This book demonstrates how young people from around the world appropriate and reconfigure old and new media in the process of creating personal and social narratives. Five youth media initiatives from Palestine, Israel, India, South Africa, and the United States are examined as case studies to explore how media engagement is being carried out, especially among poor youth. Drawing upon, and combining a range of insights from postcolonial and feminist epistemologies, media and cultural studies, certain strands of media education scholarship, and philosophical writings of Paul Ricoeur, Sanjay Asthana probes these narratives through a set of inter-related questions including: What are the salient features of the youth media practices? What kinds of media narratives are produced and how do these relate to young people’s notions of identity and selfhood? How do young people refashion the notions of the political, participation, and democratic engagement? What kinds of translocal connections and collaboration are being forged, and how do these relate to the global-local dialectic in youth media practices? The book reveals that young people produce media forms that are not only bracing critiques of adult-centered conceptions of citizenship, civil society, and public sphere, but present concrete practical elaborations of the various notions.
