Kiran Vinod Bhatia – författare

This book is a companion to parents in navigating the new childhood—marked by smart technology, increasing diversity, and growing uncertainties. While the Millennial and Gen Z parents of Gen Alpha are not new to technology and diversity, the speed and scale of societal and technological transformation can make parenting overwhelming. Here is a book that is more a conversation than a manual; more an empathetic guide than a bunch of thumb-rules. Parents can turn to it when grandparents can’t be consulted on the new challenges and the internet throws as much misinformation as help.The book walks parents through the challenges posed by shifting global and local dynamics, being surrounded by people who are “different” at home and at work, and the dark side of technology. The biggest contribution of the book is that it is aimed at parenting that helps children benefit from diversity and technological advances, and lead lives full of rich experiences, rather than looking at diversity and technology with fear. Additionally, the authors have proposed ways in which parents can help their children become global citizens who not only think critically, but also know how to acknowledge and negotiate their personal biases.Showing the contribution of parenting in cultivating a growth mindset that values leadership, innovation, and responsibility, this book will be significantly useful to parents, teachers, university students, and counsellors, while offering impressive material for courses in the departments of education, child development and family studies, psychology, social work, and media studies.

This book is a companion to parents in navigating the new childhood—marked by smart technology, increasing diversity, and growing uncertainties. While the Millennial and Gen Z parents of Gen Alpha are not new to technology and diversity, the speed and scale of societal and technological transformation can make parenting overwhelming. Here is a book that is more a conversation than a manual; more an empathetic guide than a bunch of thumb-rules. Parents can turn to it when grandparents can’t be consulted on the new challenges and the internet throws as much misinformation as help.The book walks parents through the challenges posed by shifting global and local dynamics, being surrounded by people who are “different” at home and at work, and the dark side of technology. The biggest contribution of the book is that it is aimed at parenting that helps children benefit from diversity and technological advances, and lead lives full of rich experiences, rather than looking at diversity and technology with fear. Additionally, the authors have proposed ways in which parents can help their children become global citizens who not only think critically, but also know how to acknowledge and negotiate their personal biases.Showing the contribution of parenting in cultivating a growth mindset that values leadership, innovation, and responsibility, this book will be significantly useful to parents, teachers, university students, and counsellors, while offering impressive material for courses in the departments of education, child development and family studies, psychology, social work, and media studies.

This book departs from the universalising and rescue narratives of poor children and technologies. It offers complex stories on how children’s social identities (gender, caste, and religion), cultural norms, and personal aspirations influence their digital experiences. How do children challenge, circumvent, or reinforce the dominant sociocultural norms in their engagements with digital technologies? What can we learn about digital technologies and poor children’s jugaad and aspirations in the urban sprawls of India? This book explores these questions ethnographically by focusing on how children in three urban slums in India access technologies, inhabit online spaces, and personalise their digital experiences, networks, and identity articulations based on their values and aspirations. It utilises insights from studies on jugaad, expression, and sociality to argue that poor children’s material realities, community relations, and aspirations for leisure, class mobility, and belongingness profoundly shape their engagements with digital technologies.

Most books on young people in the global South focus on how Gen Z consumes content and are thus receivers of global cultural flows. Gen Z, Digital Media, and Transcultural Lives: At Home in the World offers narrative exploration of how Gen Z in the global South uses digital media and technologies to not only engage with global cultural content, but also create content for employment, leisure, advocacy, and awareness. This book offers a new perspective that illustrates how this generation practices playful resilience in engaging with global flows and local realities. Kiran Vinod Bhatia and Manisha Pathak-Shelat highlight how this content reflects engagement with global flows and efforts to direct and impact these flows, expand audiences, and grow digital networks for material, emotional, cultural, and other rewards. The authors demonstrate how youth in the global South build digital worlds for themselves and others through active and producer-level participation. Scholars of communication, media studies, and digital anthropology will find this book of particular interest.

Subsequently, a critical media education framework was developed in order to equip these young people with the critical skills needed to challenge power relations, with the goal being to identify resources for resistance within themselves and their immediate media environments.