I will be the keynote speaker and also be presenting a workshop at the Every Victim Matters: Understanding the Impact of CyberViolence on Youth Conference in April.

It’s being put on by the Saffron Centre, which offers therapy and assessment for young people dealing with all kinds of mental health issues.

For my keynote, I’ll be talking about Peep Culture and its potential relationship to cyberbullying. I’ll look at how easy it is for us to depersonalize other human beings in the course of using their lives for our entertainment, and how teens are particularly susceptible to becoming victims in the age of Peep.

For my workshop, I’ll explore strategies that I’ve used to introduce pop culture to young people and get them to think critically about how pop culture works and how they can ‘take back’ pop culture to make positive changes in their live and communities.

Teaching Kids to Take Back Pop Culture: Many ideas about violence, sexuality, bullying, and body image emerge from a mainstream pop culture that is all too pervasive in our society. In this workshop, based on his award-winning book The Big Book of DIY Pop Culture: A How To Guide for Young Artists, Hal Niedzviecki will explain the importance of teaching students to think critically about pop culture. He will take participants through the kinds of presentations he's done with young people over the years and share his best techniques to initiate a discussion about pop culture. Hal will explore how workshops on pop culture for young people can address myriad social issues and have a lasting impact on young people thereby gaining a better understanding of the media environment they live in, and how they can use the mass media to create compelling, truthful and important representations of everyday life in their communities. Presenter: Hal Niedzviecki, Author - Thursday