Does youth participation hold the potential to change entrenched systems of power and to reshape civic life? In Youth Power in Precarious Times Melissa Brough examines how the city of Medellin, Colombia, offers a model of civic transformation forged in the wake of violence and repression. She responds to a pressing contradiction in the world at large, where youth political participation has become a means of commodifying digital culture amid the ongoing disenfranchisement of youth globally. Brough focuses on how young people's civic participation online and in the streets in Medellin was central to the city's transformation from having the world's highest homicide rates in the early 1990s to being known for its urban renaissance by the 2010s. Seeking to distinguish commercialized digital interactions from genuine political participation, Brough uses Medellin's experiences with youth participation-ranging from digital citizenship initiatives to the voices of community media to the beats of hip-hop culture-to show how young people can be at the forefront of fostering ecologies of artistic and grassroots engagement in order to reshape civic life.

About the Author
Melissa Brough is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at California State University, Northridge.

Reviews
"In few world cities do creative vision and the long shadow of brutal institutionalized violence intersect more powerfully than in Medellin, Colombia. What would it mean to respond to that city's challenges using 'participation' as the guiding principle? Melissa Brough's rich and clear-sighted study of local participation within citizens' media, participatory budgeting, hip-hop collectives, and urban policy making is a major advance in our understanding of Latin America's distinctive path back towards democracy." -- Nick Couldry, Professor of Media, Communications and Social Theory, London School of Economics
"[Youth Power in Precarious Times] presents an interesting case study mostly unknown by the academia outside the Global South, providing a significant contribution to the debate around participation, youth, and marginalized populations, while combining a variety of academic fields. . . . One of the book's obvious merits lies in its resistance to binary thinking by proposing a conceptual frame that provides alternative readings about a socially complex reality." -- Jose Alberto Simoes * International Journal of Communication *



Book Information
ISBN 9781478008071
Author Melissa Brough
Format Paperback
Page Count 216
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 295g