Abstract
There has been a growing realization that the youth is increasingly disengaged from the traditional political process and the polity. There have been concerns about the declining public sphere and the weakening of the spirit and sense of citizenship. These concerns have resulted in calls for a renewed effort to revive citizenship education in order to reinvigorate civic engagement and participation. The paper examines the potential of social media in providing a transnational space for global networked youth’s education and empowerment. This paper, in its first part, will provide a survey of the field on social media’s educational potential. The second part of the paper will briefly summarize some of the results of authors’ research on social media and problematize the romantic and over-optimistic expectations attached with social media in relation to its educational potential. The third part of the paper will make connections between globalization, social media, education, and empowerment and examine the barriers and hurdles that prohibit social media in achieving its full potential especially in providing the type of transnational space conducive to educating and empowering global youth.
Author Information
Adeela Arshad-Ayaz, Concordia University, Canada
Jihan Rabah, Concordia University, Canada
Paper Information
Conference: IICE2015
Stream: Education: social justice and social change
This paper is part of the IICE2015 Conference Proceedings (View)
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