DIY Citizenship in Action: Muslim Female YouTubers Speak Back

• In Event: Video Production as Democracy Education

Abstract

This paper is based on a two-year collaborative visual ethnography (Pink, 2007; Rose, 2012) that engages the media making practices of three Somali-Canadian Muslim female youth YouTubers as a form of media activism and DIY civic engagment (Ratto & Boler, 2014). As female members of a marginalized community, they bring unique perspectives to YouTube culture through the production of videos based on their lived experiences. They are the first Somali women, and the first Muslim women, to produce this genre of comedic content on YouTube in response to absence in the school curriculum and stereotypes in the mass media (Watt, 2011; 2012). What can we learn from the out-of-school (Sanford et al., 2014) media making practices of these young women regarding the potential of video production and sharing on YouTube to engage DIY citizenship in the digital age?

YouTube was first conceived as an alternative public cultural space where seldom heard voices might find expression (Jenkins et al, 2006). While we remain cautious about the commercial aspects of YouTube and about overstating the democratizing potential of new media in general terms, for the youth collaborators in this study producing and sharing videos on YouTube has had an enormous impact on their lives and identities. They consider their work transformative not only in terms of how they view themselves, but given their success, also how Somali Muslim females are viewed by others, both in their own communities and beyond. In this sense, their media making and sharing exemplifies a critical digital literacy practice (Ávila & Zacher Pandya, 2013). Their groundbreaking videos have gone viral, gained a global following, and attracted the attention of mainstream media. In 2014, they produced a video that won three international awards and was screened at the Paley Center for Media in New York City and at the Tisch School of the Arts at N.Y.U.

Through their engagement with YouTube these youth have been able to enter into political conversations on difference that otherwise would not have been available to them. They are also playing a leadship role (Ibrahim & Steinberg, 2013) with other female youth interested in media production. These YouTubers are thus enacting and performing “DIY citizenship” (Ratto & Boler, 2014) at the intersections of gender, ethnicity, class, racialization, and religion via the affordances of digital tools and social media. They are not just consumers of information, but are producing alternative media messages (Reitsamer & Zobl, 2014) missing from public and schooling discourse to influence the status quo.

Ethnographic data were collected, including: interviews, group conversations, field notes, documents, videos, and photographs. Analysis involved thematic coding. Connections were made to academic literature in new/digital literacies, critical youth studies, and feminist theory. In addition to traditional written texts, we are representing this study as a documentary for widespread digital dissemination. This research makes an important scholarly contribution to understandings of new literacy practices youth engage in outside-of-school, and why they matter. This project received approval from the Conjoint Faculties Research Ethics Board at the researcher’s university.

Author

• Diane Patricia Watt, University of Ottawa