A Framework for Co-Designing Social Media Literacy Education with Women from Migrant and Refugee Backgrounds: An Education Justice Approach

Abstract

Social media is an integral part of everyday life for women from migrant and refugee backgrounds and is sometimes recognised as a ‘critical lifeline’ enabling access to essential support during settlement. Despite this, Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) women in Australia often have limited and uneven access to critical social media literacy education opportunities, and there remains a lack of in-depth research exploring what CALD women want to learn and how they wish to participate in such educational interventions. Adopting an education justice approach, this article advances a framework for social media literacy education developed with women from refugee backgrounds. The study employed semi-structured interviews and co-design workshops with women from refugee backgrounds, alongside staff from local public libraries and refugee support organisations. The study demonstrates that women from refugee backgrounds primarily use social media for communication and connection, but are also interested in learning how to use these platforms to navigate sexism, racism, and other systemic barriers to settlement. The proposed framework—which can be adopted by public libraries and other grassroots organisations—responds directly to women’s calls for peer-led, value-driven, context-specific, and culturally responsive social media literacy interventions.

1. Introduction

Social media platforms play an important role as ‘critical lifelines’ for Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) women from refugee and migrant backgrounds (Dahya et al., 2020). At the same time, CALD women face persistent inequities in digital access and participation (Bartlett et al., 2026). In Australia, these barriers contribute to uneven digital inclusion—defined as technology access, affordability and ability (Thomas et al., 2021)—with recently arrived refugee women, particularly older women, often reporting lower levels of digital skills than older men (Baganz et al., 2024; Culos et al., 2021; McMahon & Robertson, 2021). These low levels are further compounded by English-language barriers, which increase vulnerability to misinformation, online exploitation and technology-facilitated abuse (eSafety Commissioner, 2019).

Moreover, the digital skill gaps experienced by CALD refugee and migrant women in Australia point to a broader systemic issue resulting from a lack of opportunities for adult media literacy education and a lack of funding support for this from successive Australian governments (Notley et al., 2021; Park et al., 2023). Media literacy is defined as the ability to critically engage with media across everyday contexts and throughout the life course (Notley et al., 2021, 2024). While media literacy frameworks are increasingly applied to social media contexts, scholars argue for the need to develop distinct social media literacy interventions—yet there remains limited empirical research examining how social media literacy is understood, practiced, and learned in everyday life (Livingstone, 2015; Manca et al., 2021). Drawing from Livingstone’s (2014) emphasis on both structural features of platforms and the social dimensions of digitalised life, in this paper we define ‘social media literacy’ as a set of situated, culturally informed and relational practices that support reflective and agentic use of social media platforms in everyday life.

While previous research has found that Australian public libraries have stepped in to address media literacy needs in their communities, some library programs are “not exclusively tailored towards specific communities” (Whiteside et al., 2022, p. 390), which limits their responsiveness to and alignment with the lived experiences and aspirations of specific CALD communities. These limitations need serious attention as the Australian Government has committed $3.8 million to develop a National Media Literacy Strategy co-designed with researchers, educators and communities (Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, 2024). Despite this recognition for the need for a national approach to advance the media literacy of diverse groups and communities in Australia, there remains a lack of in-depth research into migrant and refugee women’s everyday media experiences to meaningfully inform such initiatives.

Drawing on an education justice approach, this paper provides insights from a PhD study on how CALD women from refugee backgrounds engage with social media in everyday life and considers how these insights can inform the co-design of social media literacy education. The study involved semi-structured interviews and workshops with sixteen women from refugee backgrounds (referred to as ‘women participants’ in this paper) living in the Western Sydney region of Australia, alongside staff from public libraries and refugee support organisations who provide a range of social support services for their local communities. This paper draws on this research to contribute to media literacy education, migration studies, and social media studies by foregrounding community-led social media literacy interventions as opportunities to strengthen CALD refugee and migrant women’s agency and overall settlement aspirations and experiences. It also provides timely insights for grassroots organisations and government initiatives seeking to advance CALD women’s social media literacies and digital participation.

Adopting education justice as a critical framework helps understand and explore how educational exclusion and participation are shaped by historical and structural relations of power, rather than by individual deficits or neutral ‘gaps’ (Sriprakash, 2023). For migrant and refugee communities, access to learning that responds to lived experiences—both formal and informal—is often essential for navigating settlement systems, securing safety, and sustaining social and economic wellbeing. Education justice approaches foreground this relationality and collective action, recognising the ways communities already enact agency and learning through informal, culturally grounded practices (Windle, 2025). Central to this approach is ‘epistemic justice’, which draws attention to the injustices of structural oppression and the ways control over knowledge maintains power and the status quo (Balarin & Milligan, 2024). It explicitly challenges the privileging of Western knowledge systems while calling for the recognition of marginalised communities as knowledge holders and co-creators (2024). From this perspective, co-designing education with the oppressed is a core mechanism of addressing (un)intentional power imbalances and cultivating learning opportunities that honour the histories, knowledges and experiences of Indigenous, non-Western and other marginalised communities (Costanza-Chock, 2020).

To ground this study, the following research questions were developed:

• RQ1: How do women from refugee backgrounds engage with social media in their everyday lives?
• RQ2: How can public libraries and refugee support organisations co-design social media literacy education interventions with women to support their social media aspirations?

2. Literature Review

2.1. Media Literacy Education and Social Media Literacy

Media literacy education is widely understood as a practice-based field encompassing pedagogies, concepts, and frameworks that support critical engagement with media across everyday contexts and the life course (De Abreu et al., 2017). In Australia, media educators have often drawn from ‘the British-led key concepts approach’, which employs concepts such as representations, audiences and technologies to invite critical thinking around specific areas of media (Park et al., 2023). While media literacy education can be conceptualised without a specified political agenda, a growing body of scholarship argues that it should be seen as a necessary tool for addressing social justice and equity issues, particularly due to structures of inequality that are inherent in both media and education systems (Mihailidis, 2018; Mihailidis et al., 2021). For example, Mihailidis (2018, p. 11) advances the concept of ‘civic media literacies’, drawing attention to what he describes as a “civic agency gap”. Rather than positioning media literacy as a set of individual skills (such as access, analysis, or evaluation), he reframes it as a value-driven practice that cultivates collective agency and the capacity to act with others toward social change.

At the same time, Neag et al. (2022, p. 5) assert that media literacy concepts emerging from the Global North are rooted in Western structures and knowledge systems, and that there is a need to reflect on whether the conceptual interpretations of media literacy are relevant to people marginalised within or outside Western countries for whom “the West speaks”. Similarly, Ramasubramanian (2023) contends that media literacy pedagogies and practices need to be grounded in the contexts in which they are developed, as approaches that may be effective for one group at a given time may not be appropriate elsewhere.

Building on these critiques, Mihailidis et al. (2025) argue that media literacy initiatives should centre community-oriented care while actively cultivating individual and collective agency. To achieve this, they emphasise that initiatives must be designed with, rather than for, communities—requiring educators and practitioners to pause, listen, and intentionally build relationships that recognise communities as agentic in knowledge creation.

While media literacy frameworks can and are used for social media education, research demonstrates the need to develop distinct social media literacy interventions (Livingstone, 2015; Manca et al., 2021). However, social media literacy is still an under-explored branch of media literacy (Manca et al., 2021). Livingstone’s (2014) conceptualisation is particularly useful for understanding social media literacy in this study, as it integrates both the structural features of platforms—such as algorithms, data flows and interface design—and the social dimensions of digitalised life, including relationships, privacy, anonymity and participation. Subsequent scholarship has established social media literacy as involving a range of technical, cognitive and socio-emotional capabilities (Polanco-Levicán & Salvo-Garrido, 2022). As scholars note, social media literacy must engage with socio-cultural factors “beyond mere skill acquisition and behaviour modification” (Kimmons, 2014, p. 93). For instance, the Social Media Literacy (SoMeLit) framework proposed by Cho et al. (2022, p. 948) emphasises that “social media literacy should be founded upon knowledge about the self and its relationships with its actions and environments”.

While these contributions are significant for furthering social media literacy understandings, particularly in relation to people’s lived experiences, much of this scholarship focuses primarily on how individuals develop capabilities independently, with less attention to how critical reflection and analysis of social media might emerge collectively within communities. Moreover, despite calls for justice-oriented and context-specific approaches to media literacy (Mihailidis et al., 2025), there remains limited research examining how equity-driven social media literacy education interventions can be developed by local organisations such as public libraries and refugee support groups in collaboration with marginalised communities, particularly refugee and migrant women.

2.2. CALD Refugee and Migrant Women, Settlement, and Social Media

Research consistently shows that women from refugee and migrant backgrounds face complex settlement challenges shaped by displacement, language barriers, and experiences of racialisation (Parajuli et al., 2019; Wehrle et al., 2018). Language barriers are widely identified as a key factor affecting access to services, wellbeing, and participation in host societies, often intensifying feelings of isolation and exclusion (Kainat et al., 2022; Liamputtong & Kurban, 2018). The refugee label itself is frequently associated with deficit-based stereotypes that undermine women’s identities and prior experiences, contributing to reduced confidence and social marginalisation (Ludwig, 2016; Pittaway & Pittaway, 2004).

Within this context, social media has become central to everyday settlement practices. Studies across national contexts show that people from refugee backgrounds rely on social media platforms for communication, translation, information-seeking, housing searches, and maintaining transnational relationships (Ahmed et al., 2020; Culos et al., 2022; Kaplan, 2018). Social media also offers spaces for identity reconstruction and belonging, enabling participation in family and community life despite geographic displacement (Nikunen, 2019). A growing body of research also documents the use of platforms such as WhatsApp, Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok to develop new literacies, including language learning and civic engagement (Kaufmann, 2018).

Despite these beneficial uses, social media platforms also expose women to misinformation, targeted disinformation, racialised narratives and online harassment, all of which carry significant implications for wellbeing and safety (Haw & Farquharson, 2024; Khorana & Thapliyal, 2024). For instance, Berg (2021), researching information precarity, found that women from refugee backgrounds in Germany are profoundly sceptical of mainstream news media because of their lived experiences. As a result, women in her study depended on information and news circulated via social media—as they “felt there was no other alternative”—even while expressing reservations about the reliability of such sources (Berg, 2021, p. 133).

At the same time, several media literacy studies carried out in Europe have challenged deficit framings by positioning refugees as “critical readers and makers of media” (Johns et al., 2025, p. 25). For instance, Neag (2019, para. 2) calls attention to refugee youth as “experts in their own lives”, who possess knowledges, understandings, and beliefs about social media, particularly on topics such as media influencers and fake news. These studies underscore the importance of recognising migrant and refugee communities not only as vulnerable users, but also as knowledgeable and agentic participants.

In the Australian context, however, Tour et al. (2023) highlight the scarcity of research on digital literacies in relation to refugee settlement. This gap has implications for programs such as the Adult Migrant English Program (AMEP), which, while incorporating some opportunities for digital skills learning, does not always address the complexity of refugee and migrant learners’ social media practices and the risks they navigate (Tour et al., 2021, 2022). These challenges suggest the need for more contextually grounded approaches to social media literacy education that engage directly with the lived experiences of refugee and migrant communities.

3. Methods

This paper is based on a qualitative study conducted between 2022–2025, which obtained ethics approval from Western Sydney University (H15298). The research was carried out in two Local Government Areas (LGAs) of Fairfield and Blacktown situated within the Greater Western Sydney region of the Australian State of New South Wales. Both locations are recognised as key settlement locations for newly arrived refugee communities (Robertson & Aquino, 2017) and designated Refugee Welcome Zones (Refugee Council of Australia, 2019).

The research participants included sixteen women from refugee backgrounds who had arrived in Australia from Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and Syria. A recruitment call was circulated by three partner refugee support organisations in the LGAs, using both hard copy leaflets and leveraging organisations’ social media networks. As per the selection criteria detailed in the recruitment information, participants needed to: (1) be women who identify as being from a refugee background, (2) be over 18 years of age, (3) actively use social media, and (4) have English language speaking skills (adequate to be able to communicate with the researcher). Although necessary for conducting in-depth interviews without interpreter support due to funding constraints, the fourth criterion is likely to have excluded women with lower English proficiency, who are often among the most socially isolated during settlement. From an education justice perspective, this represents an important limitation, and future research should prioritise multilingual and interpreter-supported approaches. The study also included staff members from public libraries and refugee support organisations from the LGAs, in recognition of the critical role these actors play in delivering community-based education and digital support for CALD women.

This research adopted qualitative and participatory methods designed to centre the knowledges, experiences, and learning aspirations of women from refugee backgrounds. Face-to-face semi-structured interviews (45–60 min) that explored everyday social media practices and learning aspirations were conducted with sixteen women from refugee backgrounds, eight from both Blacktown and Fairfield LGAs each. Women were compensated for their time through the provision of $50 gift cards. Interviews were also carried out with staff from libraries and refugee support organisations face-to-face and online.

A month after the interviews, participants from all three groups were invited to take part in a workshop identifying priorities and principles of social media literacy education, and women participants were again provided with $50 vouchers. Data analysis followed the thematic analysis approach (Braun & Clarke, 2006, 2019) and occurred alongside data collection. To enhance credibility and remain attentive to the PhD researcher’s positionality, “member checking” (also referred to as “respondent validation”) was incorporated throughout the process (Merriam & Tisdell, 2015, p. 246). This involved, for example, sharing preliminary themes with participants during workshops, enabling them to clarify and validate the researcher’s interpretations. Across repeated rounds of coding, themes were analytically synthesised into a set of key analytic findings that underpin the framework presented in the findings section. To maintain participants’ privacy, we have assigned pseudonyms and removed any information which may make participants identifiable.

4. Findings: Framework for Community-Led Social Media Literacy Education

This section presents the analytic findings from semi-structured interviews and co-design workshops through an evidence-informed framework for community-led social media literacy education. Designed for public libraries and community organisations that seek to work in partnership with women, the framework sets out: (1) a definition for social media literacy education, (2) desired learning objectives, and (3) co-design principles for developing participatory interventions with structurally marginalised women.

4.1. Defining Social Media Literacy Education for CALD Women

Grounded in study findings, we argue that social media literacy education for Culturally and Linguistically Diverse migrant and refugee women supports learners to critically reflect on and take action through social media platforms in ways that are meaningful to them. Rather than beginning from assumed skill deficits, this approach centres learners’ experiences through three foundational dimensions: (1) culturally informed values, identities and aspirations; (2) situated practices grounded in everyday social media use; and (3) relational practices emerging through relationships with both people and platforms. For example, some women described how their social media use—including the accounts they choose to follow—is shaped by their cultural values and aspirations. Others highlighted how their social media practices involve navigating different platforms to address settlement challenges. Relational practices were particularly visible in the ways women described learning how to use social media, with family members, friends, and community networks often helping to interpret information or share advice (see Section 4.3.2). Building on these insights, in practice this approach involves supporting participants to reflect on how platform features (affordances)—such as visibility and privacy settings, blocking and reporting tools, and algorithmic feeds—both enable and constrain participation, and to use this understanding to make informed choices and take action in pursuit of individual and community-related aspirations.

Figure 1 demonstrates non-linear dimensions to consider when developing social media literacy education for and with CALD women and their broader communities.

4.2. Desired Learning Objectives for Workshops

Guided by an education justice approach,

Table 1. Desired learning objectives.

	Foundational Dimension	Objectives
Reflect	Situated practices	Identify the social media platforms participants use (e.g., WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram) and reflect on and articulate what they want to achieve using the platforms (such as family connection, information access, or community engagement).
	Culturally informed practices/literacies	Reflect on how cultural values, migration experiences, gender roles, and safety concerns shape participants’ goals on social media, including what kinds of visibility, connection or influence they seek or avoid.
Understand	Relational Practices	Consider how social media affords both risks (e.g., harassment, surveillance, scams, misinformation) and opportunities (e.g., connection, learning, activism, support), shaped by the design of platforms.
		Develop an understanding of how platform affordances (e.g., privacy controls, reporting tools, group moderation) can be used to support women’s goals while managing risks, rather than limiting participation.
Act	Situated, culturally informed and relational practices	Support women to design and work on their own social media–related projects to address individual and community aspirations. This includes using social media affordances—such as visibility settings and algorithmic feeds—to strategically support these goals and strengthen meaningful participation.

outlines learning objectives for participatory workshops designed to support Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) migrant and refugee women (and their broader communities) in strengthening their social media literacies. These objectives are informed by both women’s everyday social media practices and the Australian Media Literacy Alliance’s (2022) Media Literacy Framework. Rather than functioning as a prescriptive checklist, the learning objectives articulate what the women participants identified as meaningful and useful to reflect on, understand, and act upon, based on their lived experiences, priorities, and aspirations. In practice, workshop activities can be designed around these objectives or, as in this study, shaped through pre-workshop interviews and collective discussions, with key insights reflected back to participants during workshops to co-determine learning objectives and outcomes.

4.3. Principles for Co-Designing Social Media Literacy Education with Women

The co-design principles presented below are grounded in women’s shared aspirations, values, and concerns that shape how they want social media literacy education to be approached in their communities. The lead researcher synthesised these workshop-generated priorities into a set of principles to highlight patterns across the data. Staff from public libraries and refugee support organisations were then invited to respond to these principles, positioning institutions as supporting partners rather than originators of the framework. These principles are intended to guide the design of social media literacy education for Culturally and Linguistically Diverse migrant and refugee women towards educational justice, while offering practical guidance for libraries and community organisations seeking to support women-led and community-led learning.

The following sub-sections discuss each of these principles in detail, drawing from the workshop contributions of all three participant groups (women from refugee backgrounds, staff members from public libraries and staff members from refugee support organisations).

4.3.1. We Start by Exploring Women’s Existing Everyday Social Media Practices, Culturally Informed Literacies Shaped by Identities and Values, and Relationships with Both People and Platforms—Without Assuming Deficits or Denying Existing Knowledge

Women from refugee backgrounds who participated in the study consistently reaffirmed that accessing social media is essential for their survival in a new country. Habiba, a 42-year-old Muslim woman residing in Blacktown who arrived in Australia in 2015 from Iraq, confirmed how social media use is woven into everyday practices of emotional survival, wellbeing and sustaining transnational relationships:

I use WhatsApp, Facebook—anything. It is cheap, and you can use it any time. I think if women stop using social media, they die… more than men, women are connected to families, and here they feel alone, they feel homesick.

The study also found that women from migrant and refugee backgrounds draw on their existing multilingual literacies, religious and cultural values and complex experiences and knowledges of war and displacement to make sense of and navigate through social media platforms. This finding corroborates Black media literacy scholars’ notions of literacy as a strategy acquired for survival (Patterson et al., 2016). For example, during the interview, Habiba described how she actively curates her social media feeds by selectively following, unfollowing, and blocking content in ways shaped by her cultural and religious values around care, modesty, and emotional wellbeing, using platform features to shape what content she encounters and avoids. Her reflections illustrate what Sun and Suthers (2023) call the ‘affordances of the cultural’—the ways platform affordances intersect with cultural and religious identities to shape what and who people follow, block, amplify or avoid. Moreover, Habiba explained that women’s past experiences of war and political turmoil shape how they “choose social media groups and things to watch”, often leading them to avoid graphic or confrontational material and to seek out spaces that offer emotional support, familiarity, and a sense of safety. These insights have significant implications for future social media literacy education design, demonstrating how women have acquired sophisticated culturally grounded and situated social media literacies and practices.

Women who participated in the study use social media not only to communicate but also for constructing new identities and community building. For instance, Zainab is a 57-year-old woman who arrived in Australia ten years ago as a refugee from Iraq (from the minority Chaldean background). Before arriving in Australia, she had lived in Syria as a refugee for eight years. After coming to Australia, she studied at a Technical and Further Education (TAFE) centre, where she first learnt to use a computer and the internet. According to her, the refugee label and language barriers are the most significant barriers influencing women’s self-confidence. She shared:

When they call me refugee, it’s like I have no education in Iraq, no jobs, I don’t have anything. But in my country, I had certificate, I had a good job. I am also a woman—so it’s more problem… when someone tells me I am a refugee, I think I am weak and sick, like I am a homeless person. It makes me feel sad, sometimes. I know [it] makes other women sad too.

Zainab’s account aligns with scholarship documenting how being called a refugee is associated with negative stereotypes that disadvantage women (Vigil & Baillie Abidi, 2018). Several women who participated in the study, when asked about the refugee label, used words such as “weak”, “dumb”, like “a newborn” and “stupid” to describe the assumptions they felt are ascribed to the label.

Yet, Zainab also shared how social media offered her a space to resist these labels while enabling their civic participation:

I post pictures of my community work, flyers of meetings. Also, [name of the organisation] interviews me, asks for permission, and they put my story and picture on their profile. They write about how we are successful as volunteers. Everybody comments on them, saying I do good work in the community… I am [a] volunteer and I’m a teacher for citizenship classes.

Zainab uses social media to gain visibility for her success story, and telling her story is integral to counter the “deficit” perceptions about people from refugee backgrounds (Khorana, 2022, para. 1). This form of strategic visibility reflects Bayat’s (2007, p. 161) notion of the “power of presence”, and was evident across the data, with several women describing everyday social media practices through which they make themselves seen, heard, and recognised within their communities.

During the workshop in Blacktown, several refugee support organisation staff members reinforced these perspectives. Staff member Aditi expressed frustration that digital literacy programs often emphasise risk rather than creativity and agency. Aditi is 49 years old, and she arrived from India as a migrant three years before the interview. She said:

How about we plan for a workshop which can empower refugee women? We know that there are so many risks with social media, but why are we not highlighting the benefits for these women? So, the first thing, maybe get familiar with what they do, they are using different types of social media. These women are such good TikTok stars, you should see their creativity!

Aditi’s statement stresses the need for the training to step beyond the risks associated with protectionist approaches to media and digital literacy education (Mihailidis, 2018), and to instead reflect on what women already know and do to build on these literacies and peer-to-peer relations in ways that address women’s needs and desires.

4.3.2. We Identify and Build on Women’s Existing Strengths, Skills, and Community Networks, Supporting Peer Leaders to Emerge and Lead Ongoing Peer-to-Peer Interventions

While women participants draw on existing literacies to navigate social media, the study also revealed that learning, problem-solving, and risk management are often relational, emerging through peer networks, family connections, and support organisations. A central example is a Facebook group for Arabic-speaking women from refugee backgrounds, which was enthusiastically mentioned by several participants as a key site for community-building and problem-solving. Makeez, a 38-year-old woman who arrived in Australia from Syria five years earlier as a refugee, shared:

Anything you want to ask, you want support, you can ask here… which doctor to see, advice about marriages or husbands, which bank to use, or shampoo to use for hair. Women help you. We trust the group, because no one is coming in with a fake photo… If someone doing something wrong, they remove them. Women respect everyone.

This group enables what Witteborn (2018) calls ‘metavoicing’, which is the ability to create online knowledge and trust through presence, profiles and content. Makeez’s involvement with this group, to which she has also “added many women”, can be identified as a way of contributing to community building. In particular, Makeez refers to the affordances provided for visibility through the use of profile photos on social media platforms (Treem & Leonardi, 2013), as well as her offline friendships with women, as factors laying the foundation for trust-building. Makeez repeatedly emphasised that the group is “very respectful”, and that respect forms the foundation of mutual help. Across interviews, women repeatedly mentioned values such as respect, equality, freedom and care when deciding which social media groups to join, what content to trust, and how to support others.

However, the same Facebook group was mentioned by the staff members from refugee support organisations who participated in the study as contributing to dis/misinformation amongst the vulnerable women. Nuzra, a staff member from Fairfield, elaborated on these concerns. She is an Assyrian woman who had arrived with a refugee visa from Iraq, 15 years earlier. She said:

This Facebook group is a big problem for us. My clients come to me and say, ‘we found this in [name of the Facebook group]’. I always repeat, ‘don’t believe whatever you hear on social media’… some people spread wrong information and scams.

These insights align with the research demonstrating how Australian adults display low confidence in identifying misinformation online (Notley et al., 2024; Park et al., 2024). However, the findings from this study suggest that women’s vulnerability to misinformation is not simply about a lack of digital skill. Instead, it is shaped by the broader conditions of settlement, including limited familiarity with host-country systems such as health, banking, and social services, language barriers, and a reliance on informal, peer-based social media networks for trusted, timely and culturally/linguistically accessible information. From an education justice perspective, this points to the importance of supporting women to build their capacity to navigate and respond to misinformation (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 2021), rather than framing avoidance of social media use as the primary solution.

Women’s social media learning and problem-solving also happen through intergenerational and familial relationships, particularly with younger family members. Amal, who arrived in Australia from Iraq in 2005, described how navigating social media platforms often involves seeking support from her sons and their friends:

If I have a question about social media, blocking bad content, blocking people, or anyone abusing me, I ask my son. Him and his friends help me. Sometimes they are not around, so I feel a bit lost, but sometimes I think it makes the bond strong.

Amal’s experience illustrates how gender and intergenerational factors shape social media knowledges. While support from her son and his friends function as a relational bridge across generations, Amal also highlights how it creates vulnerability when she states that she feels “lost” if they are not there to help.

Some women participants explained that they want to move beyond these dependencies. Suraiya, a 34-year-old woman, fled the Taliban’s oppression in Afghanistan and arrived in Australia two years before our meeting. Suraiya explained that women wanted to build confidence and independence rather than continually relying on organisations:

In Australia, it is a new country. We can do more… We should know how to stand by ourselves… not ask community organisations… Sometimes, all of them don’t know what we went through.

Suraiya expressed a desire for greater autonomy and expressed a desire to see women offering more peer-to-peer support rather than needing to “ask community organisations” to help them. She is also concerned how, while community organisations play crucial in women’s settlement, their support is sometimes limited by the lack of lived experience among support workers. This signals the need for social media literacy programs that ensure participant’s knowledges are centred.

For some women in the study who had already experienced high levels of education and an upward social class mobility in their origin countries, dealing with systemic barriers that denigrate their ways of knowing and render them subaltern in Australia is unsettling. Rifka, who was a medical doctor before fleeing Iraq and arriving in Australia, said:

Before organising any workshop, they should know how much [experience] we have with social media… So, first [recognise] that there are lot of levels, and then start to teach how women can use social media. Don’t [treat] all women like they don’t know anything.

Here Rifka draws attention to the need for intersectional identities to be centred when designing social media literacy education. Her statement also reflects contemporary media literacy scholars’ advocacy for educational interventions that do not reproduce existing inequities, stereotypes and discrimination (Neag et al., 2022; Mihailidis et al., 2025).

4.3.3. We Embrace the Role of Facilitators (Rather than Experts) and Partner with and Share Resources/Responsibilities with Organisations That Share a Common Goal of Supporting the Agency of CALD Women

While library and refugee support staff expressed support for peer-led and co-designed interventions, interviews revealed deeper institutional barriers that shape how public libraries design and deliver digital literacy programs. Anne, a senior library staff member explained that:

The programs are designed by the Community Learning team, and they are specialists in that field. So, they would be looking to the State Library of New South Wales, who has experts. We also check what other libraries are doing well, and that’s how we develop that specialty, librarians are media experts… no, they do not ask communities, but they keep their ears on the ground. So, the barriers would be the team that would be involved in it might not see there being any advantage in consulting communities, because they’re already the experts.

Anne acknowledges that staff members being seen as ‘experts’ could be considered a barrier against recognising the importance of community consultation and co-design. Education justice practitioners remind educators to avoid seeing themselves as ‘experts’ since this stands in the way of breaking down power imbalances that already harm marginalised communities (Costanza-Chock, 2020). In a context such as Western Sydney—where public libraries employ culturally diverse staff and serve highly multicultural communities—this position may also represent a missed opportunity to draw on the relational, linguistic, and cultural knowledge already embedded within institutions.

That said, library staff also highlighted that opportunities for meaningful engagement already exist through established partnerships. Library staff member, Rose, described successful collaborations with refugee support organisations:

Probably Refugee Weeks witness our biggest collaborations—we have it every year with [the name of the refugee support organisation]… they have a storytelling activity. You sit in a circle, and you share your story on how you got to Australia… very helpful to understand experiences of refugees.

The annual Refugee Week collaborations appear to give library staff members an opportunity to listen to and learn from the stories of women from refugee backgrounds, and in turn, develop services that bring these women closer to their local public libraries. We identify this partnership as one of the positive examples of “coalitions” (Swist et al., 2023, p. 492) that can give rise to equity-based education interventions. Such partnerships between organisations “can support the success of digital literacy [and social media literacy] programs in view of the increased demand and complexity of such program[s]” (Whiteside et al., 2022, p. 398).

Refugee support organisation staff similarly emphasised partnerships as a strategy for navigating structural constraints. In Fairfield, staff noted that project-based funding models and rigid Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) limit their capacity to develop sustained training initiatives. Despite this, collaboration with libraries and other organisations were described as essential for accessing resources and extending program reach. These findings suggest that while institutional structures and funding pressures constrain program development, existing partnerships between libraries and refugee support organisations provide a strong but underutilised foundation for community-led social media literacy education.

5. Discussion

The proposed framework for community-led social media literacy education highlights three interconnected dimensions that can guide the design of initiatives across different community contexts: (1) culturally informed values and aspirations, (2) situated social media practices, and (3) relational practices of learning and support. In doing so, the paper builds on research highlighting the need for distinct social media literacy interventions that move beyond general media literacy models, particularly in relation to the specific knowledge and abilities required for social media use (Livingstone, 2015; Manca et al., 2021). Moreover, the framework builds on existing media literacy and social media literacy frameworks that emphasise the importance of individual critical reflection on media practices and digital environments (Australian Media Literacy Alliance, 2022; Cho et al., 2022), while also extending these approaches by highlighting the relational and community-based processes through which such reflection can develop. In this sense, the framework contributes to broader debates in media literacy scholarship that question individualised models of media literacy and call for approaches that recognise collective agency, social relationships, and culturally situated learning (Mihailidis, 2018; Mihailidis et al., 2025). Rather than focusing primarily on the development of digital skills, the findings highlight the importance of engaging with the values, priorities, and everyday concerns that shape how women from migrant and refugee backgrounds use social media in their daily lives. This resonates with Mihailidis’s (2018, p. xi) call to reposition media literacy as a value-driven practice that supports “being in the world with others” and advocates for “social reform, change and justice”.

The framework also builds on scholarship underlining the importance of developing media literacy initiatives with—rather than for—diverse communities, to address inequality rather than reproduce it (Mihailidis et al., 2025). This emphasis on equity-based co-design of education interventions resonates with calls for more community-based and grassroots approaches to media literacy development emerging from Australia. For example, Dezuanni et al. (2021, p. 17) highlight the importance of “community champions or ambassadors to promote media literacy”, noting that “familiar faces would help to ensure the uptake of programs in specific communities”. More broadly, the findings also support critiques that media literacy frameworks developed in Global North contexts may not adequately reflect the lived realities of migrant and refugee communities (Neag et al., 2022; Ramasubramanian, 2023), highlighting the importance of grounding social media literacy initiatives in the cultural and settlement contexts of specific communities.

Conceptually, the framework’s principles foreground questions of power and knowledge in media literacy education by recognising women from refugee backgrounds as active contributors to the design of learning initiatives, rather than positioning organisations as primary knowledge holders and women as beneficiaries or recipients of this knowledge (Neag et al., 2022; Mihailidis et al., 2021). In this way, the framework aligns with education justice approaches (Sriprakash, 2023) and highlights the need to redistribute power in educational design. By positioning libraries and community organisations as enabling partners, the framework offers a practical pathway to inform the design and delivery of workshops that build on existing community strengths while also addressing risks and harms such as misinformation, harassment, and digital surveillance. The emphasis on women’s strengths and peer-to-peer learning within the framework’s principles also aligns with digital migration scholarship that calls for greater involvement of people from refugee backgrounds in the design of digital initiatives and decision-making processes that shape how technologies are used to address settlement challenges (Leurs et al., 2018; Leurs et al., 2023; Neag, 2019; Udwan et al., 2020).

The findings also suggest that responsibility for supporting social media literacy among CALD communities should not rest with individual organisations alone. This is particularly important given that existing research on digital literacy programs in public libraries shows that they are often delivered through one-on-one support or small-group sessions based on pre-designed, skills-focused content that is broadly available rather than tailored to specific communities (Whiteside et al., 2022). While such an approach is likely to be more cost-effective than the framework proposed in this paper, we argue that collaborative approaches between different organisations may provide a more appropriate, sustainable and effective model for community-based social media literacy education. For example, the initiative we report on in this paper involved a collaboration between a researcher, refugee support organisations and libraries. The research findings demonstrated that staff members from refugee support organisations (when compared with library staff members) were more familiar with women’s distinct and diverse social media practices and needs as well as their broader settlement challenges and experiences. Refugee support organisations are also often staffed by people from similar backgrounds as the communities they support, and these staff members are often highly trusted by the refugee communities. This knowledge was complemented by library staff who brought knowledge about local resources and opportunities and were able to provide spaces for connecting and learning. This partnership demonstrated that when organisations develop social media literacy education interventions together, with women, limited resources can be shared, and initiatives can be better supported and sustained.

6. Conclusions

Drawing on a PhD study conducted in two Refugee Welcome Zones in Western Sydney, this paper advances a community-led framework for social media literacy education that responds directly to the priorities and everyday practices of refugee and migrant women. The proposed social media literacy education framework emerges from listening to sixteen women from refugee backgrounds using an education justice approach, which highlights the importance of epistemic justice, collective action and co-design (Balarin & Milligan, 2024). The framework centres women’s lived experiences and supports relational care and community-building, while also foregrounding women’s aspirations and creating space to acknowledge and respond to social media risks and harms.

Importantly, this framework should be understood as an exploratory contribution. While grounded and then implemented in a specific context, it does not propose a fixed or universal model. Instead, it offers three adaptable components: (1) a definition of social media literacy education, (2) a set of learning objectives, and (3) co-design principles for developing participatory interventions with structurally marginalised women. These components are intended as guiding elements that can be reworked across different social, cultural, and institutional contexts. This emphasis is critical, as frameworks not grounded in community contexts risk reinforcing inequities by prescribing narrow ways of knowing and being (Costanza-Chock, 2020).

In this sense, the framework is most relevant for community-based and settlement-oriented initiatives led by libraries, local councils, grassroots groups, and migrant and refugee support organisations working with Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) communities. The framework is not intended to replace existing digital/media literacy initiatives, but rather to complement these by using a relational, community-based, and contextually grounded approach that is particularly relevant for the purposes of reflection and learning associated with social media use.

There is also potential for further development of the proposed framework. Future research could investigate the applicability of the principles introduced in the framework and the adaptability of the framework to meet the needs of different communities, settings and contexts. For instance, while the study shows that women use social media to support settlement and pursue their aspirations, it also highlights ongoing vulnerabilities—particularly in relation to misinformation and disinformation—which were beyond the scope of this study to examine in depth. These vulnerabilities were shaped by factors such as limited familiarity with host-country systems, reliance on social media for timely information, and language barriers. Future research can extend this work by examining how the framework can be applied and adapted to address specific online challenges, including misinformation and broader issues of online safety, across different community and institutional contexts.

Finally, we recognise this study has several limitations. The study does not aim to represent all women from refugee backgrounds in Australia. Participants were from Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, and Syria, and many had prior access to higher education and professional experience before migration. As such, the findings may not reflect the experiences of women with traditional literacy challenges or those from different migration pathways. The research was also conducted within two Local Government Areas in Western Sydney, and future research would benefit from engaging women and organisations across a broader range of regional and interstate contexts.