Joe Kahne and Cathy Cohen – Mapping Youth Participatory Politics

What is the relationship between online participatory practices and political participation?

Key Questions and Comments:

• (05:22) We want to know: are many youth engaged with these activities or is it just a small sub-section of highly activated youth? Are different groups of youth equitably engaged? How does this engagement relate to broader and more common social media practices? Those are all some of the big questions we talked about in our study.
• (05:58) What kinds of support and infrastructure are needed to best support the development of young people as they engage civically and politically while employing these new technologies?
• (22:39) How are we going to give kids the tools to understand what material is trustworthy online? But, also, how to be somebody who is seen as trustworthy, too. It’s much more of a two-way street when we think about participatory politics.
• (23:57) Having youth focus on these interest-driven activities can help move them along and provide a scaffolding to get them down the road to be more involved in participatory politics. Do we know anymore about why we think that connection exists and how those like us can support those interest-driven activities?
• (28:57) I’m curious if you got an anecdotal sense, over the course of the study, if there were some particular things that prevented online engagement from translating to more permanent connections?
• (32:58) Did you do any further investigation on the ‘credibility’ question (besides that one question you put up on the PowerPoint)?
• (37:26) Do engaged youth participate more in international projects/subjects as well?
• (40:11) What counts as ‘participation’ and who’s counting it? What is the connect between these two different types of engagement? And if it’s the same demographic participating in both, what does that say about the students that aren’t participating?
• (45:01) What about the “digital divide” where kids of different ethnic groups and lower income get different types of informal training on media use than mainstream, higher income youth?
• (53:15) So, I wonder: if you guys had an opportunity to talk to a parent and, separately, talk to a principal, what are the one or two sentences you would want to tell them that are the key takeaways that they should get from your report that might change both the policies in their school or the rules in their household?
• (55:31) I’d like to briefly talk about the difference between voice and influence, both in an online and offline context.

View the Conversation
During the broadcast, the conversation also took place on Twitter using the hashtag #connectedlearning.

Guests for this webinar included:

• Antero Garcia
• Barry Joseph
• Greg McVerry
• Sam Boyer
• Howard Rheingold
• Joseph Kahne: Dr. Joseph Kahne is Chair of the Digital Media & Learning Research Hub’s Youth & Participatory Politics (YPP) Research Network and is the John and Martha Davidson Professor of Education at Mills College. His research focuses on ways school practices and new media influence youth civic and political development.
• Cathy Cohen: Dr. Cathy J. Cohen is the David and Mary Winton Green Professor of Political Science at theUniversity of Chicago. She is the founder of the Black Youth Project and author of The Boundaries of Blackness and Democracy Remixed. Her research focuses on political engagement by marginal communities. Both Kahne and Cohen are Co-Principal Investigators on the YPP Research Network’s quantitative research component: Mapping Youth Participatory Politics.

Resources for this webinar:

• The Youth & Participatory Politics Research Network
• NY Time article: Internet Access and the New Divide
• Futurity.org: ‘For US youth, political action is online’
• The Black Youth Project: cyber-resource center for enriching the lives of black youth
• Molly Katchpole’s Change.org petition regarding Bank of American’s proposed $5 debit card fee