the process of construction in collaboration with peers. This construction process represents that not only are children shaping the digital landscape, but by extension they are shaping their experiences and childhood as a social and cultural construct. Thus, defining what it means to grow up in the digital age.