Above all, I want to thank the high school students who opened up their lives to me and made this book possible. I also want to thank the teachers for opening up their classrooms and the parents and grandparents for opening up their homes. I wish I could thank all of you by name, because you deserve more credit than I publicly can give to you. You are the reason this book is here, and I will forever be grateful for your willingness to share your lives with me and for your commitment to this project. Thank you—we all have much to learn from the experiences and perspectives that you shared.
Importantly, I want to thank my advisor, Craig Watkins, for developing this project and allowing me the privilege to be a part of it. Thank you for being a dedicated mentor and teaching me how to respectfully research the lives of youth with awareness and care. I owe a big thanks to the entire Digital Edge team as co-collaborators of this research. Your insights were a priceless part of this project. Thank you Alex Cho, Vivian Shaw, Jennifer Noble, Andres Lombana Bermudez, and Adam Williams. Our times together at FHS were some of my most valuable experiences in grad school. And thank you Lauren Weinzimmer for carefully helping code our hundreds of transcripts.
I had the privilege of incredible mentors and advisors at the University of Texas who indirectly contributed to this project and directly contributed to my approach as a youth ethnographer and scholar. Mary Kearney, thank you for teaching me how to practice and teach my feminist values, which have influenced this book and all of my research. Joe Straubhaar, your ethnography course offered much-needed guidance on how to conduct ethnographic research, how to take effective field notes, and how to code and interpret hours of transcriptions. Laura Stein and Shayla Thiel-Stern you both provided valuable feedback on the earliest iterations of what developed into several chapters of the book.
Thank you to Henry Jenkins, Julian Sefton-Green, and Alan Albarran for reading drafts of the proposal and offering valuable advice when the manuscript was still in its infancy stage. To my colleagues at the University of North Texas, thank you Jordan Frith for keeping me sane over local libations and offering support along the way. I want to thank my chair, Eugene Martin, for supporting my research and providing time at the end for me to complete the manuscript.
To members of the CLRN team, thank you for allowing me to participate in your meetings and for your dedication to mentoring junior scholars. I especially want to thank Mimi Ito, Sonia Livingstone, Juliet Schor, and Kris Gutiérrez for feedback on early ideas for these chapters and for overall advice that shaped this project in many ways. Also a big shoutout to Amanda Wortman for supporting the network and being a great Twitter buddy.
The anonymous reviewers of the manuscript provided me with great advice and made the book much stronger than it otherwise would have been. I wish I could thank them in person for their kind support and careful critiques. They helped me develop as a writer, and I am appreciative of their time and suggestions. Susan Buckley, my editor at MIT, thank you for your enthusiasm for this project from the beginning and for helping me turn it into the book it is.
Lastly, thank you to my parents, Michael and Deb, for your unwavering support and confidence in all my dreams, and to my supportive family, including my sister Jen and my niece Brooklyn (who can always, without exception, make me smile). To Sharon, Ricky and Allison, and all seven of your amazing kids – thank you for the ongoing encouragement. And to my husband, Joshua, thanks for putting up with far too many all-nighters and stressed-out weekends and obsessive, rambling think-out-loud sessions. You are my perfect partner, even if you can’t make me a salmon dinner. This is finally done, now let’s hop on a plane and go celebrate.
This book is based on the Digital Edge research project, which was supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation as part of the Connected Learning Research Network, based at the University of California at Irvine. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in the book are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the MacArthur Foundation or the University of California.