Cultural Production and Participatory Politics

Youth, Symbolic Creativity, and Activism

Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández, Alexandra Arráiz Matute, Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández, Alexandra Arráiz Matute

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367266431
• eBook ISBN: 9781000651461
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art & Business

This book addresses the conceptual lapse in the literature regarding the relationship between cultural production and participatory politics by examining their connections in a range of national and political contexts.

Each chapter examines how youth engage cultural production as part of their political participation, and how political participation is sometimes central to, and expressed through, cultural production. The contributing authors provide examples of the intersections between youth cultural production and participatory politics and bring together a range of approaches to the examination of these intersections, providing illustrations of the complexities involved in these processes. Each of the chapters takes up different kinds of practices – from street art to video production, from online activism to installation work. They also examine a range of political contexts – from students striking at the University of Puerto Rico to activism in community arts centres and university classrooms. The book considers what becomes evident when close attention is paid to the intersection of cultural production and participatory politics: what does participatory politics help people to see about cultural production and how does cultural production expand how people understand participatory politics?

This book was originally published as a special issue of Curriculum Inquiry.

1
Learning connected civics

Narratives, practices, infrastructures

Mizuko Ito, Elisabeth Soep, Neta Kligler-Vilenchik, Sangita Shresthova, Liana Gamber-Thompson and Arely Zimmerman

Bringing together popular culture studies and sociocultural learning theory, in this paper we formulate the concept of “connected civics,” grounded in the idea that young people today are engaging in new forms of politics that are profoundly participatory. Often working in collaboration with adult allies, they leverage digital media and emerging modes of connectivity to achieve voice and influence in public spheres. The rise of participatory politics provides new opportunities to support connected civics, which is socially engaged and embedded in young people’s personal interests, affinities, and identities.

We posit three supports that build consequential connections between young people’s cultural affinities, their agency in the social world, and their civic engagement: 1. By constructing hybrid narratives, young people mine the cultural contexts they are embedded in and identify with for civic and political themes relevant to issues of public concern. 2. Through shared civic practices, members of affinity networks lower barriers to entry and multiply opportunities for young people to engage in civic and political action. 3. By developing cross-cutting infrastructure, young people–often with adults–institutionalize their efforts in ways that make a loosely affiliated network into something that is socially organized and self-sustaining.

Drawing from a corpus of interviews and case studies of youth affinity networks at various sites across the US, this paper recasts the relationship between connected learning, cultural production, and participatory politics.

Slam poets who have grown up competing individually for high scores decide to join forces, launching sustained campaigns related to violence prevention and environmental justice. Harry Potter fans organize collective actions for fair trade chocolate and marriage equality. Young activists fighting for U.S. immigration reform appropriate iconography and storylines from popular comics to make their case. These are all examples of youth mobilizing their cultural contexts and productions to pursue civic and political action.

Today's networked ecosystem offers near-constant opportunities for young people to engage with peers in a range of ways. They can “hang out” together while physically apart, sharing photos, videos, captions and comments all throughout the day and night; and they can “geek out” together by swapping ideas, techniques and critiques related to projects that tap their deepest interests and aspirations (Ito et al., 2009). Whether by curating a public presence through Tumblr or Twitter, remixing videos and memes, or moderating an online discussion, young people cultivate skills and dispositions that do more than promote personal expression for its own sake. These same skills and dispositions are indispensible within “participatory politics” (Kahne, Middaugh, & Allen, 2014). Through participatory politics, young people use digital tools and other emerging forms of social connectivity to express voice and influence on issues of public concern (Kahne, Middaugh & Allen, 2014).

Commentators bemoaning youth apathy worry that digitally-mediated, expression-based forms of civic activity will make young people less likely to take part in institutionalized politics (such as voting), but recent research has indicated the opposite. Involvement in participatory culture—meaning contexts that actively encourage members to make and share creative products and practices that matter to them, supported by informal mentorship (Jenkins, 2006)—can be a gateway to political engagement (Cohen, Kahne, Bowyer, Middaugh, & Rogowski, 2012). Moreover, participatory politics are much more equitably distributed across racial and ethnic groups than conventional measures of political engagement, like voter turnout (Cohen, Kahne et. al., 2012). A growing body of ethnographic case studies on participatory politics advances these quantitative findings by delving into the nuances and mechanics of how connections between participatory culture and politics are forged (Gamber-Thompson, 2012; Kligler-Vilenchik & Shresthova, 2012; Kligler-Vilenchik, 2013; Pfister, 2014; Shresthova, 2013; Zimmerman, 2012).

This groundswell of research on participatory politics shows young people linking the experiences of belonging, voice, leadership, and mobilization that they are developing through participatory culture to practices more conventionally thought of as civic and political in nature. Young people are also working in the opposite direction. Those who start off with civic and political commitments bolster those efforts by linking them to participatory culture. The research indicates that these connections between participatory culture and politics don't necessarily form automatically and can be actively brokered by peers and adults, and through organizational infrastructures.

In order to understand the unique conditions for learning that this emerging digital media landscape affords, this paper brings together the conceptual frameworks and case studies from two research networks established by the MacArthur Foundation that focus respectively on participatory politics and connected learning. What are the characteristics of the environments that support these connections between social and cultural activities, civic and political practices, and developmental outcomes for young people? And how can we better support these connections and outcomes?

We propose “connected civics” as a form of learning that mobilizes young people's deeply felt interests and identities in the service of achieving the kind of civic voice and influence that is characteristic of participatory politics. Of course there is nothing new about the idea that interest, affinity, and identity are drivers of political action, but too often when it comes to learning, we can default to civic educational experiences that fail to tap the kinds of cultural practices young people produce through their everyday symbolic expression. “Learning” connected civics does not entail individually-driven “transfer” between the personally meaningful cultural projects young people actively create and modes of concerted political engagement, but is centered instead on building shared contexts that allow for what we elaborate below as “consequential connections” between these spheres of activity.

We describe three kinds of supports for these consequential connections: 1. by constructing hybrid narratives, young people mine their cultural contexts and products for civic and political themes relevant to issues of public concern; 2. through shared civic practices, young people lower barriers to entry and multiply opportunities for young people to engage in civic and political action that can be temporary or more lasting in nature; 3. by developing cross-cutting infrastructure, young people–often working in collaboration with adults–institutionalize their efforts in ways that make a loosely affiliated network into something that is socially organized, self-sustaining, and recognized as such by those outside the original interest-driven community. Our focus throughout the article is on identifying the features of environments that build consequential connections rather than the “in the head” work (for example, knowing who controls the judiciary branch or which party holds the majority in the U.S. Senate) that very often draws attention within debates about the state of civic education or youth political participation.

Conceptual Foundation

Our central question is, how can we support young people's learning and development of deeply personal and culturally resonant forms of civic agency? In order to address this question, we draw from two bodies of theory and research–studies of youth popular culture and sociocultural approaches to learning.

Since well before the advent of digital networks, researchers have documented how young people's social and recreational pursuits offer avenues for participation in public and political life. Youth ethnographers have described the complex micropolitical dynamics of teen social status negotiations (Eckert, 1989; Milner, 2004; Pascoe, 2007). Cultural studies scholars have a long tradition of locating politics in popular culture, taking special interest in the subcultural engagements of youth and the civic and political activities of young people who've been marginalized on the basis of race, class, and gender (Ginwright, Noguera, & Cammarota, 2006; Hall & Jefferson, 2006; Hebdige, 1979; Willis, 1990). These studies have helped us to see how decorating the walls of a bedroom, or cultivating and sharing tastes in music, or styling hair in a particular way, can amount to potent forms of cultural production and contestation. Young people producing these practices are often expressing and in some cases organizing resistance to institutions and ideologies they deem problematic, obsolete, or oppressive.

More recent research has interrogated how these dynamics are playing out in contemporary digital environments (boyd, 2014; Ito et al., 2009; Kligler-Vilenchik & Shresthova, 2012). Through remix and other forms of media appropriation, popular culture fans and other consumers can exercise citizenship and create frameworks for activism (Jenkins, Ford, & Green, 2013). Deploying a “logic of connective action,” young people circulate civic content across fluid social networks that don't necessarily require joining hierarchical political institutions (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012). In so doing, they enact forms of citizenship that privilege meaning, identity, and inter-subjectivity as everyday forces that shape political life and opportunity (Bakardijeva, 2009; Dahlgren, 2005). The notion of participatory politics identifies the conditions under which young people's everyday social and cultural engagements can foster forms of civic and political agency that are increasingly accessible due to emerging modes of social connectivity and the spread of digital and networked technology.

While we begin with this appreciation of the political potential of youth-driven online activity, we also feel it is critically important that we do not end there. Our approach to participatory politics recognizes that these activities can be tied to meaningful learning and development as products of participation in civic, political, and public life. Simply circulating civic content among peers does not necessarily do much of anything for the people who hit “share,” nor does it necessarily advance the set of concerns they aim to address (though it can, and sharing information can sometimes be anything but simple and carry serious risk). The overwhelming dataflow that results can sometimes blur specific political messages and distract from the arduous work of organizing sustained, connected action; in other words, as Jodi Dean (2005) has argued, the waves of content can start to feel like part of a never-ending stream. Thus, we need to actively support learning and consequential connections between spaces of youth cultural production, their agency, and their civic and political worlds.

This brings us to a growing body of research in the learning sciences that has examined how learning is connected, reinforced, or disconnected across settings. Much of this research is concerned with the relationship between in-school and out-of-school learning, puzzling over: how classroom learning gets applied (or not) to everyday life (Hull & Shultz, 2002; Lave, 1988); how children's home and peer cultures inflect school achievement (Carter, 2005; Goldman, 2006; Varenne & McDermott, 1998); or how educators can intentionally design digitally-rich, production-oriented communities that bridge divides in access to robust learning environments (Barron, Gomez, Pinkard, & Martin, 2014). The process of connecting learning across settings is not a simple ma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Dedication
• Introduction – Creation as participation/participation as creation: Cultural production, participatory politics, and the intersecting lines of identification and activism
• 1 Learning connected civics: Narratives, practices, infrastructures
• 2 New media literacies as social action: The centrality of pedagogy in the politics of knowledge production
• 3 Public pedagogy in the creative strike: Destabilizing boundaries and re- imagining resistance in the University of Puerto Rico
• 4 Educating for cultural citizenship: Reframing the goals of arts education
• 5 The art of youth rebellion
• 6 Shooting back in the occupied territories: An anti-colonial participatory politics
• 7 Glyphing decolonial love through urban flash mobbing and Walking with our Sisters
• Index