Get To Know 22-23 BKC Fellow: Ashley Lee

Ashley Lee is a scholar of tech, politics, and social movements. Her research examines the implications of technology design and use for democracy and social equality, focusing on young people and marginalized communities. She was a 2022-2023 fellow with the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. 

So, turning to youth digital activism and surveillance through technology, why did you decide to focus on youth? How would you characterize this demographic – is it different from adults or the general public? 

Before I started my doctoral program, I was working with the U.N. in Cambodia, which, as you may know, is an authoritarian country where the Prime Minister has been in power for over three decades now. There, I came across these tech-savvy youth activists. At the time, there was a huge uptake in social media use, especially Facebook (now Meta), and these young activists were using social media to find creative means of participating in politics. 

Freedom of assembly and freedom of expression are limited in Cambodia. And because of the legacy of the Khmer Rouge, a radical communist movement which killed a large number of the Cambodian population, the norm there was not to participate in politics. So, young people were being told by their parents to stay out of politics. But when I was actually on the ground, working with young people, I realized that this narrative of young people being disengaged did not really align with what I was seeing there. 

So I decided to look more deeply into how young people were actually doing politics. Even in this repressive regime, young people were finding really creative means of getting together, discussing issues that mattered to them, and finding ways to push for change. Oftentimes when we say “political participation,” we think of democratic norms and ideals where young people and others participate freely without fear of repression. So we tend to focus a lot, in political science and communication literature, for instance, on public displays of political action and public modes of participation such as participating in public protests or marches. 

What I discovered in my research is that young people, especially those in repressive regimes as well as those from marginalized communities in the U.S. and Canada, experience higher levels of surveillance and other forms of repression. At the same time, they experiment with creative means of engaging in politics that go beyond public displays of action. I found alternative means of participation like communicating using coded words and images, using art and games to mobilize people, sharing secret social media posts, building hidden networks, and running anonymous meme groups…All these under-the-radar ways of participating in politics are often hidden from our eyes, which are attuned to the public displays of participation. I found, for instance, young people using the virtual reality game, Pokémon Go, to do politics. 

So yeah, adult conceptions of political participation do not match up perfectly with young people's conceptions of political participation. I think that was part of what initially attracted me to this research—to get a real understanding of how young people are actually participating, which may not be so obvious at the first glance. 

Are there any particular stories – you mentioned that people are using Pokémon Go – or any surprises, unexpected cases or stories that left a deep impression on you in your studies of youth activists? 

Based on literature, I initially went in thinking that young people were politically disengaged. In Cambodia, I sat down with youth activists, and they showed me all these, what seemed like holiday photos on a beach getaway—young people grilling fish on the beach, or just hanging out on hammocks and things like that. And as I had conversations with them, I realized that these were actually sites of corruption where the government and corporations were carrying out environmental corruption.  

Environmental activism tends to be a high-risk category of activism in Cambodia, and there's so much political contention and government corruption around natural resource allocation. Young people were actually doing group site visits to these places where environmental destruction was going on, documenting it, and disseminating images widely through social media. It's not evident to you as an outsider, when you first look at these pictures, that they have political meanings. Young people look at these photos and understand that they have hidden layers of meaning. What usually ends up happening is that their friends will approach them offline to start conversations about these photos, and that's how a lot of political conversations and mobilization take place—behind the scenes and under the radar. 

So that's just one example of how young people engage in this kind of secret, under-the-radar communication to get their messages across to mobilize their peer groups and advocate for different issues. And that was a surprising moment for me, when I realized that there’s a lot going on, even though on the surface level, it didn’t look like politics. As you talk to young people, you realize the hidden meanings behind images, texts, and other types of communication that they engage in. And that's the cool thing about researching young people: they are usually early adopters and are always at the cutting-edge of adopting new technologies and trying them out. Although their experimentation and innovations are usually not recognized or compensated for by big tech companies, a lot of unrecognized hidden labor takes place among youth. It's really fascinating to think about what sort of labor gets recognized, paid, rewarded, and coded as innovation. A lot of these things that young people do get coded as play and not recognized as innovation or labor. 

You research youth activism across cultural and political contexts. Do you feel like technology plays a different role depending on these contexts, in terms of public and civic engagement—beyond the obvious fact that there are certain countries where you can't go on the streets, or you're exposed to more risks for engaging in certain actions? 

Yeah, that's a really great question. I think we do see a lot of cultural variations just because cultural practices are very different depending on where you are. So even if you're using the same digital platform, people create new cultural practices, and innovate on how they deploy these technologies to advance the civic goals that they're interested in. The big divide in my research was, presumably, authoritarian versus democratic. The political norms in those countries are very, very different, and the ways in which people participate consequently end up looking very different. 

That said, I think a lot of existing research on young people and technology has sort of largely echoed the experiences and concerns of white, middle-class youth in advanced democracies, such as the U.S. and other Western European countries. Part of what I was really trying to do was to flip the lens and try to center these so-called "margins" – but not really margins, because these are also places where a lot of innovations happen. When we think about technology, we tend to associate the U.S. and other Western democracies with innovation, but a lot of innovations are actually taking place in the margins, and a lot of what we see as technological innovations actually start in the margins. 

So I think your question about culture is a very important one. It's really important to acknowledge the role of different cultural, political, and social contexts and how these technologies actually get used by youth and other community members.  

I'd say the thing about young people is that there's also a lot of cross-cultural, transnational flow of political tactics. Because of cosmopolitan youth cultures, there are certain shared characteristics, like memes and trends on social media across different countries. There are a lot of unique aspects and dimensions to how social media get used by young people in local contexts, but there are also a lot of commonalities in that these different youth movements will often learn and adapt political tactics from each other across borders. Youth Climate Strike, for example, is a transnational movement. You will also see young people adapting and appropriating tactics from other cultures to their own cultures to address the issues that matter to them. I'd say there are multi-directional flows. There are unique dimensions to each country, but each local community is also connected to larger cosmopolitan cultures. If you think about pop culture, like BTS, how memes get remixed for instance, and tactics get reused…So, yeah, it's a really fun and important topic to explore. 

Interviewer 

Maggie Chen is a researcher and designer interested in the impact of technologies on our public and private lives, especially on personal identities and social relationships. During the summer of 2023, Maggie interned with the Berkman Klein Center’s metaLAB team.