"We Make It Pop": Transforming Urban Youth Representations Through Community News

• In Event: 72.063 - Identity Production in Progress! Multimodal and Creative Engagements With Media Across Genres

Abstract

This paper explores how community news production enables non-dominant youth to author, contest and negotiate their social identities. Specifically, our case study looks at how a group of African-American city youth multimodally represent their civic and cultural agency through a collaboratively authored public access news show. Using multimodal discourse analysis (Baldry & Thibault, 2006; Kress, 2006; Halverson, Bass, & Woods, 2012) and interviews with youth media producers, we trace how the show constructs an alternative multimodal narrative to the stigmatizing portrayal of teens in mainstream news. Drawing on Bakhtinian (1973; 1986) theory of socio-linguistic voicing, we analyze how through “carnivalizing” news genre conventions and “ventriloquating” journalistic discourses, youth producers position themselves in-the-middle-of and in-response-to a polyphony of public claims about their generation and community.

Through multimodal discourse analysis of selected segments and “Directors’ Commentary” interviews with youth producers, we analyze strategies youth media makers use to create video texts that both appropriate generic traditions and renew them with the youths' own perspectives and practices. The show's producers mobilize various narrative and semiotic resources, combining aspects of news broadcast genre and youth cultural codes via body language, gaze, dress, graphics and special effects to position themselves as credible and authoritative speakers of both reported truth and the youth experience. These acts of genre-bending stretch and play with conventions of social languages and media genres to contest and reconfigure relations of power and ways of accomplishing legibility within those discourses. Genre-bending happens both at micro and macro time-scales, as youth creators innovate across multiple takes in a single shoot, or create new practices that become recurring traditions in future episodes (Saxe et al, 2009). The show’s circulation across broadcast and digital channels serves a critical function in accomplishment of the “news genre,” and positions the show’s producers as valuable resource brokers for teens and institutions in their community. Correspondingly, audience engagement and feedback become catalysts for expansive learning cycles for the show’s producers and viewers, leading to further experiments and innovations (Engeström & Sannino, 2010). Through collaborative production of counter-stratifying representations, youth producers create new narrative genres that that they then take up in personal media projects and encounters with new social and cultural situations. In the process, they develop new possibilities for being and acting together in the world (Miller, 1984; Berlant, 2011). Design implications for creating learning environments that support hybridity, dialogue and experimentation within disciplinary conventions will be discussed.

Authors

• Natalia Smirnov, Northwestern University

• Wan Shun Eva Lam, Northwestern University