Negotiated, contested and political: the disruptive Third Spaces of youth media production

Traditionally media production with young people has been characterised by an aspiration to ‘give voice’ or ‘empower youth’, but this core value is under threat. Recently, the rationale for undertaking youth media production has shifted to focus instead on enabling young people to acquire digital skills to serve the needs of rapidly changing creative industries to be entrepreneurs in a gig economy. In this paper, we share qualitative data from a young people’s media production project run in libraries in a city in the United Kingdom where participants were invited to create videogames/stories. We adopt Potter and McDougall’s notion of Third Spaces as negotiated, contested and political to enable us to identify the ways in which pedagogical choices of setting, software and style of facilitation combined to support young people’s critical and creative engagement with digital media and society. We reframe notions of third spaces, seeing less a bridge between linguistic and cultural domains and instead of arguing that Third Spaces are productively disruptive. We conclude by proposing a new set of pedagogical principles for critical reflection in the development and funding of digital media production with young people.