This chapter explores two experiences in which transformative agency and the elaboration of innovative mediating artifacts contributed to change in childbirth care in Brazil. In the first case, we analyze how an organized group of women built cultural tools to expose the excess of cesarean sections in the private health sector, leading to change in regulatory policy. In the second case, we analyze the elaboration of an institutional birth plan model in a formative intervention inspired by the Change Laboratory methodology. Both experiences can be understood as efforts to promote social participation and informed choice, using mediating artifacts to foster agency. The processes ignited by them are also analyzed by the perspective of pedagogy of autonomy as proposed by Freire, in the sense that women are able to build knowledge and act on that knowledge in a meaningful and effective way.

Digital media are integrated into the lives of adolescents in almost every corner of the globe, yet the extent of integration, how media are used, and the effects of media in development are anything but universal. In this chapter, we summarize studies that illustrate how cultural context matters for understanding digital media and adolescent psychological development. In keeping with our transactional view of culture and human development, we explore how cultural values, structures of community, and notions of selfhood shape, and are shaped by, digital media use. To balance the disproportionate representation of survey research with samples in North America and Western Europe, we draw from anthropological and ethnographic research, including our own fieldwork in northern Thailand and a Maya community in Mexico. We conclude by proposing future directions in the study of culture and digital media.