Themes are broad concepts related to youth media production that emerged through an analysis of each of my interviewee's transcripts. Each theme is based around an idea or motif that re-occurred in interviews. The themes I have chosen, appeared in the data subsequent to the interviewing process, I did not ask specific questions to fit the information I was gathering into these containers. To view clips according to themes please click on the theme titles or use the theme drop-down menu located above.

Bridging

Bridging is the term I use to describe the way that youth workers identify themselves as “between two worlds”, these worlds being the youth communities and cultures they work in and sometimes identify with as members, and the “adult” world of community work and social services or educational institutions they negotiate in order to integrate and develop their programs.

Defining Youth

This theme is the result of two questions I asked several of my interviewees. They were asked to define the word ‘youth’ in the context of their workshops and then again in the context of themselves. The resulting conversations have been themed together to build a nuanced portrayal of how the term is conceptualized by people who both work with ‘youth’, and are youth themselves.

Feedback Loops

Many of the conversations that took place during this project dealt with issues of motivation, capacity-building attendance and evaluation, I chose to deal with these as examples of what I call ‘feedback loops’, ways that information about a programs structure and effectiveness gets continually transmitted between project stakeholders in both systemic and ad-hoc feedback mechanisms.

Growing Pains

Many of the media projects that are the basis for these interviews have been in existence for three years or less. Not only are youth workers and participants in moments of identity formation, uncertainty and sometimes, even crisis, the programs that house them are themselves the teenagers of the social development set. The ‘youthfulness’ of youth media projects has a large impact on the way that youth workers perceive their work and its viability in the long term.

Social Studies

This theme holds the clips where interviewees discuss the impact of wider social issues, such as moral panic, poverty, racism, community-based partnerships, family situations, et. al. on the workshops they organize and the youth in their programs. Many interviewees suggest that social factors do not have an impact ‘on’ participation or learning outcomes in community, instead they reflect on how learning, participation, and social factors are intrinsically related.

Why Media?

Without making explicit reference to theories of multiliteracy or critical media literacy the interviewees situated their practice and their understanding of media literacy’s importance within the critical media literacy discourse, but did not suggest that participants in the workshops shared these critical leanings. While workshops are discussed as critical interventions, this was negotiated on an almost daily basis with respect to young people’s quotidian mass-media practices.