Researcher: Khanyisile Yolanda Ntsenge, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
Supervisors: Dr Constance Khupe and Prof. Rod Alence, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
In response to the threat of extinction of indigenous knowledge, there has been a growing number of people, a significant amount of whom are women, interested in the preservation of indigenous knowledge systems who have begun to use social media platforms such as Twitter and YouTube and the indigenous method of storytelling to share indigenous knowledge.
The aim of the study is to understand how the introduction of the social media platforms Twitter and YouTube has changed the community structures for sharing indigenous knowledge in physical versus social media communities.
The research is informed by a postcolonial indigenous and indigenous feminist approach and employs transformative participatory research in its methodology. Indigenous women in physical communities participated in the research while accounts owned by indigenous women on Twitter and YouTube were analysed. A social network analysis was conducted on both the physical communities data and social media data. Sentiment analysis was conducted on the social media data.
The results show that the network of communities while both anchored by indigenous women have different structures. The physical communities were very tight-knit with members of the networks learning and sharing indigenous knowledge amongst each other thereby potentially reinforcing their knowledge. The social media communities were mainly connected only to the main account and members rarely engaged with each other. The sentiment analysis found conversations in the social media networks to be significantly positive with the highest scoring emotion being that of trust.
The research has shown that although women play an important role in the sharing of indigenous knowledge in both physical and online communities, the community network structures differ. It also evidenced that there is a space and appetite for conversations on indigenous knowledge on social media. Furthermore, as they are in physical communities, women continue to be important custodians of indigenous knowledge and are trusted to share credible indigenous knowledge. This presents opportunities for further exploration on how to leverage social media platforms to mainstream indigenous knowledge while amplifying the voices of indigenous women as custodians of indigenous knowledge.
