Mis/Representations in School-Based Digital Media Production: An Ethnographic Exploration with Muslim Girls

Abstract

In this article, the authors discuss findings from a digital media production club with racialized girls in a low-income school in Toronto, Ontario. Specifically, the authors consider how student-produced media is impacted by ongoing postcolonial structures relating to power and representation in the school and in the media production work of Muslim and other racialized girls. From this standpoint, the authors interrogate how technological tools and particular media genres embedded in a postcolonial order impact the form and content of student media production in a school-based context. Focused on two in-depth examples from an ethnographic study, the authors question how Muslim and other racialized girls are portrayed in media they make and explore how that work is perceived and re/presented (or mis/represented) throughout the digital media production process.