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.
