Youth Media: Negotiating Roles and Goals in Producing Community Media

Presenter: Amy Bach, University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education

Date:  Thursday, April 16, 4-6pm

Join us for a stimulating discussion of media literacy issues and rich networking opportunities.  Event will be live streamed and recorded.  If you are unable to attend live, please join our virtual forum.

We'll discuss the tensions between nurturing youth voice, promoting positive community action, and developing media literacy through youth media programs.

Youth media makers must traverse a terrain of knowledge/power to create non-commercial, public media to address community issues as an educational endeavor within a culture driven by private, corporate media interests.

Sharing findings from two years of ethnographic research in a youth media organization that is part of a larger public access television station, Amy Bach will describe how participants and facilitators negotiate the power and potential of youth media production.

Where ‘youth voice' is not critically examined, young people at times create media texts that reproduce sexist, racist, homophobic, and ethnocentric beliefs from their own cultural and media experiences. How can youth media programs empower youth voice to transform community issues rather than reproduce them?

Please join us to share your insight and experience addressing these and other issues. In hosting the Media Smart Seminars, the Media Education Lab brings together a wide range of media professionals and students in education, arts, production, business, science, politics, community programs and parenting from across the Philadelphia and mid-Atlantic regions. 

Post-seminar gathering: Standard Tap (2nd & Poplar), 6:30 - 8:30 pm