Negotiated, contested and political: the disruptive Third Spaces of youth media production

Traditionally media production with young people has been characterized by an aspiration to ‘give voice’ or ‘empower youth’, but this core value is under threat. Recently, the rationale for undertaking youth media production has shifted to focus on enabling young people to acquire digital and entrepreneurial skills that serve the needs of rapidly changing creative industry / gig economy. In this paper, we challenge this rationale by sharing qualitative data from a young people’s media production project run in libraries in a city in the United Kingdom where participants were invited to create video games/stories. We adopt Potter and McDougall’s notion of Third Spaces as negotiated, contested and political to enable us to identify the ways in which pedagogical choices of setting, software and style of facilitation combined to support young people’s critical and creative engagement with digital media and society. We re frame notions of third spaces, seeing less a bridge between linguistic and cultural domains, arguing instead that Third Spaces are productively disruptive. We conclude by proposing a new set of pedagogical principles for critical reflection in the development and funding of digital media production with young people.

"Whilst digital media production does not inherently disrupt power relations or ensure young people’s experiences are valued, it has the potential to. In determining pedagogical approaches that make this more likely McDougall and Potter’s (2019) notion of Third Spaces as contested, negotiated and political provides a useful framework for understanding the different ways the broader context provides opportunities for productive disruptions. In this project, the disruptions resulted from a library environment where it was possible for the activity to disrupt the usual day to routines and activities. The choice of software, Twine, provided new ways to think about creating stories which heightened awareness of the reader and of narrative structure but also of online spaces which are not monetised. The facilitation disrupted the young people’s experiences of school where their stories are predominantly created in writing, individually and where there is always a ‘starter’ which limits choice. The simple act of enabling the young people to select their own ideas for stories was perhaps the most productively disruptive aspect of the project because it encouraged them to take ideas from one form and create them in another which proved to be useful in terms of critical distancing and reflection. What is more, the ability to write themselves into fictional texts and popular genres played an important role in disrupting and appropriating those very texts, for their own uses." (Parry et al., 2020: 419).