Detours through Youth-Driven Media

Abstract

Scholarship on youth media in the last decade has done much to identify the social justice dimensions of youth media practices and cultural productions. While youth media production varies in relation to the social, cultural, political, and economic contexts in which it occurs, social justice frames much of this field of activity.1 There are diverse and clear social justice issues at stake in providing media education and technology resources to young people who are systematically silenced and excluded, and whose stories confront the unjust representations of youth in corporate consumer culture. At the most basic level, the very work of providing access to the technologies and practices of media making to young people who are systematically marginalized and silenced in or by commercial media is social justice work. Most youth media programs are local grassroots efforts waged by advocates who aim to redress the exclusion of youth voices from the public sphere.2 As one practitioner notes, “Those of us who come to this field have done so because we know at our core that working with young people, identifying issues of relevance for them, and guiding their media productions to be powerful tools of change is unmistakably a radical and essential movement in education.”3 Then there are the unmistakable questions of social justice at the heart of media content produced by marginalized young people. Across a range of media—radio, video, and Internet—young people are producing stories that document sufferings, losses, and traumas based on class, race, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality that they directly experience or witness within their communities.4