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JAAKLAC Community | Activating topics that motivate us

03.07.2024 | Authors: Soledad Magnone, Shéridan Medina, Edda Forero and Ana Arias

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We closed 2023 with the constant question of what is JAAKLAC, what is its contribution, and how do we collectively move forward in Critical Digital Education and youth participation in the digital age. Thus emerged the Intentions 2024 mapping themes and methodologies to Keep, Change and Try. These are explored together with the JAAKLAC Community, starting with a mainly Latin American group, and acting with values and needs that move us.

The Community currently gathers 12 referents of activism, research, education, gender, languages and technologies, among others. We represent Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Finland, France, Colombia, Costa Rica, Lebanon, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay. Since January of this year, we have been meeting every fortnight to devise and materialise projects, apply for funding, participate in events, and get feedback from different perspectives.

In this blog we share the progress of the Community’s projects on common passions such as cyberactivism for the right to decide, games to imagine digital utopias, and the promotion of digital wellbeing among young people. We are looking for different supports to carry on and strengthen the coordination and implementation of our Community projects.

Tools for Digital Advocacy for the Right to Decide from critical pedagogy [by Shéridan Medina].

The objective is to generate exchanges and learning regarding the defence of the right to decide and access to abortion in the digital space in Latin America. This initiative has 2 modules: (1) workshop on narratives and counter-narratives on the right to decide in the face of anti-rights discourses in the digital sphere; and (2) pedagogical tools for trainers: discussing concepts such as dialogical learning, critical didactics, and the socio-critical approach, among others.

The modules are built on a pedagogical theoretical framework to design training initiatives. The workshops will address the dialogic methodology as an alternative for horizontal and participatory training processes. Finally, it offers tools for the design of activities and invites participants to try out their own proposals based on what they have learned throughout the module.

This initiative aims to contribute to the transformation of the internet as a space for citizen action. It strengthens critical skills and capacities regarding equal access to the internet, freedom of expression, privacy and protest. These are fundamental rights to ensure safe digital activism. The initiative also aims to develop skills in the design and facilitation of robust learning spaces. In this way, we build meaningful learning that will in turn have an impact on strengthening activisms and their reach in regional processes of advocacy for the right to decide.

Kelluwün! Digital Utopias: Join the multiverse to recode the world [by Edda Forero, Aze and Candy Rodríguez].

Kelluwün! Digital Utopias is a game that tests your knowledge and allows you to see reality from different perspectives. Kelluwün (“collaboration” in Mapudungun) is an educational tool that develops key skills to face the challenges of today’s digital world. By collaborating and reflecting, participants will overcome obstacles and achieve common goals.

We want to continue designing Kelluwün with young people from Latin America. Its collective design is based on decentralising the way we do and think about things, combining different elements and contexts to understand a reality or a concept. This game is a bricolage that brings together different ideas to collaborate, create and grow to respond to the new world order of the primacy of the digital.

For its new iteration we will include social media trivia, Artificial Intelligence, podcasts, data and other resources created by different organisations in the region. We will include different themes from the digital rights region, such as gender, children, migration, and digital security. We want to strengthen the structure of the game and redesign the board, we are looking for new ideas.

Connected and balanced: Managing my emotions in the digital age [by Anita Arias].

The aim is to foster the integral development of adolescents and young people through emotional awareness and self-care to face digital challenges in a healthy and constructive way. This is an educational, participatory and critical programme that promotes the establishment of digital boundaries, strengthening coping and thus facilitating emotional well-being.

Through a step-by-step plan we explore the issues and move through a series of activities. We learn from diverse thinking and strategies for self-care and emotional wellbeing in collaboration with activists and communicators. Critical education is fostered as a group, in a back and forth and circular way. We explore dynamics of participatory action, through techniques of expression, art therapy, and conscious breathing exercises. This seeks in a practical way to provide a safe and liberating space for those who participate.

This initiative is implemented by JAAKLAC and Conexión Educativa, primarily by applying for funding, seeking resources to carry it out and receiving feedback. This work builds on Conexión Educativa’s research conducted in Latin America to understand the realities of activists, human rights defenders and digital rights defenders around emotional wellbeing and individual and collective care in the home. The study is open to contributions by completing the short survey included in the article with more information.

Activate our Community!

  • Follow the news of these and other community projects on our networks Mastodon, Twitter, Instagram, Anchor Podcast and LinkedIn.
  • Support the projects with funding, technological support, by participating in the actions or by spreading the word.
  • Write to us at jallalla (at) jaaklac (dot) org