Decolonial Approaches to Researching Children and Youth's Digital Cultures: Epistemologies of the South Lenses

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In this special issue colloquium contribution, I make the case for decolonial, exploratory frameworks and approaches to studying children and young people's digital lifeworlds in a changing digital world, that at the same time acknowledges Africa's epistemic diversity and counters the enduring impacts of coloniality on contemporary identities. The discussion is foregrounded within the Epistemologies of the South framework. The colloquium piece argues that the framework is particularly important for examining how children and young people engage with digital culture, as their experiences are often overlooked in mainstream discourse. Research into young people's digital cultures and lifeworlds particularly in the global South is crucial for understanding the implications of digital culture on young lives and their future. To this end, I propose utilising decolonial approaches such as mobile diaries and mobile diary interviews, decolonial listening, and photovoice (and spatial mapping). The point of these participatory methods is to find out more about the rich and varied digital social lives of young adult Africans, with agentic power, who are not following Western norms, who are involved in a process of hybridising local and global digital cultures and accepting decolonial ways of being, power, and knowledge. The piece explores questions such as: What opportunities do the above methods offer for researching children and young people's digital cultures or lifeworlds, especially in marginalized contexts? What ethical considerations and conundrums are to be expected? How do we navigate such constraints? The colloquium concludes that one of the significances of utilising these decolonial methods in researching children and young people is that they ensure the direct hearing of children and young people's voices, highlighting their agency as experts in their own digital lives.