| 11:00 Coffee Break | |
| 11:30 Welcome | |
| HRS | Opening by the research platform heads Susanne Reichl & Ute Smit |
| 12:00 Thematic session #1 | |
| HRS | Thematic session: "Beyond the Screen - What Games Teach Us About Navigating Digitality" |
| Georg Wendt: "A Critical Video Game Literacy for the EFL Classroom" (abstract) | |
| Petra Weixelbraun & Barbara Göbl: "A Practical Exploration of Constructionist, Game-Based Learning for Digital Literacy" (abstract) | |
| 13:30 Lunch Break | |
| 14:30 Keynote | |
| HRS | Jolien Trekels: "Social Context in Adolescents’ Resilient Digital Media Use" (abstract) |
| 15:30 Coffee Break | |
| 16:00 Thematic session #2 | |
| HRS | Thematic session: "Approaching Critical Media Literacy" |
| Kansu Ekin Tanca: "Connection unstable: Youth, Human Rights, and Critical Media Literacy" (abstract) | |
| Andrea Heisse, Michaela Pfadenhauer & Marvin Waibel: "Creative explorations of interaction with AI companions" (abstract) | |
| Elisabeth Lechner: "Teaching Critical Media Literacy via Body Politics" (abstract) | |
| 17:30 Panel discussion & closing | |
| HRS | Petra Herczeg, Barbara Schober & Matthias Leichtfried: "Alles bleibt anders: 7 Jahre #YML-Forschung" |
| 19:00 Party & disco | |
Abstracts
A Critical Video Game Literacy for the EFL Classroom
Over the last two decades the Austrian Ministry of Education has met the educational need for media literacies through various ordinances, culminating in 2022 in the creation of a mandatory subject for secondary schools on digital education. The subject addresses data literacy, digital literacy, and computational thinking, but barely considers video games, a primary medium for kids and teenagers. While many young people develop a high operational literacy of video games (i.e., they can ‘read’ what is displayed during play and react accordingly), there are few formal means to foster the same critical literacy that they develop for print literature in the literature classroom.
This contribution investigates how (critical) digital literacy is conceptualized in academia, curricula and reference frameworks in the year 2025 and contrasts these findings with the demands of two ludic-literary works of fiction: the 2017 video game Butterfly Soup (Brianna Lei) and the 2019 video game Eliza (Zachtronics). The two video games explore social issues in an interactive, explorative and multimodal nature, with the former’s concern on LGBTQ+ themes and racism in a coming-of-age high school setting and the latter’s focus on complex representations of AI and tech work. To engage with these works in EFL classroom settings critically then necessitates a literacy that is both more akin to critical consciousness rather than critical thinking, but also considerate of video games’ media specificity. My ongoing research on (critical) video game literacy aims to answer that demand.
A Practical Exploration of Constructionist, Game-Based Learning for Digital Literacy
The workshop will explore how digital games can serve as a scaffold for constructionist learning and offer related insights from the Serious Game Changers project. This project investigated innovative approaches to game-based learning and developed educational materials for digital literacy in collaboration with Viennese students. Building on project outcomes, participants will have the opportunity to test and discuss a practical example of how digital games can enhance various aspects of digital literacy – both during gameplay and through subsequent creative, game-inspired work with digital media. This approach shifts the focus from learning solely through play to learning through design, embodying the core principles of constructionist learning.
Social Context in Adolescents’ Resilient Digital Media Use
Conflicting research indicates that digital media can enhance users’ lives in some cases (e.g., fostering social connectedness) while creating challenges in others (e.g., inducing stress or exclusion). This underscores the importance of media literacy in helping individuals critically navigate the digital landscape and develop strategies for positive engagement. Such “resilient” digital media use refers to an individual's ability to interact online while preserving emotional well-being, mental health, and a balanced sense of self. It involves recognizing harmful interactions, fostering positive experiences, and practicing adaptive engagement behaviors (e.g., self-regulation, mindful disconnection). Media literacy equips youth with the skills to assess digital content, understand platform influences, and critically reflect on online experiences. However, given individual variation in digital media effects, there seem to exist critical boundary conditions for resilient digital media use. By examining individual (e.g., neurological sensitivity to social context), social (e.g., peer dynamics), and platform-specific (e.g., algorithmic design) determinants of adolescents’ digital media use, we can uncover why some thrive while others struggle. Understanding these factors is key to developing interventions that promote resilience and digital well-being. This talk will highlight the importance of social context in understanding digital media effects and in promoting resilient digital media use and digital media literacy. By empowering youth with the knowledge and skills to navigate digital spaces effectively, we can enhance their well-being and help them leverage media for personal and social development.
Connection unstable: Youth, Human Rights, and Critical Media Literacy
Youth (aged 18-24) in Europe can be considered as one the groups that benefit the most from the digital environment as well as one of the groups most affected by its challenges. While the structures individuals use, navigate, create, shape or through which they communicate, may facilitate exercise of human rights (e.g. right to information, right to assembly), it may also give rise to human rights violations (e.g. right to privacy, right to freedom of expression). As a pedagogical framework, critical media literacy can offer valuable tools for youth to critically reflect on the opportunities and challenges arising in the digital environment, by claiming a human-rights based approach itself. The presentation will examine various ways that connect critical media literacy to human rights in literature and the implications of these connections on youth. It will further explore the extent to which these approaches resonate with youth’s lived experiences, by drawing on youth voices collected through a series of workshops.
Creative explorations of interaction with AI companions
The hype around AI (Hepp et. al 2023) has led to the widespread availability of artificial intelligence transforming working practices, knowledge production, interactions as well as relationships, and, most important, societal communication. One vital aspect is the adaptation of technologies for the personal sphere and users’ creative appropriation of new technological advancements. Most users’ initial interactions with AI tools like ChatGPT can be described as playful, experimental and creatively exploratory. What does it comprehend? How does it react? What are its limitations? Users pose metaphysical questions, insult the AI, or ask it to invent words or images. On the one hand, these questions probe its capabilities and limitations; on the other hand, these questions examine new frames of interaction. Does it (really) understand me? How does it respond to and engage with me? How do its constraints compare with human cognitive abilities? Therefore, these questions circle around the challenge of how we can interact with AI? In our studies of AI companions such as Replika, we observe ourselves employing similar non-standardized practices to understand these emerging forms of interaction and relationships. Translating classic interactionist methodologies to AI companion research touches on the boundary between interpretive and reconstructive research on the one hand and experimental research on the other. As researchers appear to oscillate between “playing along” in interactions with artificial companions and deliberately disrupting these engagements— in an effort to grasp the evolving patterns of communication and interaction between humans and AI. AI companions present a unique research object that requires ethnographic inquiry, openness, adaptability, and creative improvisation— an approach that somewhat contradicts methodological rigour. We argue that researching AI companions requires creatively arranging diverse interaction sequences to analyze these emerging communicative patterns. Classic interaction studies have employed various methodological approaches to observe and interpret subjective and social meaning-making within communicative dyads. However, the automation of communication has disrupted this continuum. AI companions, such as Replika, offer customized features and adapt to their users, making the study of interaction and relationships inherently dynamic. Consequently, reflexive research approaches are essential. At the #YML Closing Symposium we will discuss our creative explorations of interaction and relationship possibilities and their unique methodological challenges. The contributors are members of the FOR 5656 ComAI research group P7 ( P7 | Personal sphere: Companionship and ComAI - Communicative Artificial Intelligence (ComAI)), which investigates the emergence of artificial companionship-apps (e.g., Replika, Nomi.ai, Paradot) in the personal sphere corresponding to the changing nature of companionship in the twenty-first century.
Teaching Critical Media Literacy via Body Politics
If - in the vein of Kellner and Share (2019) - we understand critical media literacy as "the practice of critically analyzing media texts and institutions with emphasis on the relationship between power and knowledge, specifically in relation to issues of inequalities in access, representation, and economics" (Kist 8), trying to find ways of teaching "the new literacies of this century" (Kist 9), it is not hard to imagine body politics as the ideal practical playground for this endeavour.
In times of resurgent right-wing radicalism, gender retraditionalization and militarization, amid the mainstreaming of AI output across digital platforms, beauty pressure has increased across the gender spectrum as a means of control and driving up profit margins, but especially for women, whose bodies come to be a stand-in for "the good life", i.e. a life situated safely in the heteronormative sphere of reproduction and (unpaid) labours of love. Skinny is back, screen time is up and teen subjectivities are formed and negotiated in complex, contradictory human-technological assemblages related to varied forms of lookist discrimination. Based on my experience in teaching critical media analysis classes at the department of English and American Studies at the University of Vienna as well as my new role as ÖAD Wissenschaftsbotschafterin in Austrian schools, in my contribution, I will explore the potentials and challenges of teaching critical media literacy via body politics using examples from workshops.