By Any Media Necessary: Mapping Youth and Participatory Politics

DREAMing Citizenship

As evidenced in the previous chapters, participatory culture has become increasingly important to understanding patterns of civic, social, cultural and political engagement among youth. Yet, with some notable exceptions, there has been little attention focused on bridging insights from the theory of participatory culture with literature on social movements. Seeking to better understand how digital media platforms and practices may be impacting social movements, this chapter draws on insights from a case study with undocumented youth commonly referred to as Dreamers, who are engaged in immigrant rights organizing and activism. We draw primarily on interview data and media artifacts related to DreamActivist.org. Much like the American Muslim youth in the previous chapter, the Dreamers have engaged in acts of personal and collective storytelling, but they have done so in the context of a larger social movement, where tactics also seek to dramatize and publicize struggles over power. Dreamers, who originally coalesced around the federal DREAM Act legislation in 2010,, have leveraged their familiarity with digital media practices and networked culture to create ad hoc Dreamer organizations, circumventing top-down organizational structures to become critical actors within the broader movement for immigrant rights.

This chapter does not aim to account for all characteristics of the DREAM movement systematically. Rather, our aim here is more modest--to identify ways that undocumented youth have used digital media tools to represent their voices, stories, and interests. In doing so, we will also explore what lessons can be drawn from Dreamers in understanding how other marginalized communities can use digital media to create pathways toward greater social and political empowerment. During our research, we met many individuals who defied popular presumptions about civically and politically disengaged youth. These were not “the usual suspects”, not “digital natives.” Rather, they were youth who were finding ways to connect against great political, legal, economic and technological barriers.

We use social movement concepts to critically examine how excluded communities have gained inclusion and citizenship, specifically using John A. Guidry and Mark Q. Sawyer’s (2003) concept of contentious pluralism to show how Dreamers engage in many historically situated practices of mobilization and movement building. While, as the title and introduction suggest, the idea of conducting politics across media runs across the book, here is where we most directly discuss what Costanza-Chock (2010) refers to as "transmedia mobilization", where social movement participants tap into any and all available media platforms as a means of mobilizing others. Transmedia mobilization strategies can at times help grassroots social movements supplant mass media representations through more locally constructed and participatory forms of messaging.

Our research shows that transmedia strategies have served the Dreamers well in their quest, not only to move immigrant rights legislation forward, but also in their efforts to shed light on the struggles of undocumented youth more broadly. Thus, we argue that the rise in digital media, and by extension participatory cultures, has opened up other avenues beyond what Harris-Lacewell (2004) calls "information networks" to create pathways toward participation. Following from this, we demonstrate that undocumented youth have used digital media to create spaces of citizenship, collective identity, belonging, and political participation.

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