Exercising ‘the right to research’: Youth‐based community media production as transformative action

Abstract

This article explores the participatory media practices used by the Center for Urban Pedagogy, a non‐profit community‐based media organisation in New York City. Taking as her point of departure a digital media investigation into bodegas in the south Bronx (neighbourhood grocery stores), the author explores how uses the power of art and design to cultivate civic engagement among youth, in part by strengthening participants’ public speaking, digital media and research skills. In interviews with participants, the author finds that this work mitigates participants’ expressed fears of being dismissed as boring when speaking with public officials, a fear taken seriously through a reading of the work of child psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott. Winnicott worried that the person who felt boring too often retreated from participating in civic life. If, argues the author, youth are to claim what Appadurai describes as the fundamental ‘human right to research’ in the public realm, then the civic as well as the psychological dimensions that enable participants to engage in transformative action must be strengthened.

Key words:

• D.W. Winnicott
• youth‐based community media production
• participatory practices
• civic engagement
• alimentary pedagogy
• advocacy education.

Acknowledgements

This study is funded by a grant from the Canadian Social Science and Humanities Council in collaboration with Bronwen Low, McGill University and Chloe Brushwood‐Rose, York University.

Notes

1. In his 1956 paper, ‘The Antisocial Tendency,’ Winnicott associates the term anti‐social tendency with deprivation and understands it as a normal act in development. The anti‐social act (stealing, bedwetting, etc.) is a sign the enviroment is failing at the moment the child/youth is relatively dependent. Winnicott maintains that the anti‐social tendency indicates that the infant once experienced a good‐enough environment, but that this environment has been lost and is now hoped for. Winnicott speculated that youth who possess an anti‐social tendency are not in need of psychoanalysis as much as they are in need of the proper placemement, an idea I believe has important implications for thinking about education and where students feel best ‘held.’

2. Winnicott used the term authenticity to describe an experience of feeling alive, spontaneous, free from impingements or ‘feeling real.’

3. Here I follow Lawrence Cremin and Linda Westhoff's understanding of John Dewey's use of the term knowledge articulated in Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education (New York, 1916: 184–191). Westhoff summarises Dewey's understanding of knowledge in much the same spirit as Appadurai defines ‘the right to research.’ Westhoff notes that Dewey ‘distinguished between knowledge as a process – the outcome of an inquiry and a resource for further inquiry – and knowledge as information. While Dewey understood that individuals cannot be in possession of all knowledge, he underscored the importance of having at hand the information to deal effectively with a problem. …The possession of such ‘knowledge’ is the foundation for democratic decision making’ (see Westhoff 1995: 27, n. 2).

4. Winnicott used the term ‘true self’ to describe a sense of spontaneity, creativity and aliveness that comes, in part, from feeling free from impingements or the demand to comply.

5. Rosten Woo describes ‘visual clichés’ as pictures of the obvious which undermine critical and creative engagement with a problem. For example, an image of ostrich with his head in the sand to illustrate willed ignorance or a hand reaching for the moon to illustrate progress would be categorised as a ‘visual cliché.

6. It's important to recognise that the project of educating youth for the global marketplace has seriously compromised the potential for youth to get access to a first rate education. Too often, ‘educating students to enter the global market place at an advantage’ translates into offering students nothing more than a skill based curriculum that trains them for positions that are rarely stable, offer a living wage or provide health insurance.