from social movements from around the world).
A subset of this larger research network, the Media, Activism, and Participatory Politics (MAPP) research team at the University of Southern California, has developed case studies of innovative networks and organizations that have deployed participatory politics to get young people involved in efforts to heighten public awareness and promote social change. Altogether, we’ve interviewed several hundred young activists drawn from the following efforts:
Invisible Children (IC), an organization founded in 2005 and dedicated to ending the human rights violations perpetrated by warlord Joseph Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army. IC stumbled into the global limelight when they released Kony 2012, a 30-minute film that broke YouTube’s viewership records.
The Harry Potter Alliance, a nonprofit organization also established in 2005, which encourages civic and political engagement by using metaphors from J. K. Rowling’s best-selling fantasy series. The name Imagine Better is used for HPA’s efforts to expand its outreach to engage with a range of other fan communities, including those around The Hunger Games and Superman. HPA exists in a loose affiliation with Nerdfighters, a YouTube community that initially formed through videos exchanged between vlogging brothers Hank and John Green.
The youth networks connected to the Muslim Public Affairs Council and Muslim Youth Group based at the Islamic Center of Southern California, which engage American Muslim identities by encouraging expression and community-focused civic identity formation in a post-9/11 climate.
The network-based, undocumented youth commonly referred to as DREAMers who engage in immigrant rights organizing and activism to achieve legislative reform.
Students for Liberty (SFL), a group based in libertarian economic and social theories that has recently advocated for an expansion of “second-wave libertarianism.”
Research for this book was conducted over a period of six years and included interviews, participant observation, and media content analysis. Our selection of the cases referenced above reflected an initial desire to look at groups defined around brands (Invisible Children), fan interests (Harry Potter Alliance, Imagine Better, and the Nerdfighters), faith-based communities (American Muslims), identity politics (DREAMers), and shared ideological and philosophical commitments (Students for Liberty). Yet, these frames broke down as we discovered each of these groups was more diverse in its background, goals, and beliefs than anticipated. While Invisible Children does use many sophisticated branding techniques to rally its supporters, we rarely heard IC members speaking of the group in those terms; many of them saw their involvement with the group as part of a much larger commitment to human rights advocacy. While Harry Potter Alliance, Imagine Better, and the Nerdfighters do build on the infrastructure and shared cultural knowledge of fandom, we also found participants who had joined because of their political commitments and who were not particularly fans of the media content being discussed. We found that American Muslim youth were seeking to change their shared cultural identity. We saw that that both American Muslim youth and DREAMers are, as groups, much more ethnically and racially diverse than many might have anticipated, and thus that both are committed to forging coalitions across different identity categories, rather than speaking from within a single demographic. Meanwhile, we had sought out the Students for Liberty in hopes of expanding beyond the progressive focus of our cases. While SFL does offer an ideological alternative, we found that these libertarians do not identify in any simple way with any given political party, that many of them do not define their identities on a progressive-conservative axis, and that at least some regard themselves to be left-libertarians, a concept that does not arise in mainstream discussions of the movement. In sum, the categories that led to the selection of these cases were shown to be not fully adequate upon our prolonged examination of these groups.
Also, while these groups clearly (and intentionally) span a broad ideological, geographical, and community spectrum, they also share important similarities. Though they differ in the degrees to which they rely on formal structures, hierarchical leadership, and centralized messaging and the extent to which they are connected with institutional politics, they all place a strong emphasis on personal and collective storytelling. These stories often depend on grassroots media production and circulation, as well as on the deployment of content worlds, often drawn from popular culture. In each case, as well, young people actively influence the practices and rhetorics of these movements. They are helping to frame the agenda. They are helping to shape the media and the messages through which they are pursuing their causes. And they are making active decisions at every stage of the process. Our cases emphasize various dimensions of participatory culture and politics. These groups involve different populations, working toward distinctive causes, and deploying varied tactics. Yet as we have been conducting this research, we have consistently been struck by these groups’ ongoing attention to the cultural and social dimensions of participation, even as they work alongside political institutions and nonprofit organizations with more conventional approaches.
Our examples here are all U.S.-based, and we locate their activities within debates about American politics. However, these same tactics are being deployed by youth-centered movements all over the world, and we are eager to see other scholars explore what it means to do participatory politics in other cultural, political, and economic contexts. As we’ve selected these cases, we are aware of the much broader range of contemporary youth movements that are applying creative approaches to shifting the political debates around the environment, public health, poverty, antimilitarism, prison reform, campaign finance and media ownership reform, labor rights, gender and sexuality issues, racism, and countless other concerns. No book could cover the full scope of youth political participation, but we explore some key organizations working on these other issues as part of the digital archive (byanymedia.org) we have built as a resource for those reading and teaching this book.
Each of the five core chapters focuses on a specific case study while exploring key aspects of a broader theory of participatory politics. This includes notions of circulation and the paradoxes of participatory politics in relation to Invisible Children (Chapter 2); cultural activism, fannish civics, and content worlds in relation to the Harry Potter Alliance, Imagine Better, and Nerdfighters (Chapter 3); the tension between publicity and privacy, storytelling and surveillance among American Muslims (Chapter 4); the value of confessional storytelling and the risks of “coming out” online in the example of the DREAMers (Chapter 5); and the relationship between participatory and institutional politics, as well as the value of educational as opposed to electoral approaches, in the case of Students for Liberty (Chapter 6).
Each of the book’s authors has been an active contributor to the MAPP research, and, while the chapters are identified with individual authors, this book reflects multiple years of conversations among us. The designated writers for each chapter oversaw the field work for that case and also did the core of the writing, though each member of the team has had input into the other chapters. Because we want to emphasize the collaborative nature of our work, the collective term “we” is used throughout to refer to the research team as a whole.
Our Book Title
Tani Ikeda, the co-founder and executive director of ImMEDIAte Justice, was one of more than 20 young activists—representing different organizations or networks—who participated in a webinar on storytelling and digital civics we organized in January 2014. Ikeda’s organization uses media training for young women to promote “a world where individuals have the freedom to make their own choices about their bodies and sexualities.” The group’s first “About Us” page on its website places an emphasis on fostering youths’ voice: “Our mission is to encourage girls to imagine a just world by telling their untold stories of gender and sexuality through film. We believe young women can have a strong and positive impact on their communities if given the tools to amplify their voice” (ImMEDIAte Justice n.d.). The group sees making informed, conscious decisions about which media to use as central to such efforts.
During
