Feature Session: Youth Media and Youth Movements: Organizing, Innovation, Liberation

Youth have been deeply important to every modern social movement, including civil rights, LGBTQ, feminist, environmentalist and environmental justice, labor, antiwar, and immigrant rights movements. In each case, they’ve used media as tools for liberation. Young people today organize for access to education and against the school to prison pipeline, occupy public spaces, demand an end to racial profiling, hate crimes, and stop-and-frisk policies, mobilize for immigrant rights, and more. In what ways do youth activists appropriate digital media spaces, tools, and practices in order to create, circulate, and amplify social movement voices? What types of media innovations are developed in the
heat of social struggles? How can we learn from and highlight the experiences of grassroots groups and networks of youth activists?

This Feature Session is a conversation between scholars, youth organizers, and media makers who work at the fertile intersection of youth media and youth movements.

Participants:

Global Action Project (NYC): Global Action Project works with young people most affected by injustice to build the knowledge, tools, and relationships needed to create media for community power, cultural expression, and political change. http://global-action.org/

Allied Media Projects (Detroit): Allied Media Projects cultivates media strategies for a more just and creative world. From the intersection of communications, art, technology, education and social justice, we share and develop models for transforming ourselves and our communities. http://alliedmedia.org

Chicago Youth Voices Network (Chicago): Chicago Youth Voices is a coalition of 13 youth media organizations in Chicago working together to strengthen the youth media sector and amplify the voices of youth and their communities. http://cyvn.org/