The Politics of Place, Media Production, and Collaborative Research

• In Event: Co-Creating Emancipatory Spaces With Youth

Abstract

Objectives: The purpose of the study is to examine how place as relational shapes learning opportunities and the ways in which place-based media production support youth-centered research.

Theoretical framework: This study draws on theoretical perspectives that view place as lived space (Lefebvre (1974/1991; Soja, 1989) and place as relational, moving, and changing over time (Massey, 2005). Such consideration is attentive to new media technologies connecting people across distance, migrations of people, and circulations of information in various spheres of life. As a product of social relations, place can be conceived as a “meeting place” or an “intersection” imbued with social meanings, power relations, and the politics of place (Massey, 2005) with overlapping, sometimes conflicting, social realities that must be negotiated.

Methods and data: In this year-long collaborative research situated in a high school multimedia communications class in western Massachusetts, we collected data including student and teacher interviews, field notes from participant observations, videotaping of class episodes, student media work, and teacher curricular materials. Content and visual analysis yielded emerging patterns in the learning and production process. What surfaced in the analysis is the notion of place as relational. It became apparent how place was shaping students’ participation in a media communications class and simultaneously how students’ participation was shaping the class, the school, and the broader community through select topics and representations of the city in student-produced videos.

Results and conclusions: A close look at a particular class project highlighting aspects of the school and the city demonstrated the ways in which students constructed relational experiences as racialized, gendered, and minoritized youth in order to disrupt dominant discourses of educational and social issues affecting their lives. The study’s findings suggest the value of place-based media production to position students as active producers of knowledge and to insert themselves into the politics of place.

Significance: This collaborative research brings forth new questions about future designs of school-community-university partnerships with an eye toward youth participatory action research (Cammarota & Fine, 2008) and critical place inquiry (Tuck & McKenzie, 2014). The politics of place and the pedagogical possibilities of place are important to consider for innovating practices in and beyond the classroom.

Author

• Korina Jocson, University of Massachusetts - Amherst