New Media Literacies as Social Action: Youth Engaging in the Politics of Knowledge Production

• In Event: 66.061 - Cultural Production and Participatory Politics: Practices, Intersections, and Pedagogies

Abstract

In this paper, the presenter illustrates the blurring lines of youth cultural production and participatory politics from the perspective of new media literacies. It is argued that an ethos of collaboration, participation, and distributed knowledge (Lankshear & Knobel, 2006) shapes how individuals see themselves in the world and interact with each other as afforded by digital technologies. At the center of this ontological and technocultural shift are youths who engage in alternative and activist practices (Lievrouw, 2011). Given the pace of changing technologies and changing practices, it is important to examine specific ways and contexts through which youths leverage new media literacies as a form of social action in order to understand pedagogical possibilities. This paper focuses on the conceptualization and application of new media literacies in an inquiry-based project conducted by university students ages 19-26. These students as members of a semester-long course were provided a task to “alternatively” visualize, imagine, and represent a historically segregated city in the urban Midwest, with an explicit purpose of promoting civic dialogue. A culminating event held at a local museum in large part was deliberate in order to further legitimize youth voice and influence (Cohen & Kahne, 2012). Noteworthy in the media-making process was an emerging ethos that developed through collaboration with peers and community members, participation in peer- and interest-driven inquiry centered on pressing social issues, and distributed knowledge that ultimately led to interactive blogging and video documentaries. Multilayered and occurring across off/online spaces, the media-making process also drew upon particular new media literacies such as play, appropriation, collective intelligence, multitasking, judgment, transmedia navigation, negotiation, and visualization (Jenkins, 2006). Such new media literacies served as core cultural competencies and social skills in a new media landscape, but more importantly emerged as key practices within youth cultural production and participatory politics. The latter offers new insights that put into view the centrality of pedagogy as well as policy that link educational and cultural institutions to support youth engagement.

Author

• Korina Jocson, University of Massachusetts - Amherst