ABSTRACT
Although scholarship in cultural studies, critical media pedagogy, and youth studies developed a set of theoretical ideas in examining how globalization is reshaping youth participation in media, particularly in the context of the postcolonial world, a certain theoretical disquiet prevails in exploring young people’s media engagement through the inter-linked concepts of citizenship, civil society, and public sphere. To overcome the theoretical conundrums, some scholars pointed out that concepts such as citizenship, civil society, and public sphere do not explain the actually existing social realities in the postcolonial world (Chatterjee, 2004; Diouf, 2003; Obadare, 2004). The questions raised regarding the nonapplicability of concepts, though important, do not explain how certain developments in globalization and media convergence enable young people to create “new politico-cultural spaces” and to refashion notions of participation, citizenship, and civil society in particularly important ways.
