ABSTRACT
This chapter is located within the growing body of work in child and youth studies which points to the significance of the participation of children and young people, at least in principle, to contributing to the official dialogue around issues of concern to their everyday lives. Indeed, there is a growing consensus amongst those involved in social programming that unless young people are given a more significant voice in participating in policy dialogue about their own wellbeing, the programs themselves are doomed to failure (Ford et al., 2003). While there are many different approaches to addressing the critical issue of the participation of children and young people, one area that has received considerable attention over the last decade or more is in the area of participatory and community-based research (particularly in the context of development studies), and the use of visual and other arts-based methodologies such as photovoice, participatory video, drawing and map-making, and digital storytelling, as tools and methods of both research and engagement (see Clacherty, 2005; Malone, 2008; Moletsane et al., 2008). These participatory visual approaches go beyond simply being interventions, in that they typically yield vast collections of visual data in the form of photos, videos, and digital stories which researchers can use to document and study various social issues, and which communities themselves might use. A criticism of this work, particularly in relation to children and young people’s participation
is that too often it is “adult-led, adult-designed and conceived from an adult perspective” (Kellet et al., 2004, p. 329), and that it often misses the mark in relation to what young people
are actually doing on their own (as part of a DIY, do-it-yourself culture), or what they could be doing in a participatory research context that is more youth-centered and youth-led. Another criticism is that beyond the initial generation of the visual images, young people are often not involved in actually working with the data other than in relation to creating captions, for example, for the images. At the same time, in the extensive body of work on youth and digital media (see for example Bloustien, 2003; Buckingham and Sefton-Green, 1994; Carrington and Robinson, 2009; De Castell and Jenson, 2003; Jenkins, 2006), it is clear that participation itself is a critical feature of what Henry Jenkins terms a “participatory cultures” landscape in referring to DIY media use and other youth-led online practices. In this context young people, as Carrington and Robinson (2009) point out, typically engage in the “remix” and “replay” of visual and other digital artifacts through You Tube and various social networking sites. We even think of this landscape as a global “social archive.” In engaging in these practices young people often engage further in their own cultural productions. While there is a great deal of convergence between these two broad areas of study, (1) partici-
patory visual studies with youth and (2) youth-focused digital media studies, what is perhaps most “hopeful” is that both have a great deal to contribute to deepening an understanding of the links between digital media and the idea of “youth as knowledge producers,” a term first used by Lankshear and Knobel (2003) to refer to the ways in which young people can simultaneously be resources for each other and play a key role as protagonists in the production of knowledge about their everyday lives. The aim of this chapter is to describe some of the ways in which young people are using media within a social change context through the production of media and media messages, and to consider what difference such approaches make. The chapter prioritizes qualitative and interpretivist methods of media usage and discusses media forums/ tools such as photovoice, digital story-telling, participatory video, blogging, and children’s radio.
Much of the work that we describe in this chapter is located within community-based research that addresses the critical issues determined by the youth participants themselves (e.g., poverty, gender based violence, and HIV and AIDS). Most of our own work addresses these issues in a sub-Saharan African context, working through the Centre for Visual Methodologies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal where we have been testing out participatory approaches and media as tools for addressing social change for close to a decade. Added to our review of work in this context will be a review of projects with marginalized youth in other parts of Africa, North America, Australia, and Nepal.
