Youth, social cohesion and digital life: From risk and resilience to a global digital citizenship approach

Abstract

Cultural diversity and the digital have been identified as among the most important megatrends facing young Australians in current times. These challenges have been addressed primarily through a siloed risk/protection approach, with research and policy/programme formulation focusing on either social cohesion in the ‘offline’ world, particularly risks/protective factors for those identified as culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) youth; or digital risks/protective factors regarding cyber-safety for mainstream youth. This article contributes to scholarship that bridges the gap between social cohesion and the digital in youth research and policy agendas. Moving beyond the dominant focus on the psychosocial, we propose a sociologically informed, global digital citizenship framework for theorising and analysing social cohesion in relation to young people’s digital practices as a foundation for this agenda.