Contemporary digital health research, policy and practice often engage young people in voicing their opinions with a participatory approach. Simultaneously, young people organise themselves on peer-led platforms like Reddit to talk about health without adults. Peer-led discussions on platforms like Reddit gives us access to a new perspective on how young people understand and experience health. This study investigates youth voices on health in teenagers’ subreddits on Reddit and responds to three research questions: how youth voices about health matters are represented in peer-led discussions; how the platform supports plural voices; and how the Bakhtinian dialogical account of voice can offer an alternative of non-unified, heterogeneous voices of young people to shortcomings of some participatory research, service, and policymaking. This study used unobtrusive digital ethnography and extant data collection methods to sample 50 posts related to physical, mental, and sexual health. Thematic analysis was conducted with grounded theory principles. Youth plural voices revealed different conceptualisations of health and diverse narratives about actors like parents, teachers, healthcare professionals and technologies involved in health experiences. Redditors engage in humorous and factual discussions equally and share both positive and negative health experiences. There is no unity in youth health meanings, but plurality and heterogeneity deserve more recognition and support. Analysing Reddit allows us to know what and how young people talk about health with their peers. Learning from the Reddit environment, adults may redefine their ideas of youth health to be more youth-centred and better align with young people’s needs.

What is it like to be a teen today? To live in a time when on and offline worlds are increasingly blurred, especially for young people who are navigating relationships both online and at school? Misogyny, racism, homophobia, and misinformation spread in and through digital technologies and practices such as sexual name calling, the non-consensual distribution of intimate images, grooming, online harassment, catfishing, and receiving unwanted sexual messages are seemingly ubiquitous. Increasingly conceptualized as technology facilitated forms of gender-based sexual violence, (TFGBSV) (Powell and Henry 2017), these forms of harm are a significant global public concern.

In this paper, we draw from two collaborative projects that collected surveys with 557 teens, 47 teachers, and 72 parents; 17 focus groups with 65 young people, 4 focus groups with 9 parents; and 29 interviews with teens and 17 teachers. We also gathered data through arts-based methodologies, observation, and exploring educational interventions to answer the following questions:

• What is it like being a teen in this postdigital context?

• How do teens navigate their gender and sexual identities, and the intimacies, relationships, violence, and resistance that accompanies them?

• What challenges do parents and teachers face when teaching, talking about, or supporting young people in a postdigital context?

Our data casts light into what it is like to be a teen in an era in which digital technologies play such an important role in their lives - and how they experience, navigate, and challenge violence, harassment, and abuse facilitated by these technologies.

This paper stems from a chapter of my Doctoral dissertation. It borrows from the work of boyd (2014) on the experiences of teenagers in social media. In this paper I will present the different usages of the internet and social media by teenagers that live in a context of exclusion. I will focus on teenagers that are placed in care institutions in Brazil, and their struggle with everyday forms of stigma and oppression.

To live in a care institution, a.k.a shelters, is a unique experience that is the consequence of rights violations against children and teenagers (Brazilian Statute of the Child and of the Adolescent, 1990). The placement in a shelter is an extreme measure that remove children from their families and communities. To legitimate the state intervention and highlighting the exceptionality and temporality of that measure, the law prioritises family and community conviviality. This is not the case for most of teenagers, as it is unlikely they will be adopted or return, and they will spent most of their teen years there.

I will present the narratives of institution and especially teenagers, with which I highlight the link between their experiences of exclusion, the formation of identity and their digital personas. For such, I will use the concept of reflexive identity (Giddens, 1991) and the script approach (Akrich, 1992) to portray how their actions show some kind accomodation and appropriation of the affordances of social media to seek stability in a context of high uncertainty.

Climate anxiety—the feeling of dread and distress associated with worrying about the future of the planet—has been posited as a defining feature of Gen Z. This study examines youth communication around climate anxiety on YouTube, through a qualitative content analysis of 146 youth-created videos about climate anxiety, as well as the over 20,000 comments posted on them. Illustrating an emphasis on content rather than form, the videos in our corpus showed an in-depth engagement with the topic at hand, coupled with a simple, low-key aesthetic. The vast majority of videos assumed an imagined audience of young people who are concerned about the climate; thus, the goal was to provide information and advice rather than persuade about climate change. Our analysis illustrates the significance of insider conversations among youth, and the centrality of YouTube’s expressivity and connectivity affordances in allowing young people to engage with these topics on a personal and intimate level. At the same time, our research illuminates the mental toll of political expression for young people, and further highlights this connection between the affective and the political drive. On a theoretical level, our research offers and tests a broadly applicable model that explains how different social media platforms (in this case, YouTube) enable—as well as constrain—certain forms of political expression, through the interaction between their affordances, norms, and contents.

A central objective of a Portuguese research project on Young people, News and Digital citizenship – YouNDigital (PTDC/COM-OUT/0243/2021) is to grab news definitions and their connection with youth’s (aged 15-24) democratic needs. The project relies on complementary methods to approach the senses of what news is and how young people get in touch with the world. We developed a representative online survey in Portugal (N=1300) where we explored how young people reach their notion of the world. The survey reflected the existence of several nationalities, such as Angolan, Cape Verdeans, Mozambican and Brazilian (official Portuguese-speaking countries), and also Ukrainian. It also included two open research questions about how respondents build their views of the world and how they see the future of news. In this presentation, we will rely on these identified nationalities and their answers to these questions. Data points to the envision that technology will continue to have a paramount sophistication and intervention in the production of news in the coming future (they predict evolutions such as a futuristic technology in the form of an intraocular device for searching news), but they also reveal negative feelings towards the speed at which information is produced and circulates, opening way for the increasing of manipulative, and untrusty information production (they claim for more trustworthy news while at the same time they see a pathway for the news that has no salvation).