JOCELYN WILLIAMS EDUCATOR
AN UNBROKEN RESEARCH NARRATIVE.
I’m a well-established researcher having begun publishing out of a large quantitative project I initiated in 1998 (Williams & Sligo, 1999) with my then Masters lecturer, progressing straight into a large masters thesis using qualitative methods at community and family level, set broadly within the field of the sociology of knowledge, followed immediately by another grassroots community project. This early, thorough apprenticeship instilled in me a passion for research that has real meaning and impact in people’s lives, as well as learning the skills and discipline of soundly conducted research. By this point, I was ready - it was time to prove myself in doctoral research. Around 2000 as I completed my Masters and then stood on the stage in 2001 to be “capped” beside someone in their doctoral robes, I wanted to be in her shoes. I decided that day.
I had been thinking about progressing from “knowledge gap hypothesis” and “information poverty” research where I'd begun, to the thing the world had begun to talk about in 1996 when “The Internet” was new, it was a phenomenon, whose impact was barely beginning to be understood, and President Bill Clinton and his VP Al Gore starting using a new metaphor: “the Digital Divide”. Did it exist? How is it defined and understood? What impact would it have? Should we be worried? How can the Digital Divide be addressed? The Digital DIvide is a natural progression, in technological form, of the existence of unequal access to information which had been the bedrock of my earlier work. I began writing a proposal in 2001, gaining ethics approval and officially enrolling in early 2003. Completion of this complex longitudinal study in several communities using mainly qualitative methods, conducted part-time while in full time employment at Unitec, marks an important milestone in my professional life. It marks the achievement of a level of maturity in the conduct of social research, a level of mastery in managing and interpreting complex data, and the crystallisation of commitment to further intense focus in my research on the relationship between evolving media and the dynamics of community belonging. This is a broad landscape of endless fascination and importance. The thesis, viewable by clicking the image below, is in this context merely a signpost, with a long road stretching beyond it.
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THE RESEARCH NARRATIVE
Looking back from 2016, for 15 years the narrative of my research has been the internet and society. To find the localities and people with whom I would engage to conduct the PhD research, it just so happens that I worked in school settings where the Computers in Homes programme had begun to operate in the early 2000s. However the beating heart of the PhD study and my subsequent work is community building (what makes for a cohesive community?) and the role played by media and the early adoption of technologies by opinion leaders (communicators who lead and mobilise others) in driving social cohesion. A description of this field of research and practice (for it is both) is Community Informatics – essentially, community building through practical applications of digital technologies. During my PhD years (2002 – 2008), these ideas flared out from the copious debates and research around the now quaint-sounding “internet”. The Digital Divide was the first symptom of the disruption we talk about now. Currently, my research interests are broadly “the digital” and society, including the internet as a technology of connectedness but also digital media forms as they are evolving, converging, and impacting on communication behaviours.
Thus there is a coherence to my research projects and their outcomes that points like a beam of light into the future. The Living Community project, one recent 'node' or chapter in the flow of narrative, with its research (Williams, 2015), student learning (Williams, 2014) and collaboration objectives (Williams, 2016), as well as the broadcast TV series outputs (Williams et al., 2014) and community building outcomes (Williams, 2017) is just one prolific project that has taken me further in the community-building direction in the last couple of years. Yet almost everything I’ve done is part of a larger narrative about information and technology access, the implications of this for society and social justice, and modeling solutions. I’m about communication (as a process, practice and ethical position) enabling society, and my work across research, practice and teaching is about helping equip others to make effective use of communication and its myriad technologies for a more just and sustainable world. Below is one of many examples of published pieces that speak to this important research mission (click the image):
