This article posits that analyses of (cyber)bullying among digitally connected young people need to explore the interdependences, intersections and cON/FFlation of bullying in ONline and OFFline spaces. It combines digital geographers' works on relationalities between digital and offline spaces with studies on children's and young people's geographies and digitization as well as with interdisciplinary work on cyberbullying and traditional bullying in the school context. Drawing on narratives written by young people in Austria, the article lets participants speak through their own voices. There is an urgent need for disparate research examining either or both traditional and cyberbullying, to take note not only of each of their inimitable spatialities, but also their intersections. Through taking a perspective of cON/FFlating spaces we seek to produce a better understanding of the cON/FFlating nature and spaces of bullying in the digital era and to deepen the conceptualization of these interlinked and entangled socio-material-technological spaces.
There is an urgent need for the currently mostly disparate and quantitative research on traditional or cyberbullying, to not only take note of each other, but also to analyse the interdependences, intersections and conflation of bullying in digital and offline spaces in a more comprehensive manner. More recent conceptualisations of ‘space’ offer valuable contributions to a reflection upon the epistemological and related methodological considerations when seeking to understand the lifeworlds, practices and experiences of young people involved in bullying. In this sense, we have recently advanced the concept of “cON/FFlating situational spaces and places” (Bork-Hüffer and Yeoh 2017: 93) in an attempt to integrate existing algorithmic, (post-)feminist and relational perspectives to the analysis of bullying (cf. Bork-Hüffer et al. 2020). We ask: Whether and how does bullying in physical and digital spaces intersect in school contexts? We applied narratives produced by young people themselves in Austria with the objective to let them speak with their own voice when describing their experiences and involvement with (cyber)bullying. Even when bullying practices themselves seemed to be restricted to digital spaces, they are still entangled within the spatialities of participants’ relations, practices, identities and life-worlds that stretch across inseparable socio-material and technological spheres. The results reflect how the ontogenesis of socio-technological developments shapes the opportunities for, types of, frequencies and harshness of bullying attacks.
The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly changed educational and qualification experiences among young people. When the pandemic spread in 2020, schools worldwide were required to switch to remote learning. Through a qualitative multi-method, partly mobile, in-situ research approach, we accompanied pupils in the final year of their secondary education as they prepared for and finalized their school-leaving exams to investigate the following questions: What did pupils’ socio-material-technological learning spaces look like during this period? How did they adapt their digital media practices to cope with learning remotely? How did their situatedness in these learning spaces influence their learning experiences? Building on existing research in the field of digital and children’s geographies as well as learning spaces, through a combined content and narrative analysis, this article situates pupils’ learning spaces and experiences of graduating during the pandemic in the context of family relations, socio-material home spaces, polymediated learning environments and the accessibility of outdoor spaces. We debate the wide spectrum of media practices—ranging from indulgence in digital media, to balanced media use, to attempting to withdraw from using digital media—used by pupils to navigate through inextricably entangled socio-material-technological spaces during the pandemic. The further digitization of education prompted by the pandemic must be used in ways that empower pupils to engage in responsible and active use of digital media, thus allowing them to become mature and resilient digital participants in society.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.