Youth Video and Affect Over Time

• In Event: 34.080 - Affective Potentials in Informal, Media-Rich Learning Programs: New Directions in Theory and Design

Abstract

Objectives and Theoretical Framework
This paper explores how attending to “affect” frames the resonances of experiences in a youth documentary production organization in the lives of that program’s alumni. When we talk about affect in this paper, we are referencing both the ways that affect is represented in the body and through emotions, as well as the ways that affect is discursively represented during reflective interviews with alumni from a youth media program. We draw on literature on youth media (Goodman, 2003; Tyner, 2015), affect in education (Boler, 1999; Enriquez, Johnson, Kontovourki & Mallozzi, 2016), and time and memory (Brockmeier, 2002) to anchor a discussion of what can be learned from moments that come up when revisiting the experiences of a youth media program with alumni at different temporal distances from participation.

Methods and Data
In order to explore how experiences with youth media production resonate with people throughout their lives, we conducted video interviews with alumni from the Educational Video Center’s youth documentary programs across the organization’s more than 30-year history. We talked with alumni and watched their films together to see what memories and feelings they would share through revisiting their filmmaking. We devised a multimodal analysis method that places the films alongside the interview footage in order to examine how affect was embodied by the alumni, as well as their use of affect to reflect on their filmmaking experiences. We will present video artifacts from the interview process and the youth films in order to share this experience multi-modally.

Discussion and Significance
Celebrating video as an educational tool is not the aim of this paper, but we attend to its affordances in this particular program as a way of thinking through the roles of arts and media technologies in shaping spaces where youth find care and connection. Video enters our project in three ways. We use it as a way of documenting and representing the affective dimensions of engaging in reflective interviews with alumni that go beyond what could be represented in printed words. We use the films produced by participants as a way of sharing an experience and bringing up memories of the program both directly captured and in varying ways indexed by the films they made as youth. And finally, we explore together the role producing a video played in connecting alumni with each other, adults, educational practices and institutions, the social issues they explored through their documentaries, members of their communities, and elements of identities like “filmmaker” and “activist.” We ask our audience to consider how attending to affect through video might help us shift the way we think about what counts as “evidence” and “significant” in educational spaces.

Authors

• Lalitha Vasudevan, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Joseph Riina-Ferrie, Teachers College, Columbia University