Youth, digital media and social inequality

This paper presents a conceptual synthesis of current literatures on the ways in which digital media allow/negate reproduction and resistence in educational and social inequalities for youth.  With a focus on intersections of inequalities (socioeconomic status, age, culture, ethnicity, region) and social reproduction in education, the paper provides theoretical and methodological ways forward to understand and further examine the place of digital media in young lives.  Arising from a SSHRC-funded project in emergent youth-attuned international methodolgies in youth digital cultures, this paper focuses on how sociology and education can better help to position and hear marginalized young people as they converse about and negotiate digital technologies and cultures.  With a focus on Aboriginal, immigrant newcomers and impoverished youth, the paper provides an overview of the evidence of the range of the digital divide and young people's place in it.  How are social inequalities related to the digital divide for youth?  How is age placed as a critical and ongoing category of inequaltiy in the digital divide? Is the digital divide a useful conceptualization of social reporduction and resistence of youth to digital media? Is it possible for youth to turn digital media into spaces of real resistence and social justice?  The paper draws on hundreds of current, international literatures to address these quesitons and provide theoretical and methodological directions.