Participant or Zombie? Expanding Jenkins’ Participatory Politics Framework With Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR)

• In Event: Theorizing, Soliciting, and Commodifying Fan Participation

Abstract

This paper argues that Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) work is raising new questions regarding what Henry Jenkins and others have termed participatory politics. The paper considers the ways that ideas of participation and non-participation have been framed in relation to Jenkins’ work and in the context of YPAR projects informed by participatory democratic theory. It argues that by working with those in communities of structured inequities as they identify and research common problems and then seek to address them, YPAR enables scholars to listen to young people as they think about their publics and about how those publics might be constituted and addressed through visionary storytelling. New questions for participatory politics emerge, including: how might young people be encouraged to think about the publics that are key to the changes they wish to see? And how might those publics be (or become) “audiences” for such visionary storytelling?

Author

• Lynn Schofield Clark, U of Denver