Conference Papers
Session IT1.1. IT, Innovation and the digital generation
1. Zoe Dawkins: The digital generation as community planners
A group of young men and women from Yarralin, a remote community in the Northern Territory, are currently participating in a project to develop a community-owned plan. This paper will present the digital media work of these young people from Yarralin. Through the process of developing the community plan, young people will be equipped with digital media skills to tell their own stories, and that of their communities. The stories they capture from the community will be used to develop a plan emphasising existing community strengths and their vision for the community. Using film and photography, the young people will work with a diverse range of people from their community – to capture their history, stories and hopes for the future. The use of digital media ensures the plan is controlled by the community, and accessible to the community. Recorded in local language, with subtitles, the digital media plan will be presented back to the community, and delivered to government and local services. This paper will be co-presented with one of the young people from Yarralin, who will talk about their experiences using digital media to work within their own community.
Author bio: Zoë Dawkins is an applied anthropologist working in the community development sector. She is the Team Leader of the Community Development & Social Justice Team at Clear Horizon, a Melbourne-based consulting firm that provides community engagement, planning and evaluation services. Zoë specialises in creative approaches to community consultation, incorporating the use of photography, film and storytelling in her work. She has experience working with communities from across Australia and the Asia Pacific region. She has lived and worked in Asia for over four years, and regularly travels within the region on work assignments. Zoë is also Co-Director of the community arts organisation, Storyscape. Storyscape runs digital storytelling workshops and facilitates creative arts projects, working with young people from across Australia.
2. Gino Orticio: The Collective, Shared and Distinct Intergenerational Meanings of Digital Technologies among the Tadian indigenous people of Mountain Province, Northern Philippines
This paper reports how indigenous youth and elders in Tadian, Mountain Province, Northern Philippines make sense of digital technologies (mobile phones and internet-based communication) since its introduction during the first part of the 21st century. Based on field data collected from 2009 to 2011, results show that digital technologies are generally accepted and used by the iTadian (an ethnonym for people living in Tadian) as a means to “make life better” (nanam-nam-ay ti biyag), especially in communicating with immediate kin outside their own community. However, there are distinctions on how youth and elders regard these technologies as part of their daily lives. For instance, younger iTadian tend to regard digital technologies as an integrated aspect of their lives almost like an appendage. Understandably they are also the ones who are more technologically sophisticated. On the other hand, iTadian elders take a reflexive stance on how these devices affect long-held values such as (but not limited to): the treatment of one’s secrets, and respect for the dead. Aware of their limitations on using digital technologies, the elders conscript immediate younger kin as an important factor in sustaining its usage. Notwithstanding these distinctions: ethnicity, self-development and indigenous equity remain imbricated within the iTadian identity.
Author bio: Gino Orticio is a socio-technical researcher and sessional academic currently pursuing his PhD (Sociology) at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT). His fields of interests are actor-network theory, digital studies and indigenous societies.
3. James Rose: Reaching forwards, back and outwards: visualizing the continuity of indigenous populations in space and time
At any given time a population may be thought of as having a shape in both space and time. It may extend outwards across a geographic landscape as members are born, live and work in different places. It may also extend ‘back’ in time among its oldest generations and ‘forwards’ among its youngest. Furthermore, populations modelled in this way leave visible ‘tracks’ showing when and where their ancestors have existed in the past. Understanding how a population moves and changes its shape over time is a critical task of population science, because it helps design the distribution of health, education, transport, and employment services both in the present and in the future. The shape of First Australia’s population has special characteristics which also relate to traditional land and resource rights, because its distribution in space and time has an underlying structure which predates British colonisation. This continuity in space and time is a direct result of the ongoing interaction between young and old generations. Using 3D visualisation technology, this paper will look at the continuities and changes in the shape of South-Eastern Australia’s Indigenous population from the earliest available data at colonisation, to the present.
Authro bio: James Rose is a PhD candidate at the School of Population Health in the University of Melbourne and an anthropologist with the native title representative body NTSCORP in Redfern. He has worked as a native title anthropologist in NSW and as a sacred sites anthropologist in the Northern Territory for over 8 years. He was raised partly in the Mann and Musgrave Ranges of the Pitjantjatjara lands in Central Australia and partly in Sydney.