Presentations

Drawing from several lines of scholarship at the intersections of teaching, technologies and learning, including recent conceptions of platform and algorithmic literacies, Dr. Michelle Schira Hagerman offers a critical examination of what we got wrong in schools about digital “participation”. As Ontario school boards continue to seek damages from social media companies because of the ways that platforms have changed the ways that students think, interact, and understand themselves, Dr. Hagerman considers what can be learned from the early social media era. Using evidence from her recent research, she shows how we might (re)design teaching and learning for teens in ways that center on meaningful connection, criticality, and community.

Michelle Schira Hagerman, PhD, OCT studies digital literacies teaching and learning in K-12 schools. She is Associate Professor of Educational Technologies at the University of Ottawa Faculty of Education where she also serves as Director of their English-language Teacher Education Program. She is the founder and Director of edstudiO, a teaching laboratory dedicated to the study and practice of innovative and inclusive pedagogical practices. With colleagues, she is currently co-editing the International Handbook of Research in Digital Literacies (Routledge, 2015) — a project that has brought together 42 author teams from around the world to consider the multifaceted dimensions of digital literacies in a complex and rapidly changing world. She grew up on a farm in south-western Ontario, but now lives in the National Capital Region with with her two teenage daughters, a very patient partner, and a silly labrador retriever named Pippin.

As the creator economy nears its second decade, media outlets have declared the 2020s “the age of the creator.” Content creators (hereafter creators) are digital workers who rely on social media, content creation, or e-commerce platforms to publish, promote, and monetize their labor, which can range from long-form writing, vlogging, music, art, and other forms of entertainment media. As a global, multi-platform labor market, the creator economy is estimated at a cool 250 billion USD and employs millions of workers worldwide. It has transformed “legacy” media industries, such as film, journalism, and book publishing. Moreover, the advent of creative labour offers new implications for how young people obtain and share information, with a November 2024 Pew Research Report highlighting that Generation Z (GenZ) is increasingly turning to political and news influencers to obtain information, departing from print and broadcast journalism. Creators are not a silly fad or a trend; they are here to stay.

However, as a new media industry, the creator economy is highly unregulated, catalyzing inequalities in the ways creators obtain visibility, support, and build credibility with their followers—particularly across disability, gender, and race. As the platforms where creators share their work reflect the biases that shape our offline realities, marginalized creators must navigate precarious working conditions while mediating authenticity and building credibility with their followers. Whose labour is visible in the creator economy, and how does who we see reflect longstanding oppressions that mediate our daily life? This talk reflects on critical strategies for teaching graduate and undergraduate students about inequalities in creative labour, from the vantage points of visibility, authenticity, and credibility.

Dr. Jess Rauchberg (Ph.D., McMaster) is an assistant professor of communication technologies at Seton Hall University, where her scholarship is supported by a Microsoft Research grant. Rauchberg’s research and teaching broadly focuses on inequalities and visibility in the creator economy, with attention to disability, race, and gender. She is a founding member of the Content Creator Scholars Network and a global member of the TikTok Cultures Research Network. Rauchberg’s expertise is quoted in over 25 media appearances, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Good Morning America, PBS, and BBC.