Youth Worx

Abstract

The YouthWorx project is a recently established initiative in inner urban Melbourne that enables ‘at risk’ and marginalized young people to participate in community radio and in multimedia production. YouthWorx seeks to offer direct pathways from youth arts to skill-building, and to entice disaffected young people into more socially productive pathways, through the provision of high-quality media and multimedia training. Yet the effectiveness of media education in creating active participants in democratic society is difficult to assess. This article examines some of the broader thinking behind the linkage of youth, media, identity and citizenship, and considers the difficulties of implementing a workable evaluation of causal links between those disparate fields. It also reports on the findings of the media ethnography component of the initiative, as we track the first cohort of young people through the training program.