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Scholarship on youth digital media literacy programs has focused on how adults practice restraint as a means of allowing young people to exercise agency in decision-making experiences. Yet youth also practice restraint, as we found in a digital storytelling program involving 16 early adolescents (ages 11-14) from economically precarious communities who worked with 18 adult mentors trained in discussing systemic and racial injustices in the context of trauma-informed practices. Building on a framework of critical youth studies, our ethnographic data reveals how youth deployed their own version of restraint that is simultaneously "defensive" and "agentive." We argue that this is a form of empowerment that needs to be better understood in the contexts of actual practices of youth/adult media co-production, and in relation to support for the development of critical, participatory and collaborative, and expressive competencies (Mihailidis, P., and B. Thevenin. 2013. "Media Literacy as a Core Competency for Engaged Citizenship in Participatory Democracy." "American Behavioral Scientist" 57 (11): 1611-1622). Restraint is thus presented as a strategy of empowerment that youth develop in relation to digital media literacy and youth voice, especially for young people from populations historically marginalized and frequently misunderstood in media and in public life.

Political elections have been shown to influence youth civic development. The election of Donald Trump is historic and has elevated precarity for people of color and immigrants, yet we know little about how young people with these identities experienced this potentially catalytic event. Using ethnographic methods, we examined youth and adult discussions that occurred during youth participatory action research in four sites of one after-school program between October 2016 and May 2017, to investigate how the development of critical consciousness occurs among early adolescent youth of color in the context of catalyzing political events. We identified emergent patterns in how young people (a) engaged in critical reflection, (b) weighed political efficacy, and (c) considered engagement in critical action in the wake of Trump's election. The data revealed that young people's critical consciousness development ranged from basic to advanced levels. This research highlights the ways that politically catalytic events shape critical consciousness development among early adolescents of color.