Affective Affinities, Embodiment, and the Political: Youth Media Practices in Palestine and Israel

Scholarship in media education has historically focused on the constructed character of media production and reception, examined politico-economic and ideological dimensions of youth media, and generally neglected those affective dimensions of children and young people's media engagements that go beyond the ideological. Contextualized in terms of embodiment and performativity, the subjective and sensory aspects of youth agency offer substantive analytic insights into the particular ways young people engage with and produce various media forms. To understand children and young people's media engagements in relation to their conception of the "political," it is important to examine the subjective and sensory aspects of the experiences through which they produce various media forms. To this end, I will examine three youth media initiatives from Palestine and Israel to understand how children and young people appropriate and reconfigure old and new media in the process of creating personal and social narratives. These youth initiatives raise several difficult geopolitical challenges wrought by neoliberal globalization and the continuing Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Haifa and Ramallah. Palestinian youth live in a constant state of emergency in refugee camps surrounded by Israeli military barricades and borders, and as minorities inside Israel. Yet remarkably, their imagination is shaped not by despair, but, to borrow Raymond Williams's felicitous phrase, by "resources of hope." (1) In the face of looming violence and suffering, young people develop media forms and narratives that address everyday life in the refugee camps, recuperation of individual and collective memories, identity, and belonging. Although the youth-produced media forms take up the question of the political, this paper explores two other important elements in specific detail: the role of affect and embodiment, and the issue of translocality, which point toward potential "spaces for dialogue." Without delving into the extensive literature on affect, I will address the question of sensory experience by selectively drawing upon the writings of Paul Ricocur, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Vivian Sobchack. Their analysis offers insight into the embodied nature of human subjectivity that is alert to the quotidian aspects of everyday life. "Affect" is understood in terms of a set of embodied practices and is largely defined as an unreflective and unstructured feeling and experience that cannot be realized in language. According to Jen Skattebol, "Affect theories dispute separations between mind and body; and between the individual, their communities and political contexts. Affect is a tangible, embodied force that operates between people and as such it adds complexity to the way we think about relationships in learning." (2) For Sobchack, the notion of "embodiment" is a "radically material condition of human being that necessarily entails both the body and consciousness, objectivity and subjectivity, in an irreducible ensemble" where the meaning of experience is lived in context. (3) Postcolonial scholar Chakrabarty argues that academic knowledge privileges the analytic (reason) over lived experience and the senses, pointing out that "experience is not always subjective in a psychological sense, if by psychology we refer to processes that go on only in the brain. The body also has experiences and remembers them." (4) Both Chakrabarty and Sobchack urge us to pay attention to the embodied nature of human subjectivity, belonging, and identity. Pursuing the key questions underlying his philosophical anthropology: "What is the meaning of being human?" and "How does a 'subject' come to interpret itself?," Ricoeur posited that the meaning of "subject" is mediated through processes of interpretation--cultural, religious, political, historical, and scientific. For Ricoeur, hermeneutics, in addition to concerning itself with the interpretation of literary works and cultural artifacts, is about human action itself. …