Community Based Research and Reflective Practices

Given the weight of ideological and theoretical concerns brought to bear on community media projects addressed to youth, there is an imperative to discover how such ideologies impact real experiences. Through a series of interviews with the people who supported, developed, and taught youth media as part of three projects loosely connected to each other via a program I organized called The Digital Literacy Project, this research explores how youth workers reflect on and deal with the theoretical and ideological concerns that underpin their work in the domain of community-based youth media production. The divergence between idealistic portrayals within academia, policy development and fundraising, and the reality of youth media work has led me to build my inquiry around a set of qualitative explorations that will create tangible links between theories of youth media, and youth media production in practice. Interviewees discuss their experience working in the domain of youth media, addressing issues such as collaboration, institutionalization of practice, motivation, emergent literacy practices, and the effect of the ‘new economy’ on community learning projects. Of concern to this inquiry is how ‘youth’ as a political and social category is conceptualized and mobilized in the context of community-learning programs that both compliment and challenge existing institutional and educational norms.

W.O.R.D students listening to recorded tracks

Apart from being a researcher, I am also the coordinator of the media project that is at the hub of these explorations. I did not arrive at the research site to become a participant as a commitment to conducting deep research; I had already been involved in this community for a year prior to embarking on this research. I think the fact that I possessed dual roles within this study proved to be fertile ground for conducting a qualitative study; however it was not without complications. After deciding to research people who work in my community on youth media projects, it became apparent that I would have to include my own experiences as part of the field, leading to an interesting paradox: On the one hand, I was very much in the field - each of my informants had collaborated with a program that I led, and in interviews, many of the situations described and analyzed were situations I had helped to bring about, or in which I was a participant. Thus it was difficult to approach the research as an observer, as I was full of opinions, ideas and experiences that related to what my interviewees shared with me. As the research took shape, and my job as a coordinator grew less demanding I felt my identification changing – I became an ethnographer and my ‘work’ was more easily separated from my ‘research’. However, there was never a truly fixed binary, and within those two identities there was a third – that of friend and neighbor to many of my ‘informants’ that significantly changed the dynamics of the qualitative research being done.

Given my implication in the field, and because I believe that socially-oriented qualitative research should be of value to the community of origin, I decided to publish the results of this research in a format that could be easily accessed, navigated and utilized by my informants and the wider community that surrounded our work. That is why I chose to edit and present portions of the interviews through a website created specifically for this project. Issues of methodology, design and process with respect to this aspect of the project are discussed in later sections.