Co-creative media research with children and young people: experiences from the field

11:30–12:30: «Atmospheric Belonging: Diffracting Participatory Design within Troposphere».

With Xinquan Wen, University of Malmö (mau.se).

The research explores how shared attention to the atmosphere can support new forms of collective sense making about belonging and environmental change, in collaboration with adults whose lives are marked by migration, precarity or close engagement with the environment.

These three dimensions hold together because the sky is at once a shared, borderless space that invites connection - familiar yet remote for people who have moved across countries - and the urgency of climate change and the sense of disconnection it often evokes. The project investigates how participatory design can invite broader engagement and amplify voices that are not always heard in climate conversations - how humans relate to the sky, clouds, and weather as part of their everyday home.

12:30–13:15: «Youth as Mediators in Energy Transitions: Care, Critical Fiction, and Institutional Constraints in Genk».

With Asli Eylem Kolbas, University of Hasselt (deandermarkt.be).

This presentation explores how migrant youth in Genk, Belgium, act as everyday mediators between their families and institutions in the context of energy transitions. 

Drawing on six months of ethnographic fieldwork and participatory design with a youth center, we trace how young people translate technical, bureaucratic, and linguistic information as a form of relational and emotional labor. Using neighborhood-based critical fiction gameplay and material making, we create spaces where youth articulate energy justice concerns, institutional mistrust, and family care in their own terms. 

We show how facilitation practices can both reproduce and unsettle institutional hierarchies and argue that youth mediation is best understood as situated justice work rather than individual capacity building. The talk reflects on the ethical limits of research partnerships when institutions rely on unpaid youth mediation to make policy workable.

13:15–1345: Lunch

We serve a simple lunch to all participants.

13:45–14:30: «Postmedia practices with children in newsmaking assemblages»

With Rasmus Wilhelm Kyllönen, Stockholm University (se.se).

My study invites 9 to 12-year-old children to participate in what I call ‘newsmaking assemblages’. Over the course of nearly three school semesters, children take part in an after-school activity of ‘making news’, writing articles, filming videos and recording podcasts for publication online, mostly drawing from their everyday lives. 

In a defining moment of where children’s (restricted) digital lives are headed, I situate my study within critical postmedia studies, which explore how digital media and technologies can, in fact, be tools in producing new subjectivities. By mapping ‘newsmaking assemblages’, my study contributes to thinking about how media practices can remodel children’s use of digital media.

14:30–15:15: «Exploring social media and children’s digital culture through creative methods»

With Henry Mainsah, OsloMet (oslomet.no).

This presentation will explore the possibilities and affordances of a series of visual, narrative, and interactive methods to prompt young people to reflect on the nature of social media spaces and the norms that shape how they operate. 

Social media use has become part of an “always-on” culture where young people are almost constantly connected digitally to platforms such as Tik Tok, Instagram and Snapchat. It is challenging for researchers to create a reflexive space where young people can adopt a defamiliarized view of their mundane, taken-for-granted and routinized practices on digital media. 

In the presentation, I will illustrate examples from a series of research projects with children in which I have employed activity based visual, narrative, and design methods in workshop-like settings. These methods afforded the participants a self-reflexive moment to navigate, map, and categorize media content, identify social media infrastructural functionalities, and make sense of wider implications.

Through these, we aimed to elicit meaning making processes by enabling participants to think from varying positions as user/citizens, co-researchers, designers and regulators. I explore these methods as an attempt to understand ethical forms of participation, dialogue and citizenship in changing spaces of social media.

15:15–15:30: Coffee

A short coffee break.

15:30–16:15: «Søndre Media project, engaging multicultural youth in media production activities». 

With Darin Hamdo (oslomet.no), Isac Tvedt (oslomet.no) and Dagny Stuedahl (oslomet.no), at OsloMet.

This outreach project aims at engaging young people with multicultural backgrounds situated in diverse areas of Oslo city in activities of media productions. The project arranges drop-in activities at libraries and youth clubs, and mini-courses giving practical skills in photography, graphic design, podcast, fanzine-production etc. 

Through the activity issues of democracy, representation, algorithmic power and freedom of speech is debated.  The overall goal of the project is also to spark interest in pursuing an education in journalism and media studies at our department. 

We will here talk about challenges we have experienced for organising the project as a participatory project, recruiting and involving young people in our organising work.

16:15–17:00: «Practicing Hope: Challenging myths and changing narratives of youth in superdiverse urban communities (YouHope)»

With Aina Landsverk Hagen (osloemt.no), Hilde Rønnaug Kitterød (oslomet.no) and Daniele Evelin Alves (oslomet.no) at OsloMet.

Together with partners form the University of Malmö and University College Copenhagen, YouHope explores how youth in the superdiverse districts of Oslo, Malmö and Copenhagen practice hope in their everyday lives. 

During the first phase of the project the research team has conducted a media study on how young people in the respective cities are voicing hope or hopelessness in the Nordic media discourse. The narratives identified through this media study will function as a vantage point for multicited ethnographic peer-research on practices of hope in the three cities.

The keynote will address the role of Inclusive Media Education advancing critical media literacy as vital framework for fostering civic engagement and critical thinking necessary for meaningful engagement with togetherness, social injustice and structural inequalities. It positions media literacy not merely as a set of technical skills, but as a civic and ethical practice concerned with questions of in- and exclusion, social justice, voice, and listening. 

An inclusive approach to media literacy in education builds on insights from critical pedagogy, postcolonial and decolonial theory, indigenous thinking. Such an approach understands multiculture not as an exception or problem that has to be managed, but as an ordinary and constitutive feature of social life. Inclusive Media Education therefore call for reflexivity, dialogical engagement, and structural awareness, enabling publics to critically navigate and reshape mediated public spaces.

Drawing from recent research projects – including Co-designing a Fair Digital Asylum Procedure - Leurs grounds the talk and reflects on the structural power relations (politics) and aesthetical demands ( poetics) of co-creative methodologies and how they may allow researchers to shed light on how digital infrastructure function as inclusion and exclusion mechanisms.

The keynote will be based on the coming book Inclusive Media Education: Critical Media Literacies for Diverse Societies (Routledge), written in collaboration with Dr. Çigdem Bozdag (digimig.nl) and Dr. Annemaria Néag (rug.nl), both from the University of Groningen. I is part of the series Routledge Research in Media Literacy and Education (routledge.com). 

Koen Leurs is an associate professor in Gender, Media and Migration Studies at the Graduate Gender Program, Department of Media and Culture, Utrecht University, the Netherlands. His interests are digital transformations in migration, borders and youth culture, research ethics and co-creative methodologies. His most recent books are Digital Migration, published with Sage in June 2023; and Doing Digital Migration Studies, published with Amsterdam University Press in March 2024.