Public Space and Media Education in the City

For nearly 20 years I have worked with young people (aged 13–25) in creative media production, primarily in community-based programmes and partnerships with secondary and post-secondary schools. An ongoing challenge in this work has been to understand how public life connects with the work and practices of youth media projects. Equipping young people to be participants in the public realm has long been a common objective across the field of youth media production. It is part of the moral agenda that circumscribes the field and is crucial in societies where citizenry requires one to participate critically online and in a lifeworld where images, digital sound and hyperlinked texts form the circuitry of everyday experience. Yet despite the central importance of such participation, how the field of community-based youth media production and the public realm are woven together remains fraught with questions (Poyntz, 2012; Hoechsmann and Poyntz, 2012; Soep and Chavez, 2010; Sefton-Green, 2006; Buckingham, 2006a, 2006b, 2003; Goodman, 2003; Buckingham et al., 1995).

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