Stuart R. Poyntz

'But we didn't live in those times’: Canadian students negotiate past and present in a time of war

Abstract This article examines the ways in which students reason about past and present in relation to questions of ethnic identities and loyalty to the state in a time of war. In digitally recorded discussion groups of three, they studied documents from the largely German–Canadian town of Berlin, Ontario, which, responding to images of the German enemy, changed its name to ‘Kitchener’ in 1916. It examines how students make sense of the documents; how they use traces of the past to explore issues in the contemporary world; and what patterns of difference emerge in respect of their own ethnic identities and immigration histories. It concludes that, even with well-selected historical materials, most students need attentive guidance in the difficult tasks of drawing meaningful interpretations from them.

The Participation Paradox, or Agency and Sociality in Contemporary Youth Cultures

The papers included in this section were originally presented as part of a round table on “Participatory Ontologies and Youth Cultures,” hosted by the Association for Research in Cultures of Young People (ARCYP) at the Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities in Montreal on 31 May 2010.

Chapter 15 – Vancouver Youthspaces: A Political Economy of Digital Learning Communities

This chapter presents a structural account of a youth media production community as a space of social living in the global city. Digital learning communities now impact the culture of cities by territorializing urban spaces in ways that produce cultural friction. I develop this analysis here and address the ways policy, funding structures, technology change, and labour practices have shaped the political economy of community digital learning in Vancouver, Canada. I link this analysis to the rise of neoliberalism and draw on a concept of neoliberal governmentality to situate the work of policy and organizations in Vancouver. Digital learning organizations are part of a global mode of informal cultural production often organized around nonprofits and nonmarket forms of media creation that are shaping the civic conditions that define youthful cities. In this chapter, I explore the tensions and possibilities that shape this field.

Television and the meaning of “live”: An enquiry into the human situation, by Paddy Scannell

A. Moran (Ed.), TV formats worldwide (pp. 27–38). Bristol, UK: Intellect. McCabe, J., & Akass, K. (Eds.). (2013). TV’s Betty goes global. From telenovela to international brand. London, England: Tauris & Co. Moran, A. (1998). Copycat TV: Globalization, program formats and cultural identity. Luton, UK: Luton Press. Moran, A. (Ed.). (2009). TV formats worldwide. Localizing global programs. Bristol, UK: Intellect. Moran, A., & Malbon, J. (2006). Understanding the global TV format. Bristol, UK: Intellect. Oren, T., & Shahaf, S. (Eds.). (2012). Global television formats. Understanding television across borders. London, England: Routledge.

Past tensions and future possibilities: ARCYP and children’s media studies

Abstract The year 2007 marked the beginning. The same year JOCAM was launched, an interdisciplinary group of Canadian scholars formed a scholarly association to address the needs of researchers working with young people’s texts and cultures across Canada. In this paper, three members of Association for Research in Cultures of Young People’s (ARCYP’s) Executive examine current and future tensions within children’s media studies by drawing on lessons from ARCYP’s opening decade. Both ARCYP and JOCAM emerged during a time of productive intersections between the fields of children’s studies and media studies. Here, we draw on ARCYP’s history as part of an examination of ongoing lacunae that have arisen as sites of common concern have emerged. These tensions—having to do with notions of textuality and authority, consumption and children’s agency and citizenship and power—point to lacunae in the field of children’s media studies. ARCYP’s history of development is thus taken up as a lens to see the past and imagine the future priorities of our research field.

Eyes wide open: stranger hospitality and the regulation of youth citizenship

Across the Anglo-American world, a pervasive sense of wariness and concern about strangers continues to haunt influential discourses and practices that regulate and shape youth citizenship. In particular, (1) media-centred accounts of ‘stranger danger’, (2) dominant citizenship discourses taught in schools and (3) government policies regulating young peoples civic lives, remain significant in shaping how strangers are made meaningful for youth. Through these discourses and practices, the stranger increasingly comes to be a fetish figure, a body and symbolic form whose very figurability is rendered a problem in the first instance. These developments are problematic, in large part because strangers are a necessary and enabling feature of modern democracies. Accordingly, in this paper, I examine the three aforementioned fields of discourse and practice as they have operated broadly over the past decade in Canada, Britain and the United States. I show how strangers are made difficult and dangerous others for youth and make clear how these constructions regulate and threaten a vibrant public world. I conclude by hinting at how stranger hospitality might be taken up differently in schools (and other public fora) as part of nurturing our collective democratic futures.