11.03.2024 | Authors: Soledad Magnone
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JAAKLAC emerged in November 2020 to research and advocate on Critical Digital Education (CDE), especially broadening participation from Latin America and the Majority World. JAAKLAC is a non-formal organisation mainly based on time-limited projects and the voluntary work of youth, teachers, activists and artists, among others. The initiative began by seeking to connect my academic studies in Europe with practical solutions, in Uruguay and Latin America, at the intersections between education, digital technologies and human rights.
The JAAKLAC initiative began by reflecting on digital agendas and the role of digital education for greater critical consciousness and participatory democracies. These beginnings were iterated into collective actions co-designing resources and CDE practices based on dialogue and Participatory Action Research. The results have been accompanied by open sharing of the collaborative process in different multimedia formats, accessible for creation and access, to broaden the community of practice.
The importance of this approach in CDE was anchored in the deepening social inequalities and effects on the proliferation of social movements, in Latin America and globally. In this period, the role of digital technologies in facilitating and constraining a broad spectrum of human rights became even more evident. At the same time, the brutal digital acceleration of COVID-19 was the right time to innovate in creating alternatives in education to repair flaws in the dominant models.
Share, Learn and Do!
JAAKLAC emerged together with Causas Digitales, a project dedicated to the Convention on the Rights of the Child and digital technologies. Thus, we established a youth group co-coordinating projects that has been sustained and varied over time. The participation of adolescents and young people has been personal and also mediated by educational centres and youth organisations. We have involved this participation in projects from their design, the search for funds, the implementation of activities, and their evaluation. Causas Digitales has counted on the constant participation of Azeneth García, Edda Forero and David Aragort.
To date, the initiative has materialised proposals connecting different perspectives across generations, disciplines, sectors and geographies, such as: Critical Digital Education for All, Lingua Café, Saga Detox de Datos Latine, No Minor Futures, Digital Human Rights in the Caribbean, Digital Comprehensive Sexuality Education, Glocal Mesh LAC, and Causas Digitales. These have been supported by and in collaboration with RedCon Causa, LACNIC, Derechos Digitales, Tactical Tech, Mozilla Festival, Mozilla Foundation, AfroCrowd, Wikimedians of the Caribbean, Team CommUNITY, RightsCon and Access Now Latinoamérica, among others.
New beginnings
In 2024, we want to design the Future JAAKLAC from broader perspectives and in sync with the reality of groups generally excluded from digital agendas. For this we designed the JAAKLAC Community to (a) discuss the purpose, governance, activities and sustainability of JAAKLAC; and (b) materialise an editathon of projects, for different people and groups to start or strengthen actions in CDE by and for their different communities. We started openly inviting to dialogue in asynchronous monthly and bi-weekly meetings and activities with a Latin American group. We are making the road by walking!
This year we set ourselves Intentions built in retrospect and contributing to issues that are close to our hearts. Thus I identified the following thematic areas or projects to maintain, change and try. These intentions are being iterated with the JAAKLAC Community and with whom we will create future intentions:
Keep
+ Critical Digital Education for all: bridging gaps between digital rights, educators and youth with collaborative campaign to generate conversation around the right to a quality education in the digital age.
+ Lingua Café: experimenting with spaces for language inclusion and digital rights while promoting intercultural skills and research on advances and drawbacks of the digital age to materialise a language inclusive world.
Change
+ Digital Causes: a youth group co coordinating JAAKLAC’s projects since the start. We aim at establishing a cohort of schools and civil society organisations designing together and assessing JAAKLAC’s activities to activate fairer futures centred our younger generations.
+ Tech and Biodiversity: Legado 2060: starting at MozFest 2023, this project began cocreating a Sci-Fi telenovela (soap opera) about the drama between the characters Politics, Society and Economy. The story brings about a happily ever after between Tech and Biodiversity.
Try
+ Migration, post colonialism and academia: ethnographic research showcasing oppressive systems and emancipatory tactics of digital rights activists from the Majority World pursuing studies in European higher education.
+ Narratives of love about New Masculinities in digital rights advocacy: multi-media composition of stories from women and LGBTQI+ digital rights activists foregrounding men contesting patriarchal domination and rooted on solidarity.
Are you up for it?
All these projects are looking for alliances, spaces and funding to continue designing them, materialising them and expanding participation in the design of fairer digital societies.
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Join the JAAKLAC Community
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Spread the word about our actions #EducacionDigital #DigitalEducation @jaaklac on Mastodon, Twitter, Instagram and Anchor Podcast
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Write to us at jallalla (at) jaaklac (dot) org
Photo: Unsplash Ilse Orsel https://unsplash.com/@lgtts