Lauren Berliner publishes Producing Queer Youth: The Paradox of Digital Media Empowerment

IAS faculty member Lauren Berliner published Producing Queer Youth: The Paradox of Digital Media Empowerment. Based on over three years of participant action research with queer teen media-makers and textual analysis of hundreds of youth-produced videos and popular media campaigns, the book challenges popular ideas about online media culture as a platform for empowerment, cultural transformation, and social progress. It offers a nuanced picture of openings that emerge for youth media producers as they negotiate the structures of funding and publicity and manage their identities with digital self-representations. Berliner’s research reframes digital media participation as a struggle for—rather than, in itself, evidence of—power.