Abstract
This article reviews scholarship on youth and young adult activism in digital spaces, as young users of participatory media sites are engaging in political, civic, social, or cultural action and advocacy online to create social change. The authors argue that youth’s digital activism serves as a central mechanism to disrupt inequality, and that education research should focus on these youth practices, particularly by young people from marginalized communities or identities, in order to provide important counter-narratives to predominant stories circulating about “at-risk”or disaffected youth. The article examines young people’s use of online tools for organizing toward social change across three lines of inquiry—young people’s cultural and political uses of participatory tools and spaces online, new forms of youth civic engagement and activism, and adult-supported programs and spaces facilitating youth activism. In centering the review on youth digital activism, the authors suggest that education researchers can learn from youth themselves about how to disrupt educational inequalities, resulting in a more humanizing stance for education research that takes into fuller account the human potential of all youth, beyond school walls.
I believe that the birth of social media catalyzed the fourth wave of feminism, allowing women from all over the world to connect, share ideas and empower each other . . . I feel fortunate to be alive during this time, and my goal is to contribute to the Internet revolution by sharing my knowledge on feminism, LGBTQIA+ [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual] rights and everything political. Feminists of the past laid the groundwork for us today, and my goal is to pick up their torch.
We open this review with Sylva’s words to call attention to the ways young people are using digital tools and online spaces to document inequalities, address injustice, and take social action, building on the groundwork of previous generations of activists even as they seek to extend and transform those efforts. While contemporary scholarship on youth media, hip-hop literacies, and community-based activism has extensively documented the breadth of contemporary adolescents’ literate lives (e.g., Fisher, 2003; Lam, 2009; Moje, 2004; Morrell, 2008), adolescents are all too often positioned in education research, policy, and popular discourse as unformed, at risk, or apathetic (see Lesko, 2012). Perhaps unsurprising in the current zeitgeist, these deficitizing discourses are particularly prevalent in characterizing the lives and literacies of teens of color, LGBTQIA youth, and other young people from marginalized groups (Gadsden, Davis, & Artiles, 2009; O’Connor, Hill, & Robinson, 2009; Vasudevan & Campano, 2009). Young people today, however, are using participatory media sites like Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr to engage in advocacy and social activism that often goes unheralded, invisible until it is viewed as disruptive of schooling or society.
From #BlackLivesMatter to #LoveWins, young people are using digital media in myriad ways to connect with each other, promote social change, and counternarrate the world from their perspective. Rather than allowing adults to dominate narratives on issues facing adolescents—including gentrification, mass incarceration, neoliberal educational reform, and socioeconomic precarity in an age of global capitalism (Kinloch, 2010; Lipman, 2004, 2013; Winn, 2010)—young people today, particularly those from marginalized groups, are using social media, online fandom, and other kinds of digital affinity groups to restory the popular imagination by shaping it into their own image (Thomas & Stornaiuolo, 2016). In this chapter, we undertake a review of the literature on youth and young adult activism in digital spaces, examining how these activist practices are forms of counternarration. Defining youth digital activism as adolescent and young adult online practices that involve political, civic, social, or cultural action oriented toward social change or transformation, we argue that such activist practices can serve as a central mechanism to disrupt inequality.
Furthermore, we suggest that education research should focus on activist practices by youth from marginalized communities or identities to provide important counternarratives to discourses circulating about “at risk” or disaffected adolescents. Such a focus begins from the premise that it is vital to understand and learn from what youth are doing (how they are accessing and using these digital tools and spaces to document their experiences of injustice) and the impact and consequences of those practices (Brock, Kvasny, & Hales, 2010). An emphasis on how youth are disrupting inequalities through their social actions resists predominant perspectives about digital divides that begin from what is missing—whether from a lack of resources, practices, or opportunities. Without romanticizing youth digital activities or holding them up as transformative in and of themselves, we seek to emphasize and amplify youth efforts to be heard and to affect change in order to disrupt deficit discourses; we see such efforts as central to a humanizing stance for education research (Paris & Winn, 2013), one in which researchers focus on the full development of the person and not just adolescents’ schooled lives (Del Carmen Salazar, 2013).
After describing our framework for examining youth digital advocacy and activism, we organize our discussion into three main sections examining young people’s use of online tools for organizing toward social change. First, we review studies that examine the spaces and tools youth are using to document inequalities and take social action, including fan and hashtag activism. Next, we review studies documenting youth civic engagement and activism and consider the changing definitions of civicness. In the final section, we concentrate on educational programs and adult-mediated online spaces dedicated to youth social activism. We conclude by framing youth’s digital activism as a form of restorying (Thomas & Stornaiuolo, 2016), in which young people’s counternarrative work is seen as a central mechanism for disrupting normative and deficitizing frameworks.
Framework for Examining Youth Digital Advocacy and Activism
Keeping our goal of honoring the voices and experiences of young people in mind, we embrace a critical, sociocultural approach to researching youth digital activism, arguing that all young people have a wealth of resources and experiences they bring to bear in their engagement with the world (Blackburn, 2002, 2007; Garcia, Mirra, Morrell, Martinez, & Scorza, 2015; Lam & Rosario-Ramos, 2009; Morrell, 2008). We believe education research should operate from this asset-based stance, examining inequities from the perspectives of people who experience them while actively resisting normative epistemologies that further marginalize the multiple ways people develop knowledge of the world (Paris, 2012). With these theoretical commitments in place, we deliberately excluded scholarship that invokes discourses of the digital divide (DiMaggio, Hargittai, Celeste, & Shafer, 2004; Warschauer & Matuchniak, 2010). While such work provides one lens through which to examine inequities in digital access and opportunity, we are taking a different stance—one that foregrounds youth epistemologies and experiences. As Brock et al. (2010) argued, research on the digital divide often begins from the premise that something is missing, which normalizes Western, heteronormative, masculinized, White, middle-class, able-bodied, and adult ways of engaging with digital technologies. To resist such framing, we sought scholarship that rooted inquiry in youth perspectives and that actively positioned youth as agents of change.
To that end, we approached this review with a wide lens, reading broadly in literacy studies, media studies, fan studies, anthropology, cultural movement studies, critical youth studies, sociology, peace and conflict studies, and related fields to get a general sense of how different constituencies define and characterize youth digital activism. From this initial reading and discussion, we developed three questions to guide our review:
In what ways are youth addressing issues of injustice in schooling and society through their use of digital tools and practices online?
How are youth using digital media to facilitate their activist participation and engagement online?
What can education researchers, practitioners, and policymakers learn from youth engagement in participatory cultures for the purposes of social change?
We began searching academic databases (JSTOR, ERIC, Web of Science, Google Scholar, EBSCO) for peer-reviewed journal articles using combinations of search terms related to digital youth activism (e.g., adolescents, digital, online, network, media, critical, social activism, civic activism, civic engagement, civic action, social action, education, literacy). Due to the evolving nature of online media, we limited our searches to the past 20 years. With a pool of potential articles, we narrowed the search to empirical work (defined as scholarship engaged in systematic inquiry, with clear description of methods of data collection and analysis) focused primarily on youth (defined as people aged 12 to 25 years). We further refined the search to studies that took a youth-centered approach (defined as the close examination of youth experiences and inclusion of youth voices and perspectives). We then hand-searched references from key articles to identify additional articles and books, though only entire books that fit these criteria (e.g., youth-centered perspectives, empirical, focused primarily on online activism) and not individual chapters.
With an initial pool of 78 articles and books fitting this profile, we narrowed it to 43 on closer review. One of the central challenges was the ephemeral nature of youth activism online; as a new field, for example, scholars across multiple fields defined activism and youth in different ways, with a number of relevant articles never using those exact terms (e.g., examining political engagement or protest) or focusing directly on young people (e.g., including multiage populations in their studies). A number of articles focused less on the online aspects of youth activism and more on digital tools young people used (e.g., computers to make activist-oriented films). Other relevant, youth-centered articles purported to be empirical in nature but did not include sustained attention to or systematic inquiry into young people’s activities. Therefore, while we sought to be as comprehensive as possible, we acknowledge that our efforts may not have captured all of the salient scholarship in this emerging area of study. Our questions guided the subsequent content analysis, which distilled into three categories: (a) youth social activism (including fan and hashtag activism), (b) youth digital civic engagement (including its participatory dimensions), and (c) youth participation in educational spaces oriented toward social change (including adult-facilitated programs). These three categories, mapped onto the three questions guiding the review, provided the blueprint for the sections below.
Youth, Fan Culture, and Digital Activism
In this section, we review scholarship that traces how young people participate in self-expressive, issue-oriented, and interest-driven activist practices online, spotlighting work that highlights youth voices, agency, and initiative taking. We first review research that links the cultural and political, exploring how young people engage as fans to connect their interests and identities. We examine the ways that cultural, social, and political dimensions of online practice involve new forms of representation and counternarration, as young people tell their stories, share their experiences, and bear witness to one another as well as to the world around them. In the subsequent section, we review studies that highlight the generative power of collective action through social media, foregrounding scholarship that explores how such collective efforts open new spaces to influence public life. We conclude by discussing the ways these endeavors demand that previously disenfranchised and marginalized voices are heard in and across communities, powerfully demonstrated in hashtag campaigns like #BlackLivesMatter, #BringBackOurGirls, #1000BlackGirlBooks, and #LoveWins, which in turn expand local and global audiences for social activism.
The Cultural as Political: Fan Activism and Online Representations
Whether discussing a TV show’s recent plot developments in an online forum, writing and sharing a fictional story inspired by a gaming franchise, or protesting the casting of a favorite movie, young people participate in contemporary culture in myriad ways. While critics may dismiss these participatory activities as frivolous, solipsistic, or diversionary, scholars are beginning to view these cultural practices as relevant to civic and political life, nested within a web of participatory culture where new forms of activism are possible (e.g., Earl & Kimport, 2009; Jenkins, 2012; Vie, 2014). Such new forms of activism can include cultural activities in which consumers actively resist, offer alternate representations, appropriate and remix cultural forms, and draw attention to these intersections of the cultural and political. Earl and Kimport (2009) have studied the ways young people are adopting tactics of political protests—namely, petitions, letter-writing efforts, boycotts, and e-mail campaigns—to address cultural concerns and record grievances. These strategies for holding institutions accountable offer a means of actively negotiating power, illustrating how popular culture infuses our everyday lives and provides a generative avenue for taking activist positions.
A prevalent form of cultural activism involves fanwork, which allows fans to participate in fictional worlds by writing fan fiction, engaging in cosplay, or making fan videos, for example. Such fanwork can take the form of fan activism, especially when marginalized groups wield it to speak back to canons. Jenkins’s (2012, 2013) work on fan activism positions audiences as active rather than passive consumers of media content. Jenkins (2012) defines fan activism as forms of civic engagement and political participation that emerge from within fan culture itself, often in response to the shared interests of fans, often conducted through the infrastructure of existing fan practices and relationships, and often framed through metaphors drawn from popular and participatory culture. (Section 1.8)
Fan activism shares a number of features with other forms of activism, such as resisting censorship, pushing back against misrepresentations, or contesting commercial interests by mobilizing through multiple media channels and outlets.
Fan activism can also lead to explicit participation in more traditional forms of social action. Indeed, Jenkins (2012) has argued that “fandom may represent a particularly powerful training ground for future activists and community organizers” (Section 2.6). Kligler-Vilenchik, Mcveigh-Schultz, Weitbrecht, and Tokuhama (2012) studied fan activism as a powerful mode of mobilization for young people because it combines shared media experiences, a sense of community, and a desire to help. One example of fan activism analyzed by both Kligler-Vilenchik et al. (2012) and Jenkins (2012) is the Harry Potter Alliance (HPA), an activist organization inspired by the fictional world of the J. K. Rowling novels that has mobilized more than 100,000 young fans in campaigns to address literacy and human rights issues. Like other fan communities, HPA has raised money for specific causes (e.g., sending planes with medical supplies to Haiti after the earthquake) but also works toward structural changes that link the magic of Rowling’s stories with change in the real world—as the website notes, “We know fantasy is not only an escape from our world, but an invitation to go deeper into it” (HPA, n.d.). In flexibly responding to issues as they arise and capture the interest of members, HPA engages in an activist model that founder Andrew Slack calls “cultural acupuncture”—as the organization identifies “key cultural pressure points” that can direct action toward real world problems (Jenkins, 2012, Section 4.7). By recognizing the power of art to influence hearts, minds, and emotions, fan activism embraces young people who are engaged culturally, offering models and supportive structures for deploying those skills and energies to other civic and political ends.
Artistic expression in fan activism can take the form of counternarratives of resistance (Duncan-Andrade, 2007), particularly for young people who are misrepresented, marginalized, or erased from mainstream media. One example of these online fan counternarratives we have recently explored is racebending (Thomas & Stornaiuolo, 2016), which Pollock (2004) and Moll (2004) both observed as a phenomenon in schools where youth choose to emphasize certain racial features and characteristics in order to fit in. Online, however, the concept of racebending emerged as a campaign from the Avatar: The Last Airbender fan community. Aghast at the casting discrimination in the film adaptation of Airbender, fan activists began a grassroots organization to call attention to the ways Hollywood studios and casting directors change the race or ethnicity of characters to discriminate against people of color (Racebending.com, n.d.). Racebending has subsequently emerged as powerful fan advocacy for diverse literary and media landscapes through the use of fanwork to change the race of a character (Thomas & Stornaiuolo, 2016). Youth engage in other kinds of bending practices on Tumblr and other social media sites, including genderbending and queerbending (Jenkins, Shresthova, Gamber-Thompson, & Kligler-Vilenchik, 2016). While genderbending has a long history that predates the digital age (Abate, 2008), queerbending is activist fanwork created by and for queer fans for political ends, in contrast to slash fanfiction and fanart, which is often created by cisgender girls and young women (Persaud, 2016; Tosenberger, 2008). Although such activist responses by audiences and interpreters certainly precede the digital world, fanbent images and stories now circulate to wider audiences—and broader effects—via the tools of social media.
Whether “bending” the race, gender, or sexual identity of characters they find (Thomas & Stornaiuolo, 2016), engaging in “lifestreaming” to gain voice and visibility online (Wargo, 2015), or taking “selfies” to circulate self-representations (Brager, 2015), young people are now writing themselves into the media that have excluded them. For example, when 11-year-old Marley Dias did not see herself in the books she was reading, she took matters into her own hands by creating the online campaign #1000BlackGirlBooks. While also inspiring other young people, Dias drew attention to the broader issue of representation in children’s literature, which according to the Cooperative Book Center, only 180 titles out of 3,500 books published in 2014 featured African or African American characters (Flood, 2016). Similarly, Wargo (2015) described how participants in his study created complex identity texts to write themselves into media that has silenced or ignored them. One of his participants, Jake, a gender-queer-trans-youth in transition, produced and curated social media texts that blended his affinities, fan identities, and documentary practices to assert his identity online in visible and consequential ways. Increasingly, youth and young adults are using social media to position themselves and their experiences at the center of the culture, often through a variety of artistic and expressive practices.
Collective Action Through Social Media
One of the most powerful dimensions of social media for youth activists is its collective nature, as young people no longer need traditional gatekeepers (teachers, librarians, community organizers) to build or share knowledge, find other like-minded people, or plan and coordinate actions. Instead of relying on the well-trodden pathways of the past, contemporary young people form new coalitions and connections based on shared interests, using social media as a form of collective activism (Velasquez & LaRose, 2015). As an information hub that allows for exchange of information and provides multiple channels for feedback and peer interaction, social media facilitates the generation and sharing of information that may not be distributed or available on mainstream news outlets. For example, people can use social media and geolocational tools to address sexual harassment and report sexual assaults (Damodar, 2012) or engage in protest behavior across online and offline spheres (Carney, 2016). Examining social media use and youth protest behavior in Chile, Valenzuela, Arriagada, and Scherman (2012) found that these social media sites allowed people to develop personal and group identities as they built relationships with one another and gained insight into others’ perspectives.
Whether joining privately on apps like Snapchat or WhatsApp, posting videos or images on Instagram or YouTube, or reaching out to and mobilizing local and global audiences via Tumblr or Twitter, young people are using established and emerging platforms to come together in multiple ways, for multiple purposes. Vie (2014) described how many young people changed their profile picture in 2013 to the modified logo of the Human Rights Campaign or rainbow flag to signal affiliation with marriage equality. While some might argue that changing one’s picture online represents a shallow form of activism (sometimes derisively called slacktivism), Vie (2014) argued that such massive group identification can signal rapid visual support for a cause, combating microaggressions and spurring some people to further action.
Yet just as these new platforms and spaces open up the possibilities of new forms of participation, scholars like Love and Bradley (2014) have pointed out the “messiness of new media as a cultural and resistant space” (p. 259) as these sites open young people to bullying, abuse, explicit racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, ableism, and surveillance. In particular, Love and Bradley (2014) argued that tracing the online calls for racial justice that emerged in response to Trayvon Martin’s death in 2012 revealed how the “signifying of cyber and literal violence against Black bodies demands new discourse and critical frameworks to reflect how Blacks’ self-definition and calls to action are treated within new social media” (p. 259). Bonilla and Rosa (2015) suggested that despite the need for caution, these social media platforms have emerged as powerful sites for documenting state-sanctioned violence and mainstream media portrayals of marginalized communities and racialized bodies because young people now carry the tools with them to engage in those documentary practices, disseminating those experiences to others, and finding solidarity with others similarly facing forms of oppression and marginalization.
One of the most prevalent and widely recognized ways young people are engaging in collective forms of activism online is through the use of hashtags, which are a kind of indexing system that emerged on Twitter to allow quick retrieval of information. Some of this hashtag activism (Williams, 2015) is action-based, like the #BringBackOurGirls campaign to recover over 200 kidnapped Nigerian schoolgirls, while others are targeted toward shifting traditional media to examine global systems of power (Brager, 2015). A number of scholars have begun to investigate how Twitter can function as a space for constructing counternarratives and reimagining group identities by using hashtags not only to find information but to link to other ideas and conversations and to participate in real time (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015). More recently, after the landmark 2015 Supreme Court decision upholding marriage equality, Obergefell v. Hodges, the hashtag #LoveWins trended, but was preceded by digital activism and education that circulated among LGBTQIA youth, many of whom used the Internet to learn and teach others about identity (Fox & Ralston, 2016; Killham & Chandler, 2016).
One of the most relevant and powerful examples of collective organizing online involves the cultural power of Black Twitter (Brock, 2012), characterized by Black users of the social media platform. Perhaps the most salient activist function of Black Twitter is the #BlackLivesMatter movement, founded by Patrisse Cullors, Opal Tometi, and Alicia Garza after the shooting death of Trayvon Martin by his neighbor George Zimmerman (Ransby, 2015). As a decentralized but coordinated movement that has called attention to “racialized policing, the vulnerability of black bodies, and the problematic ways in which blackness is perceived as a constant threat” (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015, p. 8), the #BlackLivesMatter movement was motivated and driven forward by young people talking about and taking pictures of themselves in hoodies or putting their hands in the air to signal solidarity with Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, unarmed young Black men killed by police (Carney, 2016). These efforts to produce collective representations that challenge the ways Black bodies are misrepresented by mainstream media offer new means for addressing educational inequality, and have inspired other groups to be engaged in similar hashtag activism for their own purposes (see Bosch, 2016).
Digital Civic Engagement: Youth as Civic Actors Online
As youth leverage new tools and networks to participate in collective action on political, social, and community issues of concern, one strand of scholarship on youth digital activism examines young people’s civic activities online. Growing out of research into youth civic engagement (e.g., Buckingham, 2000; Ginwright, Noguera, & Cammarota, 2006; Kirshner, 2015; Rogers, Mediratta, & Shah, 2012), recent work examining young people’s digital civic activism is challenging traditional understandings of civicness by foregrounding youth perspectives and definitions. We begin this section by reviewing research that theorizes civicness through close examination of young people’s perspectives, activities, and identities as they are lived and practiced in various cultural and social contexts. We spotlight scholarship that actively resists characterizations of youth—particularly youth from marginalized positions—as apathetic, uninterested, or unwilling to participate in civic or political life. Such deficit framing of young people often uses normative frameworks and metrics that do not adequately capture shifting cultural practices and alternate ways of knowing and being. We then locate these shifting definitions of civicness in what scholars have characterized as a participatory turn in contemporary life (Jenkins, Clinton, Purushotma, Robison, & Weigel, 2006), surveying research on participatory civics and politics that repositions young people as political and civic actors who produce and share content that connects their passions, interests, and identities to influence public discourse.
Shifting Definitions of Civicness
Examples abound of young people participating in civic and political life through digital means: mobilizing on social media for Obama’s 2008 campaign, organizing protests in Egypt via Twitter, or circulating online petitions to defeat the Stop Online Piracy Act. In one study of “Egypt’s young cyber citizens” using new technologies for social change, Herrera (2012) traced examples of peer-to-peer online mobilizing, like the ways youth built solidarity across diverse constituencies in the antitorture campaign “We Are All Khaled Said” (p. 348). Despite a number of youth participating in more traditional forms of civic engagement—voting, contacting political representatives, volunteering, protesting—discourses of youth civic disengagement are prevalent, often framed as a gap in young people’s knowledge, opportunity, or empowerment (Coleman, 2008; Kahne & Middaugh, 2008; Levinson, 2010), particularly for young people of color (Jensen, 2010; Levine, 2009). In addition to conceptualizing “young people as the root causes of their own problems” (Ginwright & James, 2002, p. 29), however, this paradigm of youth disengagement misses new forms of civic participation that are not rooted in the same system of beliefs about citizenship or revealed on traditional metrics (Bennett, Wells, & Freelon, 2011; Cohen & Kahne, 2012; Zuckerman, 2014). We suggest that foregrounding youth perspectives and attending to youth’s online practices can help alert scholars to the “changing repertoires of civic practice” (Bennett et al., 2011, p. 838) that push back against normative understandings of citizenship and political involvement.
New patterns of digital activism like changing one’s profile picture in solidarity with a cause, signing and circulating online petitions, and boycotting/buycotting online (Fournier, 2013; Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 2010) require that scholars closely examine young people’s beliefs and practices across various spheres, including their public expressions, community organizing, awareness building, and lifestyle politics. These actions involve loose affiliations with peer networks that crowdsource information and maximize self-expression, and they take on even more importance in societies where such expression is curtailed, regulated, or excluded. In Singapore, for example, Zhang (2013) examined how young people eschewed the traditional label of activist, which was historically rooted in oppositional party politics and civil disobedience, and instead engaged in various online activities oriented to social change (e.g., advocating public causes on Facebook, becoming “bloggervists”). A number of studies have similarly examined the role of context and culture in youth’s civic and political activities, as young people redefined the nature and scope of what counts as activism through the creative use of new tools and networks (e.g., de Vreese, 2007; Lin, Cheong, Kim, & Jung, 2010; Östman, 2012; Xenos, Vromen, & Loader, 2014). These efforts to highlight youth perspectives and beliefs, challenge so-called neutral definitions, and take into account cultural and contextual factors and identities demonstrate how researchers can push back on deficit framing by centering the experiences of young people and working toward shifting public opinion and raising awareness of these forms of activism.
Youth engaged in self-expressive practices are not just expanding the definition of what counts as civic engagement or carving new political pathways that circumvent more traditional routes to public action—they are also resisting the very idea of citizenship that lies at the heart of most definitions of civicness (Buckingham, 2000). In a transnational era characterized by voluntary and involuntary movements of people across national boundaries, especially in conditions of precarity and under threat of violence, it becomes both more challenging and more pressing to trace these evolving understandings of citizenship and the role it plays in civic and political engagement. Examining these contingent dimensions of civic engagement, Beltrán (2015) studied undocumented young people calling themselves DREAMers, young people who support the DREAM (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors) Act (bipartisan federal legislation under consideration since 2001 that would provide a pathway to citizenship for children who grew up in the United States). In her study, these young DREAMers used social media to engage in “strategies of visibility” (p. 80) that both redefined the terms of the debate over immigration and humanized undocumented young people (cf. Patel & Sanchez Ares, 2014).
Some DREAMers employed new tools and networks to “come out” by openly and publicly declaring their undocumented status, using strategies from the LGBTQIA community, to “queer the movement” (Beltrán, 2015, p. 81). By posting and circulating first-person accounts, DREAMers used the collective and public nature of these online postings to challenge criminalizing logic and highlight the politics of immigration. Georgina Perez, one young DREAMer, shared her name and story to resist the neoliberal framing of immigration: We’ve done the petitions, we’ve done the flyering, the lobbying, the protests, the rallies, and instead of our voices being heard, we’re just not seeing any change. We’re seeing that our communities are being criminalized; we’re seeing racist legislation; we’re seeing family separation. And that’s why today I’m coming out as undocumented and unafraid. I will no longer stand and wait for someone to come and save me. (Beltrán, 2015, p. 91)
Perez and her DREAMer colleagues resisted more normative forms of civic engagement by engaging in acts of civil disobedience to frame the issue as an emergency, offering their own first-person testimony despite its incriminating nature. As Beltrán (2015) argued, this “queering” of immigration activism by DREAMers highlights the fraught and complex nature of democratic membership—and draws attention to the changing social, historical, and cultural dimensions of civic practice, the need for humanizing practices that shift the terms of debate, and the responsibilities of institutions toward individuals and groups who have experienced systemic oppressions.
Participatory Dimensions of Civic Practice
As the previous sections demonstrated so clearly, young people’s participation in civic and political life now is driven by their passions and interests (not just a sense of duty or obligation to the polity) as well as by their peer networks (rather than established coalitions or traditional gatekeepers). As Ito, Soep, Kligler-Vilenchik, Shresthova, and Zimmerman (2015) described in their framework of “connected civics,” young people are often driven to act on issues of public concern when those issues are connected to their deeply felt interests, affinities, and identities. In their qualitative meta-analysis of research from MacArthur-funded studies, the authors focused on youth-driven activities to identify mechanisms that facilitate consequential connections across youth interests, agency, and civic opportunities. They identified different capacities youth develop in affinity settings—such as telling stories, mobilizing publics, and managing publicity (see Soep, 2014)—that can be mobilized to broader effect.
While some may dismiss forms of “thin” civic engagement like changing a profile picture or circulating a video online as inconsequential, Zuckerman (2014) has argued that this kind of mobilization of youth’s interests and identities needs to be understood on a continuum that includes “thicker” forms of civic and political engagement (e.g., leading a protest, organizing a funding drive). Today’s pathways to civic and political life are now often paved through popular culture and peer networks, as young people engage in new forms of organizing and coalition building across online and offline communities oriented to social interaction and entertainment, oftentimes only tangentially connected to more conventional civic and political realms (Bennett, 2008).
In an era in which (a) people are networked together in multiple configurations, (b) digital tools for production and circulation of artifacts are widely available, and (c) young people have grown accustomed to sharing ideas and perspectives with a wide array of friends and strangers online, young people now expect their contributions to matter and institutions to be responsive to issues they discuss and debate in the public sphere (Kahne, Middaugh, & Allen, 2015). The Youth and Participatory Politics group has conducted a number of studies of youth’s civic and political engagement, developing the framework of “participatory politics” to describe the “interactive, peer-based acts through which individuals and groups seek to exert both voice and influence on issues of public concern” (Cohen & Kahne, 2012, p. vi). In a large scale, nationally representative study of youth aged 15 to 25 years, Cohen and Kahne (2012) found a strong association between nonpolitical, interest-driven activity and participatory politics, suggesting that those interest-driven practices serve as a foundation for civic engagement by providing relevant knowledge, skills, and networks.
The concept of voice has emerged as a central one in theorizing participatory forms of civic engagement, as young people exercise their voices by creating and circulating meaningful content (Kahne et al., 2015; Kirshner & Middaugh, 2015). As the personal form of expression that identifies one as unique, voice is often seen as the link between more general media participation and civically engaged participation as people write themselves into public narratives: “Moving from a private to a public voice can help students turn their self-expression into a form of public participation” (Rheingold, 2008, p. 101). Zuckerman (2014) argued that this creative expression of voice can be “an important path to civic engagement” because it builds affinities and identification with broader causes, allowing young people to see their impact on an issue. A number of scholars investigating how queer youth “write [themselves] into the world” as a form of social action (Blackburn, 2002, p. 323) have focused on how young people can use their voices to resist homophobia and heterosexism and express multiple subject positions (e.g., Blackburn, 2007, 2014; Driver, 2007). Gray (2009), for example, examined how rural youth represented their LGBTQIA identities online in coming-out narratives, highlighting the importance of online collective spaces of engagement for “the transformative power of self-identification to organize politics, culture, and intimacy” (p. 1182). In her ethnographic scholarship, Gray (2009) centered the voices of her participants, focusing on stories such as Brandon’s, who struggled with how to publicly represent himself as a gay African American young man. He asked himself “What kind of civil rights leader would I be?” if he were to ignore the political struggles of groups to which he belonged, and he found ways to reconcile those identity conflicts by participating online. These forms of participation online, engaging in self-expression to “authenticate queerness” (p. 1182) through first-person narratives, are ways of engaging in the politics of representation that have come to characterize new forms of civic activism.
Educational Opportunities for Youth Digital Activism
Whereas the previous sections foregrounded young people’s self-sponsored activism in online spaces, this section concentrates on the role that educational programs, community organizations, and adult-mediated spaces play in supporting youth social activism online. The past two decades have demonstrated the growth and educative potential of youth organizing programs, voluntary groups focused on social change that are often led by young adults and composed of middle and high school youth of color (Ginwright & Cammarota, 2007; Kirshner, 2007, 2008; Rogers et al., 2012); similarly, youth media programs with critical, transformative pedagogies have proven to be powerful and effective in supporting young people to document inequities in their lives (Duncan-Andrade, 2007; Poyntz, 2006; Zimmerman, 2007). We are particularly interested in how these educational programs are extending and expanding their work by using new tools to engage in collective action and link to others. Some studies suggest that the biggest shift for these organizations involved broadening the span and scope of their mobilization efforts (e.g., McDonald, Geigel, & Pinguel, 2011). For example, Conner and Slattery (2014) found in their study of the Philadelphia Student Union, one of the oldest contemporary youth organizing groups, that when the youth-led organization incorporated new media activities like podcasts and blogs into its activist repertoire, those activities synergistically expanded the reach of the organization’s core mission. Youth worked toward promoting educational equity across more venues and amplified the core message using these new tools.
Educational programs that support youth online activism across multiple spheres often do so by providing access to a variety of resources and scaffolds to critical activist engagement, such as intergenerational networks, apprenticeship models, community alliances, and historical framing about social change across local and global contexts. One example of the potential of community organizations in supporting online youth activism is Asthana’s (2015) study of Palestinian youth media narratives across community and online contexts. He focused on one community organization in the Western Bank, Ibdaa, offering opportunities for refugee youth to create digital films as well as connect to other Palestinian refugee groups online. On Ibdaa Facebook pages, young people shared images and videos documenting the material realities of persistent violence of the Israeli occupation; these images and video were accompanied by commentary and critique that illustrated the shared pain and persistent resoluteness (sumud) of the Palestinian youth and highlighted the affective and embodied dimensions of their lives. These online practices of solidarity moved away from victimization narratives embedded in humanitarian discourses, instead focusing on youth agency in their capacity to rework narratives of trauma into acts of resistance and resilience.
One of the most powerful resources educational organizations offer is the mentoring and apprenticeship structures that support young people in exploring new forms of activism. Garcia et al. (2015) describe one such program, the Council of Youth Research, which honored what students of color brought with them but also provided important scaffolding for “critical digital civic literacy,” a pedagogy of academic literacies, critical literacies, digital literacies, and civic practice (p. 165). One Council of Youth Research participant, Graciela, illustrated the importance of young people documenting, sharing, and mobilizing around their counterstories when she shared her response to a deficitizing film at an academic conference: “We are not a community based on dropouts, gangs, and violence but a community based on revolutions that have helped desegregate our schools and better the education for my fellow compañeros” (Garcia et al., p. 152). Graciela’s words foregrounded the centrality of the youth’s work and their power to act as agents of change in their own lives and communities.
We offer two cautions that arose when examining youth digital organizing in educational spaces. One caveat offered by Fleetwood (2005) revolves around organizations that may be tempted to use youth’s stories for other purposes (e.g., as a marketing tool) or that flatten or essentialize youth narratives. She cautioned youth media arts organizations to be mindful of how they might use video to “document an authentic urban experience from the position of racialized youth”—a search for a racialized version of authenticity, or “realness,” that draws on broader, essentializing cultural narratives (p. 156). These broader discourses, echoed in popular media and advertising, position racialized youth as outside of normative White society and responsible for their own marginalization—“while also serving as the vehicle of consumption of a particular racialized youthful identity through its association with a range of commodities” (p. 156). A second caveat emerged from Shiller’s (2013) study of two Bronx-based community organizations. In foregrounding the importance of adult and young adult mentors as community resources, this study serves as a caution for organizations and education researchers to recognize the agency youth already possess and not slip into assuming adults are “giving them [youth] agency” (p. 88) in becoming change makers.
Haddix, Everson, and Hodge (2015) offer an important counterstory to such essentializing uses of new media tools in their study of the Writing Our Lives community program, oriented to supporting the activist, civically engaged writing lives of urban youth. In their article, the authors—one youth participant, one teacher, and one scholar—think together about how this program’s efforts to support youth in writing about the inequities they experience offered a pathway for the youth author to bridge multiple spheres of her life. Coauthor Josanique Everson wrote about her experiences using social media and other digital tools to organize a youth rally in response to the barrage of killings of unarmed Black people in the United States. She said, in part, “Oh, our school didn’t really talk about it [the killing of Mike Brown and the Ferguson protests]. . . . And that’s what really made me mad” (Haddix et al., p. 263). After discussing the ways that the program and its participants facilitated, supported, and amplified Josanique’s efforts, the authors concluded: “Josanique’s resolve toward inquiry, discovery, and action is an exemplar of the ways that many young people are grabbing their pens, their phones, and their keyboards and changing the world. The youth will lead the revolution” (Haddix et al., p. 265). By foregrounding youth voices and involving youth in leadership positions, educational programs and organizations like Writing Our Lives keep the spotlight on the work youth are engaged in, adopting the digital tools youth are already adept in using to extend their reach and expand their missions.
Conclusion: Restorying Toward a Renewed Digital Activist Imagination
We have examined youth digital activism across several loci in order to call for education research that “build[s] critical hope and a bank of counter-narratives” to counteract dominant deficitizing discourses about young people more generally and youth of color specifically (Duncan-Andrade, 2007, p. 27). A humanizing stance for education research not only centers youth perspectives and actions but also attempts to take into better account the full human potential of all youth. When we look to online spaces of youth engagement and the kinds of socially attuned practices they engage in across the myriad spaces of their daily lives, we can learn from youth themselves about how to disrupt educational inequalities and broaden the focus on youth literacy practices beyond school walls.
We frame the rise in youth digital activism as one form of restorying (Thomas & Stornaiuolo, 2016), which understands young people’s counternarrative work to be a central mechanism for disrupting normative and deficitizing frameworks. In an era of struggle and contestation over narrative and meaning, young people today are, in the words of literacy scholar Vivian Vasquez (2014), “reading and writing the self into existence,” using digital participatory cultures to restory schooling and society by making it into their own image. Restorying describes the complex ways that contemporary young people narrate the word and the world, analyze their lived experiences, and then synthesize and recontextualize a multiplicity of stories in order to form new narratives. Education researchers can foreground restorying efforts as one means of disrupting inequalities in their own work, by paying close attention to the ways we represent youth and pushing back on mainstream and normative frameworks that often position young people as “at risk” (Vasudevan & Campano, 2009).
Issues of representation—how we represent others and how people represent themselves—are at the heart of youth digital activism. In the recent past, young people had few opportunities to represent themselves on a wide scale, instead relying on mass media and established institutions (e.g., education, publishing, mass media) to craft the stories that dominated our understandings of each other and ourselves. People who were marginalized and minoritized needed to adhere to dominant notions of civic participation—notions that were influenced by White, able-bodied, cisgender, and middle-class or wealthy men. Today, however, there are new possibilities for restorying those representations. Hamilton, the revolutionary Broadway musical by Lin-Manuel Miranda is a case in point. A staged adaptation of Ron Chernow’s (2005) biography of Alexander Hamilton, Miranda chose to use nontraditional casting for the play. The only visibly White actor in the original Broadway cast with a speaking role was Jonathan Groff, who played a comical yet ominous King George III. The rest of the characters, including Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and the Schuyler sisters, were all magnificently played by actors of color. While the historical accuracy of the musical has been rightly questioned by scholars (e.g., Monteiro, 2016), the overwhelmingly positive reception of Hamilton from young people studying U.S. history provides hope that change is coming faster than even Miranda might have imagined.
It is significant that much of this reception has been facilitated through social media. Although most youth and young adults cannot afford to attend the Broadway show, a libretto on Genius.com, as well as lively hashtags from #Hamiltunes to #Hamiltrash, have encouraged discourse about the Founding Fathers as not distant and lofty Great Men of History who invented the world as we know it, but as everyday people who had many of the same concerns as people living in contemporary United States. Positioning Hamilton himself as an immigrant from the Caribbean is a way of, in the words of Eliza from the musical, writing the self “back in the narrative” (Miranda, 2015) and controlling who tells one’s story. Indeed, the rising generation is moving toward a kind of collective restorying—which Nigerian author Chinua Achebe once suggested was a “balance of stories” (Bacon, 2000)—to begin to address the myriad gaps in our world. If a Founding Father like Alexander Hamilton can be reimagined through the eyes of a young Puerto Rican American, the possibilities and promise of youth restorying the world around them through media are immeasurable. In our current landscape of persistent inequality, the efforts of marginalized people to author themselves in order to be heard, seen, and noticed—to assert that their lives matter—has the potential to contribute not only to a new activist imagination but also to the making of a new world.