Conceptualizing Identity in Youth Media Arts Organizations: a comparative case study

In this article the authors explore the relationship between concepts of identity and the purpose, process, and products of youth media arts organizations. Since the explicit mission of these organizations is to work with adolescents to explore and represent identities, the authors develop our understanding of how organizations conceptualize identity development and how these concepts shape the digital film-making process and products. In a comparative case study of In Progress (St Paul, Minnesota) and Reel Works Teen Filmmaking (New York City), organizational leaders were interviewed, and a semiotic analysis conducted of the organizations' websites and other public, printed materials. The authors analyzed the films as products of these organizations' production processes to understand how these organizations define identity and what these definitions mean for how they do their work with youth. They found two distinct conceptualizations of identity: identity as community building, and identity as individualization. Unpacking these different conceptions helps us to understand how youth media arts organizations shape the identity development process and what is made possible for participating youth. This work can also lead us to more sophisticated models of adolescent identity development, particularly for non-mainstream communities who have often been saddled with dominant cultural models that do not quite fit. Digital media spaces such as YouTube, MySpace, Ning, and Break.com have made sharing video representations of personal stories a common practice. Creating and sharing videos is now relatively cheap and easy to accomplish, but the ability to tell compelling life stories using digital media is a far more complex practice to master than skill-based mastery of digital tools alone. Youth media arts organizations (YMAOs) have emerged as designed spaces where youth learn to create video representations of their life stories. Research on what youth learn from their participation in YMAOs indicates that these are learning environments for multimodal production that involve identity construction. Willett et al (2005), for example, argue that 'identity' features prominently in multimodal composition: 'New media production is as much about producing identities and social spaces as it is about creating media ... Through different media forms young people are described as performing, defining, and exploring their identities' (p. 2). In fact researchers seem to agree that identity work is going on, whether youth are creating digital stories about their popular culture hero (Schneider, 2005; Hull & Katz, 2006) or playing a video game (Gee, 2003). Jenkins et al (2007) describe 'the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery' (p. 28) as one of the core media literacy skills necessary for successful engagement in twenty-first century society. What role do YMAOs play in constructing the process of identity development for participating youth? There seems to be little disagreement that participation in narrative-based media production activities supports identity development. But how these activities support the construction of positive identities, particularly for marginalized youth, is under-explored. YMAOs engage youth in the production of various media including digital story (Hull & Nelson, 2005),