Fleetwood Article

Some preliminary research into academic work on youth video projects has produced few results, unfortunately. However a search though Scholar’s Portal (the search history can be found at the end of this post) did uncover 3 interesting articles. In this post, I will discuss one of these articles: Fleetwood’s (2005) “Community-Based Video Production and the Politics of Race and Authenticity.”

Fleetwood’s work and research interests appear to be very relevant for our current project, as she is interested in issues facing racialized youth in San Francisco’s gentrifying (or gentrified) Mission District. She also uses video production—both her own and youth-led—to carry out her research and activism. Fleetwood asks a number of very interesting questions when discussing the use of video for marginalized youth in an agency setting. They are as follows:

How do we understand collaboration when white adult artists and institutions own the resources and broker access for youth of color? What are the narrative and technological limits placed on the project by its sponsors? Who ultimately has ownership of the video? How do we read the representations constructed in these collaborative videos in relationship to dominant visual and popular culture? (p. 85).

These questions might be starting points for our current investigations of youth video, and, in fact, they are questions we have already been asking. Fleetwood’s article also investigates how dominant media companies use youth in video to both fetishize and vilify them. This is especially true for racialized youth. These representations are often co-opted by youth and appear in their own independent video projects. However, their is a reciprocal relationship, in that media companies are now co-opting youth-produced video and other media as a marketing tool. Fleetwood seems to argue that a good youth-led video project would encourage an investigation of, and interference with, this cycle of representation.

Some interesting possibilities for future reading found in the notes: Dee Dee Halleck, Handheld Visions: The Impossible Possibilities of Community Media.

REFERENCES:

-Fleetwood, N. R. (2005). Community-Based Video Production and the Politics of Race and Authenticity. Social Text 82, 23(1).

SEARCH HISTORY:

Scholar’s Portal Search:(KW=(youth* or teen* or adolescen*)) and(KW=((video project*) or (video activit*) or (video program*)) or KW=(video exhibition*))

In Multiple Databases (Art Abstracts @ Scholars Portal: Arts & Humanities Citation Index ® (1975 to present); ASSIA: Applied Social Sciences Index and Abstracts; Communication Abstracts; Communication Studies: A SAGE Full-Text Collection; Criminal Justice Abstracts; Criminology: A SAGE Full-Text Collection; Education Abstracts @ Scholars Portal; Education: A SAGE Full-Text Collection; ERIC; Family Studies Abstracts; Health Sciences: A SAGE Full-Text Collection; PsycINFO; Social Sciences Abstracts @ Scholars Portal; Social Sciences Citation Index ® (1956 to present); Social Services Abstracts; Sociological Abstracts; Sociology: A SAGE Full-Text Collection; Urban Studies & Planning: A SAGE Full-Text Collection; Urban Studies Abstracts)

86 Results found including: Ager et al., Fleetwood, Bowey & McGlaughlin