Caroline Caron

From concept to data: sleuthing social change-oriented youth voices on YouTube

ABSTRACT The idea of youth voice has become commonplace in youth studies and advocacy, although its meaning is more often assumed than explicitly defined and critically analyzed. This article engages with the concept of youth voice through a discussion of how we designed and implemented a pilot study on social change-oriented videos produced and circulated by Canadian teens on YouTube. We discuss the challenges and issues we encountered while attempting to constitute our research sample of youth-produced videos. In our sleuthing process, we grappled with the limitations of online search engines for our research purposes, and as a result developed a purposeful, tactical and adaptive approach. Throughout this process, we found that technical and practical issues evoked ethical concerns regarding youth voice as well, which thus required constant decision-making. As we report on how we dealt with these issues, we contribute to ongoing discussions and debates on youth voice occurring at the intersection of critical youth studies, social media, and online research ethics.

Vlogging on YouTube: the online, political engagement of young Canadians advocating for social change

ABSTRACT Youth are often perceived as passive and disengaged from civic and political life. However, many researchers have countered such discourses of youth passivity and isolation, highlighting young peoples active and interactive political engagement through less traditional outlets, especially online. In this article, we are influenced by a poststructural orientation to agency to identify themes across the social change-oriented YouTube channels of eighteen young Canadians. The themes we have identified counter a dominant focus on youth civic disengagement, political apathy, and isolation, instead highlighting the diverse political issues young Canadian vloggers address, the strategies they use, their multiple subjectivities, the interaction and support of their online community, and the relevance of inequality. We show how YouTube has become an important venue for the production and dissemination of youth perspectives.

How are civic cultures achieved through youth social-change-oriented vlogging? A multimodal case study

Debate over conceptual definitions is prominent within the body of literature dealing with emerging patterns of civic engagement and political participation among youth information and communication technology–enabled politics. This article contends that advancing new knowledge in this field is also dependent upon fine-grained empirical analysis of digital traces of youth participation. Drawing on a close analysis of two youth-produced vlogs, we show that adolescents’ commitment to social change can be creatively achieved through video making. Informed by a socio-semiotic approach to multimodal analysis and by Peter Dahlgren’s concept of online civic cultures, our qualitative analysis highlights two main patterns we found in young people’s vlogs aimed at raising awareness about social issues. First, we found that to impact their intended audiences, vloggers presented themselves as creative choice makers and as savvy insiders of youth civic cultures on YouTube. Second, we found that vloggers successfully managed the risk of being the target of online hostility using rhetorical devices and tactics that smoothed counterpositions. Overall, our multimodal case study shows that contrary to traditional approaches to successful communication based on textual coherence, a mix of consistency, disruption, and contradiction can be used purposefully in public speech in order to manage difficult, risky topics. As we demonstrate that visual-based communication on social network sites such as vlogs posted on YouTube is not neat and tidy, we illuminate the vloggers’ shifting identities, opinions, and concerns. This evidence-based observation calls for more in-depth small case qualitative analyses for investigating the multiple affordances of civic talk online and its democratic potential. This article contributes to the ongoing conceptual redefinition of youth civic engagement and political participation in the face of fast-evolving sociotechnical change.