What does it mean to understand and add to the world through the arts?
How can knowledge be constructed, thought about and shared by making, hacking, breaking rules, telling stories and playing?
What happens when children are allowed to do the same?
In her inaugural lecture, Dylan will showcase a portfolio of research that leverages hybrid arts practices to explore, alongside children, their relationships with digital technologies – including video games, augmented and virtual reality, and AI. She will also highlight collaborative design processes that empower children to shape more hopeful futures for technology use, prioritising their perspectives over adult-driven agendas. These initiatives span interventions in child health, educational content, and entertainment, influencing the development of TV programming, apps, and toys.
On the surface, these projects contain superficial stories and play, but the research also highlights deeper concerns and aspirations children have for technologies, education and the wellbeing of themselves and the natural environment. In turn, this leads to a call to rethink the importance of art in the lives of children, which, among other things, can allow them to critically engage with politically driven systems that bring about many of the issues they care about. Specifically, how Big Tech's neoliberal agendas support oppressive, narrow educational experiences as well as climate destruction through their constant extraction from the Earth, fuelling both the climate crisis and children's climate anxiety.
