AP/CMDS 4708 6.00
Youth Cultures and Media Practices
This course analyzes contemporary youth cultures with an emphasis on the ways in which youth engage with diverse and converging media texts and practices. The course develops a contextual understanding of media literacy, identities, embodiments, subcultures, social networks and civic engagements within the lives of youth, analyzing media institutions and policies, consumer cultures, technologies as well as local participatory and transnational practices. Youth are understood in terms of their media uses and productions as learners, consumers, producers and artists across complex relations of power, discursive frameworks and dynamic experiences. Oriented toward conceptualizing “youth,” “culture” and “media practices” in relational, historically nuanced and culturally situated ways, we will examine and undertake qualitative youth media research with critical and reflexive theoretical and methodological tools. Our goal is to balance an understanding of hegemonic forces of commodification controlled by corporate media with emerging and changing relations in which youth collectively transform the conditions, forms and directions of their media participation. Course credit exclusion: AP/HUMA 4141 6.00.