Twitter Wars & Culture Wars: Teens, Tolerance and the Anti-Bullying Era

This talk draws from two school years of live and digital ethnography at a rural high school in the Northeast to examine how youth and adults put anti-bullying into practice. Dr. Sarah Miller finds that while bullying is routinely about the regulation of gender, sexual, racial and class-based inequalities present in U.S. culture, adults’ anti-bullying strategies largely ignore the role of inequality in youth conflict, and instead individualize bullying and emphasize tolerance. She argues that this approach is an ill-equipped response– without addressing inequality, anti-bullying policies can be just as easily used to protect as they can to police harassment. Instead, she finds that youth are more effective at responding to bullying through their own strategies, using social media as a site to engage in resistance, recognition, and diversity education.