Producing Authenticity: Urban Youth Arts, Rogue Archives and Negotiating a Home for Social Justice
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.26522/ssj.v15i3.2348Keywords:
youth arts, non-formal learning, authenticity and trust, urban spaceAbstract
Social justice needs a home, a place where it can be found, especially for young people growing up in fragmented and increasingly inequitable societies. Community youth arts organizations have secured a certain prominence in this context over the past three decades and are now part of the urban infrastructures that shape connected learning networks in highly industrialized nations. In this capacity, youth arts organizations regularly engage a language and aesthetics of authenticity and trust as part of how they call out, represent and make a home for children and youth. This paper examines how authenticity in youth culture and youth cultural expression is negotiated by arts organizations and how organizations locate their own trustworthiness as allies of young people through the curation of online media archives.
The analysis draws on the internet media archives of two youth arts organizations in Canada’s largest English-speaking cities. The Oasis Skateboard Factory (OSF) in Toronto, ON is an extension program of the Toronto District School Board that enables participants to create their own brands and learn to run a skateboard or professional design business. ReelYouth (Vancouver, BC) started in Vancouver in 2005 as a community media empowerment project, and now delivers programs across Canada and internationally.The claims to youth authenticity articulated in each media archive reveal how authenticity and trust are negotiated ideologically by each organization and how organizations mark their ontological status, as a home from which young people can think and respond to an unjust world.
I examine how youth authenticity is produced by analyzing how discourses of youth identity, connection and trust are deployed across each archive. Whilst showcasing how authenticity is negotiated by each group, I show how the production of authenticity discourses by OSF and ReelYouth simultaneously convey a deeper reality: the way youth arts groups operate as care structures (Scannell, 2014) that offer ontological security (Giddens, 1991), and places of increasing “awareness of previously unnoticed interconnections” (Frosh, 2019, p. 16) for youth. In this way, they operate as sites of border work, places of routing from which the work of social justice can be borne.
References
Abidin, C. (2018). Internet celebrity: Understanding fame online. Emerald Publishing.
Amin, A. (2014). Lively infrastructure. Theory, Culture & Society, 31(7/8), 137-161.
Appadurai, A. (2013). The future as cultural fact: Essays on the global condition. Verso.
Auslander, P. (2008). Liveness: Performance in a mediatized culture. Routledge.
Bekerman, Z., Burbules, N. C., & Silberman Keller, D. (Eds.). (2005). Learning in places: The informal education reader. Peter Lang.
Berger, P., & Luckmann, T. (1967). The social construction of reality: A treatise on the social construction of knowledge. Doubleday.
Bruns, A. (2019). Are filter bubbles real? Polity Press.
Christenson, P., & O’Brien, M. (2003). Children in the city: Introducing new perspectives. In P. Christenson & M. O’Brien (Eds.), Children in the city: Home, neighbourhood and community (pp. 1-12). RoutledgeFalmer.
Chun, W. H. K. (2016). Updating to remain the same: Habitual new media. MIT Press.
Crooks, H. (2018). Reel girls: Approaching gendered cyberviolence with young people through the lens of participatory video [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada.
De Kosnik, A. (2016). Rogue archives: Digital cultural memory and media fandom. MIT Press.
Drotner, K. (1999). Dangerous media? Panic discourses and dilemma of modernity. Paedogogica Historica, 35(3), 593-619.
Frosh, P. (2019). The poetics of digital media. Polity.
Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and self-identity: Self and society in the late modern age. Polity.
Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford University Press.
Ito, M. (2018). Affinity online: How connection and shared interest fuel learning. New York University Press.
Jenss, H. (2004). Dressed in history: Retro styles and the construction of authenticity in youth culture. Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture, 8(4), 387-403.
Kompridis, N. (2006) Critique and disclosure: Critical theory between past and future. MIT Press.
Krashinski, S. (Dec 6, 2013). Oasis Skateboard Factory gives struggling teens a chance to show their skills. The Globe and Mail. Retrieved from https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/toronto/oasis-skateboard-factory-gives-struggling-teens-a-chance-to-show-their-skills/article15810072/#c-image-0
Kwon, S.-A. (2013). Uncivil youth: Race, activism and affirmative governmentality. Duke University Press.
Lischer-Katz, Z. (2017). Studying the materiality of media archives in the age of digitization: Forensics, infrastructures and ecologies. First Monday, 22, 1-22.
Marwick, A. (2013). Status update: Celebrity, publicity and branding in a social media age. Yale University Press.
Nayak, A. (2003). Race, place and globalization: Youth cultures in a changing world. Oxford University Press.
Oasis Skateboard Factory pops up at Baitshop (January 28, 2013). Retrieved from https://www.blogto.com/sports_play/2013/01/oasis_skateboard_factory_pops_up_at_the_baitshop/
Pauwels, L. (2012). A multimodal framework for analyzing websites as cultural expressions. Journal of Computer Mediated Communication. 17, 247-265.
Poyntz, S. R. (2013). Public space and media education in the city. In P. Fraser & J. Wardle (Eds.), Current perspectives in media education - Beyond a manifesto for media education (pp. 91-109). Palgrave Macmillan.
Poyntz, S. R. (2018). Vancouver youthspaces: A political economy of digital learning communities. In M. Dezuanni, M. Foth, K. Mellan & H. Hughes (Eds.), Digital participation through social living labs: Valuing local knowledge, enhancing engagement (pp. 277-297). Elsevier.
Poyntz, S. R., Coles, R., Fitzsimmons-Frey, H., Bains, A., Sefton-Green, J., & Hoechsmann, M. (2019). The non-formal learning sector, youth provision and paradox in the learning city. Oxford Review of Education, 45(2), 258-278.
Reel Youth. (n.d.). https://www.reelyouth.ca
Robards, B., Lincoln, S., Pinkard, B. C., & Harris, J. (2018). Remembering through Facebook: Mediated memory and intimate digital traces. In A. S. Dobson, B. Robards & N. Carah (Eds.), Digital intimate publics and social media (pp. 75-91). Springer.
Scannell, P. (2014). Television and the meaning of live: An enquiry into the human situation. Polity.
Sefton-Green, J. (2013). Learning at not-school: A review of study, theory, and advocacy for education in non-formal settings. MIT Press.
Sefton-Green, J., & Erstad, O. (Eds.) (2019). Learning beyond the school: International perspectives on the schooled society. New York: Routledge.
Vannini, P., & Williams, P. (Eds.). (2009). Authenticity in culture, self and society. Ashgate.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Articles are published in Studies in Social Justice under the Creative Commons "Attribution/Non-Commercial/No Derivative Works" Canada licence.
The copyright for the articles published in this journal is retained by the authors, with first publication rights granted to the journal. By virtue of their appearance in this open access journal, articles may be used, with proper attribution, in educational and other non-commercial settings. The submission of a manuscript to Studies in Social Justice will be taken to mean that the author understands and agrees to the following:
- the manuscript represents original work not previously published;
- the manuscript is not being considered elsewhere for publication in the same language (publication elsewhere in an alternate language does not preclude acceptance of submission to Studies in Social Justice);
- appropriate written copyright permissions have been secured for republication of any copyrighted material contained in the manuscript;
- copyright for this article is retained by the author, with first publication rights granted to Studies in Social Justice;
- by virtue of its appearance in this open access journal, it is understood that the article is freely available for use, with proper attribution, for educational and other non-commercial purposes;
- reuse of the article for commercial purposes by anyone other than the author requires permission of the author;
- the author agrees to cite Studies in Social Justice as a source whenever h/she later republishes or reuses the article in other platforms.
