Emma Harden-Wolfson

What do you get if you combine an uptick in the scale and frequency of intractable global issues, care for student agency, expertise in Central Asia, and an interest in exploring visual research methods?

The answer – fortunately – is not a joke!

Even better, it’s a new article by me and Dr Dana Abdrasheva (bet you didn’t see that one coming).

Called Me and the world: A methodological exploration of university students’ perspectives on global issues through cellphilms, our article reports on workshops we carried out in Kazakhstan with university students (the Gen Z in question) to find out which global issues they are most concerned about and to understand how they interpret these pressing challenges in their own contexts and based on their ways of seeing/thinking about the world.

We worked with 50 students at two universities to learn more about their perspectives on global issues, provide training in making cellphilms (short educational/informational films typically made on a cell/mobile phone), and then to support them to make their own cellphilm. We then held a cellphilm screening and created space for students to discuss the cellphilms.

We chose to work in the setting of Kazakhstan for a number of reasons, but thinking specifically about the Gen Z group of students meant we could, as we say in the article, ‘open windows into a group whose identities and perceptions are shaped spatially within the geography of the ex-Soviet space but as citizens connected to the world, and temporally as one of the first generations never to have experienced Soviet rule firsthand yet who continue to live with its imprints’ (p.5).

We believe that this the first study to deploy the cellphilm method in Kazakhstan. Feedback from student participants and faculty who observed us suggest that both the method and the topic were of high interest, which matches our experiences as facilitators/researchers.

By far the biggest concerns students had about global issues relate to war and conflict on the one hand, and environmental issues and climate change on the other hand.

This matches the main issues that also worry their global Gen Z peers. In turn, this tell us a lot about:

• the important mediating role the internet plays in making information available.
• the massive reach of technology in facilitating access to the internet.
• the inescapability of the global challenges that define the era in which this generation is coming of age.

Working in small groups, students made cellphilms about natural disasters (floods, global warming, and litter), corruption, vandalism, gender and ethnic inequalities, and cybersecurity. They covered a lot of ground! We describe the content of the cellphilms in more detail in the article.

From our study, we found that using visual methods like cellphilms can actively engage students from both pedagogical and content-related perspectives.

• As a teaching tool, cellphilms play to students’ strengths, given that most are very well-versed in social media and the short film format.
• By centring students’ perspectives, cellphilming is an opportunity for students to voice their opinions and construct a point of view.

Rakhmet bolshoi (as Dana likes to say) to all our brilliant student participants, to the faculty and staff behind the scenes at both universities who helped make the workshops happen, and to the Kazakhstan government for funding the project.

Here’s a direct link to the article, so please like and share (as the kids almost certainly don’t say any more): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0883035525002812

Happy reading!