On Monday, February 22, APPC’s Annenberg Center for the Advanced Study in Communication (ACASC) held its Spring Youth and Media Colloquium, featuring Vikki Sara Katz, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Communication at Rutgers University. Dr. Katz’s talk — “What children’s media brokering can teach us about digital divides and health disparities: A view from an immigrant community” — drew from data collected in a multi-method exploration of new immigrant Latino families in South Los Angeles to explore the roles that children play as brokers of language, culture, and media for their non-English-speaking parents.According to Dr. Katz, examining how children attempt to make and maintain connections to community resources on behalf of their families—including health care facilities and services—reveals potential linkages between limitations in children’s home-based brokering of media content and constrained access to local health care resources. Discussion focused on the implications of this type of community-based research for policy efforts to address social disparities.
