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The 'learning city' contains a range of non-formal learning economies. In recent years researchers have focused on, what has been termed, the non-formal arts learning sector, to document best practices, the emergence of new literacies and/or cultural practices, and to highlight interventions that support otherwise marginalised and underserved communities. Yet, for all of this attention, the non-formal learning sector has remained an opaque object, defined by hazy boundaries, diverse programme structures, and a presence in cities that is difficult to grasp. In this paper we develop an account of the non-formal arts learning sector for socially disadvantaged youth by treating it as a 'socio-technical assemblage' of the learning city. We draw on data from the "Youthsites" research project and examine the history, priorities, and tensions in the sector between 1995 and 2015, a period when the youth arts sector has become a significant feature of urban space. We trace the emergence of the sector in three global cities, analyse a series of paradoxes linked to income and property, the labelling of youth, and organisation aims, and show how these paradoxes shape the sector's broader relationship with the state, labour and consumer markets, and related institutions that allocate support for young people.

The article offers information on the 2024 summer issue of the Canadian Journal of Communication, which focuses on ongoing primary concerns and new developments in Communication and Media Studies. Topics include the challenges facing journalism in the context of elections around the world, the impact of digital transformation on journalism, and the intersectional analysis of power structures, employment insecurities and gendered and racialized experiences in digital journalism in North America.

Through a discussion of two videos--The Take (Naomi Klein & Avi Lewis, 2004), and a student project--I argue that media education can further the role of youth as critically engaged, democratic citizens most effectively when educators develop students' capacity for reflection and self-expression through engagement with those power structures that limit such acts. Media literacy's democratic promise thus evolves from the productive tensions that arise from educators' desire to protect and prepare students to live in a media saturated society. Of late, media education has strayed from this objective. I suggest that this move is not necessary.(Contains 5 notes.)

On October 20-22, 2016, the Association for Research in Cultures of Young People (ARCYP) hosted the inaugural international conference, Youngsters: On the Cultures of Children and Youth (Youngsters 2016) at [...]

More than 30 years since Hannah Arendt's death in 1975 at the age of 69, her novel theory of the public realm continues to attract attention and debate. In this article, the author contributes to this discussion by drawing on Arendt's theory of public life to investigate the space of youth media production in relation to questions of democratic habituation. Arendt is not typically thought of in relation to youth or media, but her concern for the nature of public acts, and for the way such acts expand people's lives by producing worldliness, offers a powerful framework for thinking about teenagers' media production work. The author introduces Arendt's thinking on the public realm and then uses her framework to examine the complex experiences of youth video production mentors involved in a summer digital media program located in Vancouver, Canada. The author situates a review of the youths' experiences in Summer Stories in relation to the development of what Henry Jenkins (2006a, 2006b) calls a culture of participation in contemporary Western societies. The author notes that while such a culture would appear to offer youth more opportunities than ever to produce their own cultural expressions, this does not mean such expressions are free of disciplinary practices that regulate and limit youth conduct. The author provides examples to support this argument and then turns to the experiences of youth mentors in Summer Stories. Through these experiences, the author indicates how and when production work nurtures democratic habits by fostering what Arendt contends is central to public life, that is, a form of thinking that is responsive to others, to the fact that people are all part of a shared world. (Contains 4 notes.)

Beginning in infancy, young people in the global North and in much of the global South now grow up learning the language of consumer media culture through a constant diet [...]

An introduction is presented in which the author discusses several articles within the issue on topics including social research for scene thinking , genealogy development and Actor-Network Theory.

In Canada, there is a relatively strong tradition of activist scholarship in media and communication studies. However, very little research has been undertaken on how working in the university may contextualize the ways in which academic workers participate in activist media projects. Focusing on three such projects -- Media Democracy Day, Open Media, and NewsWatch Canada -- this article draws upon elements of political economy and Bourdieu's field theory to consider how the different characters of the academic and activist fields work to enable and constrain the abilities of faculty to engage with them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]