Citizens of the margin: citizenship and youth participation on the Moroccan social web

ABSTRACT

This paper examines how marginalized youth in Morocco use YouTube to contest hegemonic discourses of state power and institutional practices of social exclusion. The paper analyses a user-generated, YouTube web-series, Tales of Bouzebal, as a performance of marginality and a social critique of state bureaucracies and institutions in the context of post-Arab Spring Morocco. Using a combined method of textual and discourse analyses, the paper argues that the new media practices of producing and consuming user-generated video are best understood as practices of cultural citizenship that contribute to social change through the production of counter-discursive political subjectivities among youth in MENA. The paper posits that the concept of citizenship needs to be expanded to account for citizen participatory media practices that contest the conditions of marginality and inequality sustained by normative definitions of citizenship.

KEYWORDS:

• Youth
• participatory media
• cultural citizenship
• YouTube
• marginality
• social change
• Morocco

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Mohamed El Marzouki is a doctoral candidate at the Media School, Indiana University Bloomington. His research interests sit at the intersection of Youth citizenship, participatory media and politics, and creative cultural production in the MENA region. Before coming to Indiana University, Mohamed obtained an MA in Media and Communication from Goldsmiths College, University of London and taught communication at Al Akhawayn University Ifrane (Morocco). [Email: [email protected]].