University of British Columbia

Graduate Student, Department of Language and Literacy Education

Thesis Title: Global Networks, Local Reels: Social Media and Civic Education in Transnational Settings

About

Broadly, I am interested in theories of the public sphere, youth media and cultural practices, gender & sexuality, and the transnational and cosmopolitan. My current research is on youth media and transnationality, and the ways in which transnational groups of youth experience and engage mobility through video in civic-oriented international development programs.


A little bit about my research project:

Scores of youth media programs operate globally on the hope that media engagement will foster voice and empowerment for young people involved with them, yet there is little understanding of the ways in which the media production and pedagogical practices of these programs and youth are situated within broader discussions on media, development, literacy, and globalization. This dissertation research is about relational mobility and agency in youth media, and attends specifically to a transnational youth media and development program in rural Nicaragua run by Plan International and Amigos de las Americas. Through video production, diverse youth narrate complicated stories about agency and mobility in a globalized world, stories that offer both resistance and reification of global narratives about hope, youth, and mobility. There is engagement with notions of power and marginalization through the expectation that youth engage with social issues, and the framing of media practice as intertwined with the pursuit of hope. The task, and the youth’s relationship to each other, is fraught: there is an insistence that they work together, that North American, Dominican and urban Nicaraguan youth have the right to enter into collaboration with rural Nicaraguan youth and communities and have a voice in the creation of videos and their subsequent sharing through in a variety of mediated spaces. There is an explicit insistence that youth have a story to tell, that that story is indeed tell-able through new media practices and that the story, told in new media, is related to their becoming leaders, activists, and young people involved in “development,” or “civic engagement.” This research explores these paradoxes, focusing on how youth media makers negotiate agency and mobility in media production, and how their media productions themselves are shaped by diverse and complicated mobilities. Questions of youth-led media activism and social engagement become highly relevant in understanding the relational mobility of transnational youth media makers, as do the transnational media networks and socialities that these youth access and build in order to create and activate their work.

Some of the questions I am thinking about are:

How do relations of transnationality, mobility, and hope shape practices of youth media? What stories are tellable, and how are they told? What is the relationship between mobility and transnational youth media, and can mobility be "told" or accessed via media production?  How is mobility enacted in the storylines in relation to real/material mobilites? How is mobility evidenced via media production?  How do hope and mobility structure and dis/enable transnational youth media practices within and outside of organizational programming?

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