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Mobile Voices: Participatory Action Research for Mobile Community Among Immigrants in Los Angeles

by Joe Karaganis — last modified 2009-02-26 10:30

Primary Investigators: 

François Bar and Sasha Costanza-Chock, University of Southern California; Raúl Añorve, IDEPSCA;  Amanda Garcés, IDEPSCA

Partnering Organization: 

Mobile Voices, a collaboration between IIDEPSCA image2nstituto de Educacion Popular del Sur de California (IDEPSCA) and the Annenberg Research Network on International Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication, USC 

Mobile Voices is an academic-community partnership to research and design a platform for low-wage immigrants in LA to publish stories about their lives and their communities directly from their mobile phones. This low-cost, open source, customizable, and easy to deploy multimedia mobile storytelling platform will be designed in collaboration with its users, and will help recent immigrants who lack computer access gain greater participation in the digital public sphere.

The research team is studying and documenting participatory approaches to building and deploying low-cost new media, exploring how storytelling helps community building and organizing, and investigating how emerging media tools can best be leveraged to promote digital inclusion and assist marginalized groups. The research outputs will include a case study on participatory technology design; pre and post-study evaluations of communication skills and practices among the community groups; a mobile-customized version of Drupal, a popular free and open source content management system; a free and open source application for low-cost mobile handsets; a systematic review of existing mobile services for organizing and advocacy efforts; a popular education toolkit for grassroots mobile organizing; and a participatory evaluation of the project's impact. This project builds on a Small Grant received from the SSRC in 2006.

 

To learn more about this collaboration, see the SSRC interview with researchers Sasha Costanza-Chock and Amanda Garcés.

See also the mid-term report of the project (2/26/2009).
Voices

Another thing that the Small Grant did that helped us develop the next stage of the project was it allowed us to have something concrete to show and talk to potential allies about what it is we were trying to do. We see that with François and the other students at USC who have now become involved in the project and are playing really important roles in taking the research component a whole stage further.

It allowed us to generate more interest and also to leverage some of the University resources to support it in a way that we never would have been able to do if we just went with our ideas about what it was we wanted to generate and said, ‘We have this vision.’ Having the Small Grant actually enabled us to do the test workshops and develop a plan, and then we had something to bring and show people.

-Sasha Costanza-Chock, Annenberg, USC