Kath Albury: "Digital sexual health - from literacies to capabilities"
This is a hybrid event. Please register on Eventbrite to receive a Zoom link.
Digital literacy education is often proposed as a panacea for a range of everyday sexual health and wellbeing concerns - from 'safe sexting' and dating app use, to consent education. Sexual health workforces, too, are increasingly required to adopt data-driven digital technologies and practices (sometimes referred to as eHealth or mHealth) to undertake core activities such as clinical service provision, health promotion, education and outreach, reporting and quality assurance. This presentation draws on preliminary findings of sociotechnical research investigating the intersection of sexual health, digital literacy, and data literacy. It uses interviews with sexual health researchers and practitioners, and the findings of a narrative literature review, to identify current limitations in sexual health research addressing “digital literacy for sexual health.” Current 'digital health literacy' discourse tends to frame literacy in terms of individual deficit - and exclude the digital and data literacies of health workforces from consideration. I propose alternative (and less morally loaded) frameworks of digital and data capability for sexual health, building on recent participatory research with members of the not-for-profit workforce. This 'capabilities approach' attends to the complexities of digital health practice, while remaining mindful of the social and political factors that are critical to sexual health and wellbeing.
About the speaker: Kath Albury is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow, leading the 'Digital and data capabilities for sexual health ' project. She is also an Associate Investigator in the Swinburne University of Technology Node of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. She is a Chief Investigator on the Swedish/Australian collaboration 'Digital sexual health: Designing for safety, pleasure and wellbeing in LGBTQ+ communities'. Kath's past projects investigated young people’s practices of digital self-representation, and the role of user-generated media (including social networking platforms and dating apps) in young people’s formal and informal sexual learning, safety and wellbeing practices. Her recent co-authored books include Everyday Data Cultures (with Jean Burgess, Anthony McCosker and Rowan Wilken, Polity 2022) and Data for Social Good: Non-Profit Sector Data Projects (with Jane Farmer, Anthony McCosker and Amir Aryani, Palgrave Macmillan Open Access 2023).
This talk is presented in partnership with the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies (IGSF), the Disrupting Disruptions: Feminist and Accessible Publishing, Communications, and Technologies speaker and workshop series, and Concordia University’s DIGS Lab.