1st Edition

Political Protest and Undocumented Immigrant Youth (Re-) framing Testimonio

By Stefanie Quakernack Copyright 2018
    232 Pages 2 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    232 Pages 2 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    What does it mean to be a young undocumented immigrant? Current public debate on undocumented immigration provokes discussion worldwide, and it is estimated that there are more than 11.1 million undocumented immigrants in the US, yet what it really means to be an undocumented immigrant appears less explicitly delineated in the debate.



    This interdisciplinary volume applies theories from Media, Cultural, and Literary Studies to investigate how undocumented immigrant youth in the United States have claimed a public voice by publishing their video narratives on YouTube. Case studies show how political protest significantly shapes these videos as activists narrate and perform their ‘dispossession’, redefining their understanding of the mechanisms of immigration in the Americas, and of home, belonging, and identity. The impact of the videos is explored as the activists connect them to Congressional bills and present their activities as a continuation of the legacy of the civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s.



    This book will be of interest to a wide range of scholars and students involved in debates on migration, communication, new media, culture, protest movements and political lobbying.



    Chapter 1 - Introduction: Digital Narratives of Undocumented Immigrant Youth

    Chapter 2 - The Movement, Politics, And Media Logic in YouTube Narratives Of Undocumented Youth

    Chapter 3 - Re-Framing Testimonio: Mediatizing Political Storytelling on YouTube

    Chapter 4 - Stories of the Dispossessed

    Chapter 5 - Visual Dispossession(S) and the Dynamics of the Performative: Moving Image

    Chapter 6 - Activism in Soundscape: Voice, Noises, And Music in Digital Narratives

    Chapter 7 - Intermedial Spaces: Written Language, Static Image, And Props

    Chapter 8 - Conclusions

    Biography

    As of spring 2018, Stefanie Quakernack is a postdoctoral researcher and project manager at Ruhr-University Bochum. Her fields of research are immigration, education, and language. Up until 2017, Stefanie Quakernack was a lecturer and doctoral research fellow in the American Studies department at Bielefeld University, where she studied fields of U.S. immigration at the intersections of Media, Political, Literary, and Cultural Studies. Much of the research presented in this book originates in the field research that she carried out in Chicago, Illinois, in spring 2014."