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Youth as Cultural Producers/Cultural Productions of Youth

Lora Taub-Pervizpour

In his book Why Voice Matters: Culture and Politics after Neoliberalism, Nick Couldry (2010) begins his bold project – that is, the project of naming a “crisis of voice” – from Paul Ricoeur's claim that “we have no idea what a culture would be where no one any longer knew what it meant to narrate things” (1984, p. 28). The contemporary crisis of voice documented by Couldry has its genesis in the global ascent of neoliberalism in the 1980s and has by now insinuated itself into all domains of the social world, so we can discern it in the realms of politics, economics, and culture.

Couldry argues that the doctrine of neoliberalism fundamentally “reduces the complexities of what it describes” and “presents the social world as made up of markets, and spaces of potential competition that need to be organized as markets, blocking other narratives from view” (ibid., p. 6). Within this context it is “consumer choice,” not “voice,” that has value. Market forces matter, while the potential social force of an engaged citizenry is suppressed.

In the US, no other group is told as often as youth is that its members' voice does not matter. And no group is more excluded than youth from the possibility of having an effective voice. Young people fare worst of all in relation to neoliberal politics, which commodifies all facets of their everyday lives at home, at school, in communities, and in the wider culture of childhood. Neoliberalism values young people only in so far as they wield any degree of consumer power. The crisis of voice under neoliberalism is experienced most acutely by children and young adults from low-income communities and from communities of color, who are systematically rendered voiceless. Henry Giroux and others have identified the extent to which education advances neoliberal reasoning.

This chapter attempts to document the particularities of this crisis of voice for low-income African American and Latino youth in Allentown, Pennsylvania who participate in HYPE – the Healthy Youth Peer Education program. HYPE uses digital media tools in the service of identifying, raising, and sustaining the voices of marginalized youth and brings these voices to bear in public conversations about healthy communities. HYPE is a collaboration among local institutions, professionals, and students engaged in a collective effort to explore what it looks like when communities choose to value the voices of young people who have been systematically silenced. By constructing a space in which young people can name and critique the ways in which they are silenced across multiple social institutions – school in particular – HYPE makes young people and adults join as allies in the difficult task of imagining a social world where teens' voices do matter. This chapter describes one local response to Couldry's call to action:

I also wish to suggest here that youth media programs create the conditions of possibility to produce these stories, and therefore they hold a promise as sites of human activity from which an alternative to neoliberal politics can be built. HYPE is one example of a site socially organized to promote what Couldry identifies as “a counter-rationality voice” (ibid., p. 14). The work presented here explores the relationships between young media producers and the adults who ally with them in their cultural productions. To ally with young people in their media making is, at its best, to construct a process of valuing voice. Documentary fieldwork conducted with HYPE over three years underscores the important reality that providing access to new technologies and practices will have a limited meaning or impact unless the participants intentionally construct social relations that are more just and more humane, in the face of the inequities that frame adult/youth relations in their community and in the culture at large. In their cultural productions, HYPE youth have documented those inequities, showing how they shaped their marginalization in relation to the local police, the school authorities, the neighborhood residents, and corporate mass media. At another level, HYPE youth remind us of the imperative to build more just and more equitable relationships within the sites and practices of media production.

Youth Media Production: Frames of Reference

As a field of practice, the youth media body has a long history of promoting young people's rights to become the narrators of their own lived experience. As JoEllen Fisherkeller's (2009) survey of the field demonstrates in detail, youth media production varies in relation to the social, cultural, political, and economic contexts in which it occurs. A common driving force for much of this practice is the recognition that young people often have limited access to spaces that are organized to promote the very possibility of their raising the voice as citizens. The field of youth media was largely forged through local grassroots efforts made by advocates aiming to redress the exclusion of youth voices from public life.¹ As one practitioner notes in Ingrid Dahl's comprehensive State of the Youth Media Field Report (2009, p. 8):

Young people are producing stories across a range of media that document hopes, sufferings, losses, and longings that they experience directly or witness within their communities, and that are based on class, race, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality.² To be sure, these narratives offer evidence of young people's ability to imagine a future in which their voices are valued and their stories matter.

The role of electronic media in the lives of children has commanded the attention of scholars since at least the 1930s, when the Payne Fund Studies famously attempted to track the impacts of film – the “new media” of that decade – on young viewers. In that enduring history of concern, it is a relatively recent development that scholars have focused analysis on young people as producers of media not because young people's engagement in media production is new, but because there is academic bias toward consumption.

Young people have always participated in productive cultural practices. On the basis of decades of work in listening to children in various US contexts, Robert Coles (1998) argues that children have a “documentary impulse,” an inclination to play with the available tools of communication in order to make a record of what they have seen and heard in the world and to share it with others. Similarly, in Girls Make Media, Mary Kearney (2006, p. 24) details the history of girls' cultural production at the turn of the twentieth century, bringing to light extensive historical evidence that “American girls have long been involved in creative activities that, though often invisible to others, link them directly to the realm of cultural production.” Kearney claims that “American girls have always been culturally productive using various media to express themselves and for communication with others” (ibid., p. 2). This is true today more than ever before – for boys and girls alike.

Still, the culturally productive activities of young people remained almost unexamined by scholars throughout the latter half of the twentieth century in favor of analyses focused on young people's consumption of media. In the 1980s and early 1990s, informed by some strands of cultural studies, scholars challenged the enduring stereotype of youth as mass media's naïve and passive recipients or vulnerable victims and stirred an interest in young people as media producers. In an essay reviewing key contributions to this burgeoning research literature, Vicki Mayer observes:

Once it was recognized that young people have agency – a limited one, but agency no less – the question what do young people do with the media broadened to include not only the engagement of young people as consumers, but their media making practices as well.

Researchers turned attention to youth as media producers in part to critique the extent to which young people's understandings of identity, community, and participation were situated within commercialized contexts. (Some efforts were surely born out of equal frustration with the near neglect of the production within scholarship on youth and popular culture). In the late 1990s, as “school reform” fundamentally restructured education around neoliberal politics and market incentives and childhood more broadly was reshaped in the image of consumer culture, critical media scholars could not but ask: What spaces do remain where young people are encouraged to think about themselves as more than consumers? In what social contexts do youth encounter models of citizenship not defined by consumption or shaped through by commercial forces? An expanding and diverse array of youth media programs (including radio, video, journalism, and other media formats and practices) located primarily in after-school community-based settings held promise as sites where young people could access the means of communication enabling them to produce their own mediatized accounts of the social world.

Several researchers have already attempted to map a significant and growing interdisciplinary literature on youth media production (Buckingham, Banaji, Burn, Carr, Cranmer, & Willett, 2005; Goldfarb, 2002; Goodman, 2003; Sefton-Green & Soep, 2007), writing from a variety of academic disciplines – media and cultural studies, communication, political science, sociology, education, literacy studies, and history. A good part of this literature is comprised of studies from youth media practitioners, whose frontline accounts deepen our understanding of the practices constituting youth media and question the (often) tenuous alliance of power between youth media makers and the adults who create the conditions for their cultural productivity. Not only are there many forms of youth media; there are also many paths to understanding and interpreting youth media. Much of this work is referenced and figures prominently throughout the present chapter.

In this section I want to briefly highlight just one of these pathways to understanding youth media – an orientation that, I think, avoids a troubling tendency to segregate youth media academics from youth media practitioners. The work I discuss here shows us that it is possible – perhaps even essential – to be rigorous about both: Mayer's Producing Dreams, Consuming Youth: Mexican Americans and Mass Media (2003), Ellen Seiter's The Internet Playground: Children's Access, Entertainment, and Mis-Education (2007), and various research articles by Glynda Hull and her colleagues in Oakland, California. Though they approach youth media production from different disciplines (media and communication, education), these authors share a simultaneous engagement as active practioners/volunteers and researchers. At San Antonio Cultural Arts (SACA), Mayer volunteered her video and journalism skills to support a group of Mexican American youth to produce a video documentary, Altars on the West Side, while she studied the meaning of this work within the context of both commercial and alternative Mexican American media in San Antonio, Texas.

Around the same time, in an ethnically divided working-class community in southern California, Seiter helped construct a computer lab and an after-school newspaper class in order to give children the communication access and the skills they needed if they were to represent their own lives and community and to use their own voices in doing it. Seiter explains the appeal:

Teaching computing and journalism skills to community youth at this lab and in a more affluent suburban school setting for nearly four years, Seiter was able to closely observe children's computer and Internet use. These observations form the basis of her study of the intractable disparities among children in their access to and use of the Internet. Mindful of Clifford Geertz's (1988, p. 6) assertion that ethnographic writing usually “consists of incorrigible assertion,” Seiter argues:

In 2001 Hull co-founded with Michael James a community technology center in the heart of an urban neighborhood in West Oakland, California. At Digital Underground Storytelling for Youth (DUSTY), Hull – a professor of education at the University of California in Berkeley – collaborates with community partners to design and study after-school programs for youth on digital, multimodal, multimedia composing. DUSTY's purpose is to create an alternative educational space where youth can develop an authorial and agentive self. In Hull's work there is a seamless connection between advocacy and scholarship on young people as media makers. The lines between them blur – in the following explanation given by Hull, Kenney, Marple, and Forsman-Schneider (2006, p. 8):

I would argue that the authors discussed here share a self-conscious effort to direct the resources and energies of their academic institutions to projects that begin to redress the information inequalities in their communities. Seiter (2007, p. 102) writes of her youth media partnership as “only one of many that offered academics an opportunity to be useful, to share some of the wealth concentrated at universities,” in a wider effort to address the unequal distribution of technology and educational resources in the US. The works included here are models, because they help establish frameworks that inform the subfield of youth media production analysis and because they provide a model for rigorous analysis of young people's cultural production within a broader social justice agenda. Indeed, the studies of Mayer, Seiter, and Hull et al. suggest the rich possibilities of youth media production as a leading edge in the wider media democratization movement.

If youth media are the leading edge in the battle for media democracy, what does that edge consist in? What imbues youth media with democratizing potential – the possibility of contesting neoliberalism's denial of voice and its claim that only market value matters? An overlapping emphasis on process is unmistakable across the work of Mayer, Seiter, and Hull et al. Reflecting on her experiences both as a volunteer and as a researcher collaborating with Mexican American youth on a video project in San Antonio's west side, Mayer stresses that products are significant, but not as much as the process of making them is: “Grassroots video projects do not create citizens. Rather, they are places that potentially reinforce the ways that people feel like members of a community” (2003, p. 115). Hull and colleagues (2006, p. 8) at DUSTY in Oakland, California reflect on how, through “the design of our curriculum and participant structures, we position digital storytellers as authors, composers, and designers who are expert and powerful communicators, people with things to say that the world should hear.” The influence of educational theorist and activist Paulo Freire's concept of critical consciousness is evident both in Seiter's after-school journalism/Internet program and in Hull's DUSTY. In describing this critical orientation, Seiter writes:

According to Hull and James, DUSTY's curriculum and pedagogy encourages young people and adults to position themselves “as local and global community members able to remake their worlds” (Hull & James, 2007, p. 5, citing Freire, 1970).

Mayer's study draws out another facet that makes the three studies cited here exemplary: a necessary and nuanced understanding of the relationship between consumption and production. While focusing on her collaborations with Latino youth in their video production, Mayer does not ignore the fact that “commercial mass media were omnipresent in the daily activities” of the teens, who “talked about media constantly” (2003, p. 119). Mayer, Seiter, and Hull et al. each recognize, in their respective involvements with youth media, that the consumption of media and of popular culture powerfully contributes to the context in which production takes place. Mayer describes this with a transparency understandable to anyone who has sat beside a teen to log a videotape. “Much of my own work with the young volunteers at SACA relied on our common media interests; logging video footage did not seem so boring if we could talk about Justin Timberlake or the latest Spanish language telenovela” (ibid.). In this way, Mayer argues, consumption is productive, and her participant observation and interviews recapture the dynamic interplay of media consumption and production in the lives of the Latino youth with whom she worked, “citizens who consume mass media but also desired an alternative to them” (ibid., p. 118).

Anne Haas Dyson first drew attention to the value and meaning of children's affinities for popular culture within the spaces of learning in her 1997 book Writing Superheroes: Contemporary Childhood, Popular Culture, and Classroom Literacy. Dyson's ethnographic study of writing practices in an elementary school in Oakland, California shows how children used popular culture – for example the television show X-Men, commercial music, and football – as writing subjects and resources for building “webs of connection” with others. “Writing was not so much an expressive medium for individual souls as a tool for social beings whose major concerns were not learning to write” (Dyson, 1997, pp. 42–43). The complicated social processes at play discerned by Dyson helped Seiter make sense of the fact that Worldwide Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) was always the first writing topic of choice among Latino boys in her computer lab. Looking at wrestling in its cultural, historical, political economic context, and in the context of her ethnographic and longitudinal research, Seiter avoids the trap, common among critics, of seeing only the sex and violence in the WWE. Seiter untangles the issues of class, race, and gender, which bind Latino boys' consumption of WWE to their journalism productions. “If our official curriculum focused on learning research tactics on the Web and the genre of newspaper writing, the boys' writing about wrestling reflected their unofficial work of shoring up identity and creating a space in which they could feel powerful” (Seiter, 2007, p. 65, drawing on Dyson).

The scholarship introduced above resonates with Couldry's impassioned call for spaces that put the value of voice into action. Mayer, Seiter, and Hull demonstrate that having a voice is not enough – the rich, textured, and sometimes troubling accounts of young people's storytelling documented by these three researchers exemplify what it means to listen to young people and to communicate back to them, transmitting the message that their voices matter. Like Couldry's, my argument is that we don't just need more youth media: we need to create opportunities for more youth to witness the democratic possibilities of their media within their local communities. Expressing a self-declared, hard-earned pessimism about technology and education, Seiter asserts:

To be sure, media and communication researchers can contribute to the difficult work of constructing spaces where youth voices are being heard and valued. Fisherkeller (2009, p. 25) has urged media and communication researchers to “help youth media by encouraging the support and maintenance of programs already existent and by envisioning new kinds of creative and strategic partnerships and collaborations among youth media programs and media and communication researchers.” In the remainder of this chapter I turn to one such collaboration, in Allentown, Pennsylvania – where, since 2006, I have worked with community partners to grow and sustain a youth media program called HYPE.

HYPE: Context and Method of Study

HYPE offers youth of high school age opportunities to engage in social change and public advocacy through leadership development, digital storytelling, the performing arts, and documentary media. Participants live in the predominantly low-income and racially diverse neighborhoods of Center City Allentown.³ In the first section of what follows I focus on program activities during the summer of 2009, when six Latino and six African American youths between the ages of 15 and 20 participated in HYPE. The group consisted of three young men (Rashid, Anthony, and Jamie) and eight young women (Alyssia, Jessie, Sheridan, Dahlia, Gabby, Shaniqua, Clarice, and Amanda). The study draws on the qualitative methods of participant observation and documentary fieldwork and includes data from field notes written by the researchers and other HYPE staff members, a range of documentary sources, and unstructured interviews with three HYPE students; the interviews were conducted by Eirinn Disbrow, an undergraduate research intern. Disbrow also conducted in-depth interviews with Jenna Azar, HYPE co director, and with education scholar Michael Carbone, who, as chair of the education program at Muhlenberg College, where HYPE is located, has extensive knowledge of the culture and politics of the local public school system. The documentary video produced by the HYPE teens in the summer of 2009, Roots of Change, also provides important insights for considering the possibilities of valuing youth voices in Allentown.

Figure 22.1 Preparing for person-on-the-street interviews, HYPE teens are empowered with cultural tools for storytelling. Source: Jenna Azar, HYPE Co-Director, Healthy Youth Peer Education.

Power and Powerlessness Behind the Camera

HYPE offers a safe and supportive context for learning and development, where young people have possibilities to raise their voices and name their concerns about problems they see in their community. I conceive of this as a “third space,” as theorized by Kris Gutiérrez (2008), by Glynda Hull and Katherine Schultz (2001), and by others – a site where different activity systems (school, community, family, university) collaborate to create a context that promotes the formation and negotiation of new roles, relationships, learning, identities, and – above all – voices. HYPE students overwhelmingly view the community as unwelcoming to young people in general, and adults as mistrustful of low-income youth, in particular those of color. Person on-the-street interviews conducted by HYPE on a summer morning confirmed this perception. In the words of one middle-aged White male interviewee: “What do I think of teenagers? Buncha hoodlums, that's what I think.”

No experience demonstrated better how disempowered HYPE students feel in the face of authority than the interview they conducted with the principal of the largest public high school in the local school district. The interview team – Amanda, Dahlia, Shaniqua, and Sheridan, accompanied by Disbrow and Azar – traveled the eight blocks between HYPE and the high school by car, equipped with camera, microphone, and a list of carefully scripted questions. The interviewers were visibly anxious as they sat in the principal's waiting room. When he entered – a large and gruff man with a thick grey, walrus mustache and wearing an oversized school jersey – all of the girls froze in silence. Doing nothing to put them at ease, he cleared his throat: “Well?” Urged by Disbrow, they mumbled their names, averted eye contact, and filed behind him into an office crowded with memorabilia in the school spirit. The girls quickly sank deep into their seats, leaving Disbrow to set up the camera. Amanda held the sheet of interview questions and positioned her chair next to the principal, but out of the camera frame; she was more reticent and nervous than she had been conducting person-on-the-street interviews earlier in the week. Disbrow asked many of the follow-up questions, hoping to provide a model for the teens to adopt. But they said very little, and the principal made no visible effort to engage them or to quell their discomfort. The interview footage reveals some of the issues of power and ethics that emerge when young media makers turn their cameras on the adults who have very specific forms of authority over their lives.

Early in the interview, when asked about the difficulties of his work, the principal shares that his greatest struggle is “getting kids involved” in extra-curricular activities. He barely mentions a notorious lack of resources before turning to speak at length about the importance of non-academic after-school activities – band, football, theater, music. This was one of the few times when Amanda veered from her interview script to ask (with evident disbelief and with her own young awareness of larger issues at stake), “Do you think the reason they're not involved is because they choose to be or because the resources aren't there?” The principal replies, “It's a choice thing. These opportunities are there. It's just a matter of kids choosing.” Amanda presses on: “Do you think they are motivated [to participate]?” “Well, that's a deeper question. What is motivation?” After an awkward silence, the principal at last acknowledges that “it's tough for our kids. A lot of them have commitments after school, a lot of things beyond their control,” but he emphasizes that “it's up to each individual student to make the most of the opportunities we provide.”

The principal claims that “fun kids” are the best part of his job, but the girls themselves experience the school as anything but fun, and as deeply unwelcoming. Education scholar Michael Carbone finds the interview footage striking for the complete absence of any conversation about academics. “He doesn't see these kids as potentiating into anything, as emergent adults,” explains Carbone, who oversees student teachers placed in the district.

This underlying injustice shaped the teens' interview with the principal. Initially eager to conduct the interview, the teens stated after the fact it was really “a waste of time,” meaningless, and ultimately disempowering.

In the institutional context of the inner-city school, the “principal's office” is almost always marked as a space of conflict, punishment, and control, not a space that values youth voices. Jenna recalls the interview experience:

One of the interviewers, Shaniqua, sat captivated by the principal's power: “I was thinking about while he was talking [how] there are so many kids in that school and it's just him that has the authority over them and that's it.” That's it. Steven Goodman (2003, p. 25) astutely claims that “urban high schools are taking on the look and feel of prisons,” and there is little doubt among the HYPE girls that the principal looks and seems like the head security guard. In trying to make sense of the dynamic during the interview, Azar reflects, “What you see when young people come up against power [is that] they only have a few options, and most of the time they chose the power of disengagement, the power of not caring.”

It would be wrong, however, to see this disengagement as “apathy,” a common complaint lodged against young people. In their long-term “Public Connections” research project in Britain, Couldry, Sonia Livingstone, and Tim Markham (2007, p. 5) share a similar stance. “Rather than blaming young people for their apathy, the finger might instead be pointed at the online and offline structures of opportunity that facilitate, shape and develop young people's participation.” Listening closely to young people in focus group interviews, these authors find that “[y]oung people protest that ‘having your say’ does not seem to mean ‘being listened to,’ and so they feel justified in recognising little responsibility to participate” (ibid.).

If HYPE teens felt excluded from any real conversation during the interview with the principal, reviewing and editing the interview footage offered a second opportunity to engage critically with the issues he dismissed and to determine how the principal's perspective would be included in their video. Back in the editing studio, implicit and explicit struggles over what to include and exclude quickly emerged. Amanda sat to review the footage with Sylvia, a HYPE college intern and a former student at the high school presided over by this principal. Sylvia recalls the complexities of that task:

Decisions about what to include and what to exclude are always subjective (Coles, 1998), and in this instance they reveal some of the tensions between adult and youth perspectives.

Working from clips identified by Amanda and Sylvia, a small group extracted a sound bite that triggered the program coordinator's concern. In her role as program coordinator, Azar was alert to the potential backlash that the young filmmakers (and students at the same school as the principal) faced if they were perceived to be portraying him in a negative or unfair light. She also warned about the risk of turning the principal against the program, which could potentially undermine wider community support. Jenna advocated that the teens recover the wider context of the clip, and they did so without protest.

Clearly, taking away young people's creative control over their cultural production runs counter to the goals of the youth media movement. Youth media educators share a responsibility to expand young people's right to communicate, not to impose further limitations upon that right. But Jenna's concerns reflect her awareness of our responsibility to ask the students critical questions that challenge them to think through the implications of their production choices. The teens were disillusioned by the outcome of the interview with the principal, and, although they were not particularly concerned about showing their principal in a negative light, they understood the practical and ethical dilemmas Jenna was identifying in the context of the bigger picture. The teens recognized the possibility that, if the principal disliked his portrayal in the film, he could shut down their voices at school and in the community. Locating conversations about the ethics of representation at the center of our work can empower young people to make production choices that serve the larger social justice objectives at stake. But these objectives need to be weighed against the aim of valuing youth voices – a process that, according to Couldry, is of urgent importance for the creation of a more democratic future. This was not, however, the only time in the process of producing Roots of Change that youth and their adult allies intensely negotiated conflicting visions and goals.

The Rough Cut: “This is Our Call to Action”

With just two days left until the public screening, the HYPE crew gathered to watch a rough cut that was assembled during the weekend from four distinct segments created by four smaller production teams. Prior to that moment, there was but a loosely shared understanding of how the segments would flow together. The long silence after screening the 18-minute video was broken by one of the program's founders, an educator who was struck and dismayed by an overabundance of adults on screen. “I just don't get the sense of HYPE,” she lamented, asking passionately: “Where is my HYPE?” This was a reminder that documentary is always a partial representation of reality; and she also underscored the multiple and sometimes competing visions/narratives held by adults and teens as they collaborate in youth media work. This was even more evident as HYPE teens weighed in with their impressions on the rough cut: Jessie disappointedly shared that it was not at all what she had envisioned; Jamie called it “boring and unimpressive”; Rashid looked crushed while offering a worried reassurance that “it's going to be okay.” With the community screening just 48 hours away, things did not feel like they would be okay.

Jenna asked how the film reflected on HYPE itself and what image it transmitted to the community. If it were poorly received by the public, would the teens be vulnerable? Concerns about backlash and youth vulnerability are not unique to HYPE (see Gaines & Villarroel, 2010), but HYPE had very specific reasons to be cautious. When a short HYPE video examining the unfair treatment of youths by local police was featured at an official city event the year before, it angered an assistant police chief, who felt blindsided and blamed event organizers. Experiences like this one are powerful reminders that processes that attempt to value the voice of the youth will be threatening to those who hold traditional forms of power over them – the very power that functions by denying them an effective voice in their community.

The rough cut had the effect of raising the teens' voices and catalyzed them to assert their role at the center of the media-making process. They became animated about their vision for the documentary and committed themselves to doing the hard work ahead, in order to make it “their own.” In the fast-paced and high-pressured environment leading up to the community screening, relationships between youth and adults were again renegotiated. As the teens looked for direction to Eirinn, a more advanced college student, she worried about having too big a handprint in their work. In some ways disappointment over the rough cut was a call to action, compelling the youth to participate more fully. They sat for long stretches of time editing at the computers, ignoring their vibrating cell phones or the lure of other online pursuits. Eirinn's interactions with the teens during this time were shaped by her own awareness of the need to deliver a completed documentary video that would meet the diverse expectations of youth and adult stakeholders alike. The responsibilities shared by adults and students in the production process has long been a subject of tension, writes Goodman (2003, p. 57) of his 20 years of experience with youth media at the Educational Video Center in New York City:

As we came closer to the end of the production schedule, assistance and support from the adult educators was vital. Revisiting these last stressful moments of HYPE, Shaniqua recalls:

Shaniqua and her peers leaned heavily on Eirinn during these final days, as the students worked at the edges of their digital-editing knowledge and Eirinn tried hard to maintain their role of driving the production process. During a short afternoon break we took the opportunity to refocus and articulate our collective understanding of what was meant by “youth-driven/adult-supported” media production. On the chalkboard, we made a diagram of two concentric circles, one labeled “youth driven” and the other labeled “adult-supported.” The teens were asked: “What does youth driven look like to you?” Their answers and descriptions filled the inner circle. We then asked, “What does adult-supported look like to you?” Their ideas of the kind of support they were expecting filled the space of the outer circle. This jointly produced artifact became an important guide in the remaining hours of HYPE, particularly in navigating the slippery border between adult support and control. Jenna highlights this ambiguity as she considered those final days and hours:

Clearly, adults need to take stock of what may be contradictory impulses and responsibilities shaping the production process. We want to encourage youth participants to take ownership of their work, which may at times collide with our obligation to protect the youth who participate in our programs. Constructing youth media programs around a framework for valuing voice requires both vigilant awareness of the interests and agendas of audiences for youth-made media and a keen sensitivity to the fine edge between “protecting” the youth and “censoring” their voices.

Youth Cultural Production: Negotiations

The rough-cut screening was tough on youth and adults alike. HYPE educators left conflicted responses to the conversation: excited, on the one hand, that the teens were roused to claim ownership of the documentary making process; frustrated, on the other, that this newfound determination had not surfaced as strongly earlier in the five-week program. What responsibility did the teens bear for the disappointments of the rough cut? Some had simply not “shown up” for the documentary work, preferring instead to hang out or to pursue other online digital media practices at every opportunity – Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, gaming, and texting with cell phones.

Not only does this unsettled tension provide another moment for examining the ethical dilemmas that emerge when adult and youth agendas collide, it also raises important issues of class and race, which are embedded in the social conditions of HYPE. Many of the Latino and African American participants have limited access to high-speed Internet. While survey data from the Pew Hispanic Center and the Pew Internet & American Life Project suggest that the gap in home Internet use between white and Latino households may be shrinking – given the rising percentage of Latino households with broadband connections from 2006 to 2008 – disparities of access in households with annual incomes under $30,000 persist (Livingston, Parker, & Fox, 2009). Access to computers in urban public schools is similarly limited by an absence of infrastructure and support and by the current organization of the environment around standardized curricula and high-stakes testing. Compared to computers in suburban public schools, those in urban schools are often older, and Internet access is slow and heavily restricted. By contrast, most of the work at HYPE takes place in a college room with 16 state-of-the-art Apple computers, high-speed broadband access, two printers, and a scanner. The multimedia production studio is similarly well equipped, with multiple high-definition video cameras, a mobile laptop system, and other production tools the value of which surely exceeds the average annual income of a high school teacher in the district. The draw of the technology for lower income students is undeniable (Seiter, 2007), and it is difficult to dismiss the teens' online activities as mere distraction from the “legitimate” media-making goals at hand.

Figure 22.2 Exploring the community with video cameras in hand, HYPE helps teens develop a sense of themselves as agents of change. Source: Jenna Azar, HYPE Co-Director, Healthy Youth Peer Education.

Cell phones were ubiquitous at HYPE during the summer 2009 program, as was access to an array of digital media devices, including Nintendo DS and other hand held gaming systems, iPods, and MP3 players. While the teens mostly observed the rule that prohibits talking on their phones during HYPE, they were almost always connected via texting and Internet social networking sites. When they were working at the computers, they toggled between HYPE work in iMovie or GarageBand, for example, and MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, gaming or fan sites. For some scholars, these digital media practices signal a new kind of creative production for youth. Patricia Lange and Mizuko Ito (2009, p. 261), for example, argue that online media practices constitute a kind of creative production in the digital age, suggesting that, “for most youth, profile creation is a casual activity in defining a personal web page and graphic identity, pieced together with found materials on the internet. This is a form of messing around that can provide some initial introductions to how to manipulate online digital media.” Henry Jenkins and his collaborators (Jenkins, Clinton, Purushotma, Robison, & Weigel, 2009) suggest that social networking sites and other spaces where youth create and share content online provide them with possibilities to engage in a “participatory culture.” Within this conceptual framework, digital and online media are seen to comprise a “new media ecology,” which has the potential “to reshape the conditions under which young people engage with media and culture, moving youth from positions as media consumers to more active media producers” (Lange & Ito, 2009, p. 244).

At HYPE we also recognize that, beneath the surface of this casual “messing around,” there is an excitement to connect with new media that can be mobilized to engage youth in other forms of media making and can perhaps represent even “a starting point for broadening media production into other forms” (ibid., p. 261). New opportunities to create personally and socially relevant content may be particularly meaningful for youth of color, in the context of an Internet that is, as Seiter (2007, p. 17) argues, “so heavily skewed toward white, English-speaking professionals who are interested in making purchases online.” As a program, HYPE values the knowledges and experiences that youth bring to the table – and this includes, increasingly, their experiences online. As media educators, however, we also have a responsibility to give students information about the limitations of these practices, situated as they are within a context of commodification that is notoriously relentless in targeting urban Latino and African American youth. Seiter (ibid., p. 104) insists that media educators and researchers bear a responsibility to “teach children about the economics of the Internet” – for instance to make transparent the “hidden forms of commercialism” implicit in the business of mining and profiling on the basis of user-generated content.⁴ There are huge differences between online avenues and the streets one walks to get to school or to the store.

Beneath the hype of transforming youth into a “participatory culture,” social networking companies profit from the steady stream of content that users generate in the form of posts, photos, links, friends, and personal profile information. Nicole Cohen (2008, p. 7) is careful to note that, “[w]hile these sites can offer participants entertainment and a way to socialize, the social relations present on a site like Facebook can obscure economic relations that reflect larger patterns of capitalist development in the digital age.” Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube are very much a part of the institutions of media that form what Goodman (2003) describes as a system of authority, one that contributes to the criminalization and commodification of the urban working class and youth of color. Creating social networks online, meaningful as they may be, is no substitute for the daunting work of constructing a more inclusive community for these youth in Allentown. The longing for a voice to shape a more just community is deeply felt by HYPE teens, as exemplified by Jessie, a 16-year-old Latina student mentor in the HYPE program for three years.

Jessie's Intro: “In a Short Couple Bars, It's Like Exactly the Point”

Jessie wrote this rap two days before HYPE ended. They are the first words uttered in Roots of Change (HYPE, 2009), and they capture the teens' desire to make the film “their own.” As Jessie and Rashid rap, Jessie and Shaniqua appear on screen, leaning out of the windows of Jenna's car as they drive through the streets of Allentown. The production process that shaped the intro sequence came as close as anything to HYPE's collectively defined ideal of youth-driven and adult-supported media.

Roots of Change opens with shots of Ccenter City Allentown⁵ – row homes, store-fronts, gas stations, an art museum, abandoned buildings – interspersed with close-ups of Jessie and Shaniqua gazing out of the car window at their community. Much like a music video, Jessie's rap lyrics drive the scene. She was outspoken in assuming responsibility for rewriting the introduction, although she had little experience of working with the editing software. For two days Eirinn sat with Jessie while she reconstructed the intro, providing just enough guidance with the program for Jessie to be able to render visually the ideas in her mind. From a youth media educator's perspective, this was rewarding work, with a passionate student actively creating the scene. At one point Jessie beamed, “I could do this forever.”

Midway through her rap, Jessie asks: “What will it take to form it / The way we envision it / In our minds?” She is speaking of the community of Allentown, but the question is worth asking in relation to youth media. What does it take, in the context of HYPE and youth media more generally, to create conditions that empower young people to realize their cultural productions with greater autonomy and agency? What does it look like to create a process that values youth voices? A good part of the answer, to be sure, rests with Jessie herself, who demonstrated throughout HYPE a deep understanding of what it means to be in this community as a Latina, a teenager, and an advocate for social justice.

Jessie managed to locate herself in relationships with HYPE adults as an active participant and partner. We recognize, however, the difficulties HYPE students may encounter when they are challenged to rethink their view of themselves and their relationship with the community beyond HYPE.

Jessie felt these pressures acutely in the context of her home life:

EIRINN:	How does HYPE affect other areas of your life?
JESSIE:	Well, actually, it gets me in trouble a lot with my Dad because we get into arguments and he tells me not to talk back and I'm like, “I don't go to HYPE to learn how to be quiet! I have my own voice!” And then he tells me to shut up [laughter]. But the way we practice stuff [at HYPE], it's really comfortable. It's not like at school where we have to [sit there] and take notes.
EIRINN:	What was your favorite memory from HYPE this summer?
JESSIE:	Filming the intro. I was just really excited and I had a vision. Filming it was really fun because it was like exactly what I had in my head, and then adding the rap – it just made it that much better. That was my favorite part, like every time I watch it I just tell everybody, “This is my part! I did this!” I do love that rap too [. . .] I feel like in a short couple bars, it's like exactly the point.

Listening deeply to Jessie, Eirinn gets as close to her vision as possible and supports her as she acquires the skills necessary to render the vision so that others may be able to see it. Years of experience at Educational Video Center have demonstrated to Goodman that media educators must constantly manage and assist the media production work with youth without overstepping their boundaries, by “leaving little room for youth decision making or ownership” (2003, p. 104). The collaborative meaning-making process driven by Jessie and supported by Eirinn is a promising response to Jessie's refrain: “What will it take to form it / The way we envision it / In our minds?”

Jessie and her peers completed Roots of Change just in time for a community screening attended by family, friends, college professors, public officials, and community leaders. It was received with much praise; one young girl in the audience asked the HYPE filmmakers: “How can I be like you?” The film's message was powerful, the filmmakers' voices were impossible to ignore, and in the space of the screening they briefly experienced a community that actively valued their voice. As Jenna pointed out:

The young producers' longing to shape community change infuses the multi-voiced narrative in the documentary's final sequence:

Conclusion

If youth media is to fulfill its promise as a force for valuing voice and creating particular conditions through which young people and adults are allied in this goal, it will require us to reflect constantly on our objectives, methods, and – crucially – the social relationships that shape youth cultural production. Whether we call it youth driven, youth-made, or youth-created, it is up to media educators and students to articulate collectively what is meant by these terms and how their meaning is constituted through our media-making practices. Then we have to work hard at constructing relationships that do justice to the democratic ideal of young people raising their voices and being valued as cultural producers and participants in community life. As Goodman (2003, p. 112) observes: “We have come quite far. But damn, we still have a long way to go.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The voices of many community partners informed this research, and the author acknowledges in particular the Healthy Youth Peer Education (HYPE) teens who share their perspectives through media production; HYPE co-director Jenna Azar; HYPE undergraduate interns Eirinn Disbrow, Sylvia Boateng, Joanna Whitney, and Stephanie Lamb; faculty from the Departments of Media and Communication and Political Science at Muhlenberg College; and HYPE founders Abby Letcher, MD, and Roberta Meek. The author recognizes the generous support for HYPE from Muhlenberg College, the Dorothy Rider Pool Health Care Trust, and the Program for the Funds for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education. The author is also grateful for Sara Vignieri's close reading and editorial suggestions. An earlier version of this work, co-authored with Eirinn Disbrow, appears in Media and Social Justice, edited by Sue Jansen, Jefferson Pooley, and Lora Taub-Pervizpour (Palgrave McMillan, 2011).

NOTES

1 While some high-profile national – and even global, corporate-driven – youth media campaigns have emerged, the complicated relation of this development to the history of youth media is a subject for another paper. See, for example, Adobe Foundation, “Adobe Youth Voices,” http://youthvoices.adobe.com.

2 Much of this work is represented in the Youth Media Reporter, the leading multimedia Web journal for practitioners, educators, and academics working in the field of youth media. See the journal's website: http://www.youthmediareporter.org. The last issue of the journal was published in March 2011, but past issues dating back to 2005 are archived online.

3 This area has been the focus of significant community development initiatives and funding efforts, through which it has been designated a “Weed & Seed” area. More recently, through a collaboration among various philanthropic foundations in the region, it was designated a “Youth Empowerment Zone.”

4 Seiter's study concludes with a compelling list of recommendations that media educators, teachers, and parents can leverage in activities that aim to educate children so as to make them think critically about the Internet. See Seiter (2007, pp. 103–106).

5 Center City refers to the downtown and business area of Allentown, a densely populated and multicultural neighborhood that is currently the focus of an urban renewal effort.

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