About YAPA

YouTube as a performative arena (YAPA), is a three-year, three-part research project funded by the Swedish Knowledge Foundation. YAPA cuts across the disciplines linguistics, sociology, IT pedagogy, and comparative literature in order to examine emergent uses of video among youth in Sweden and it’s potential importance as a tool of learning and communicating in increasingly hybridized digital-physical arenas.

(The film’s transcript can be read here)

The first of the three studies is an ethnographic examination of YouTube as a hybridization of online and offline performative spaces. Three groups of YouTube users will be interviewed in order to determine motivations, influences, as well as identify potential social significance both in their offline and online lives. These groups will include a Stockholm based flashmob group, a Umeå based parkour group, and a group of Swedish youth that use YouTube as a political platform.

The second part of this study will map and contextualize the discourse surrounding youth’s critical making on YouTube in order to critically analyze how YouTube is both defined and described by traditional mass media. This discourse can range anywhere from a descriptive representation to ‘media panics’ which are often typified by features such as exaggeration and unfounded generalizations.

The final part of this project will focus on the multimodality, expressiveness, and social features of the YouTube platform in order to challenge traditional notions of text in the Swedish school system. Schools from Umeå, Sweden will create short films on a dedicated YouTube channel. From those films, the Swedish author Peter Kihlgård will create a literary text, which will then be reconnected back to the original films. The combined works will be presented online and in an installation at Umeå University/HUMlab. The films and literary text will then be used to generate a dialogue about how performative and creative arenas can realize an expanded notion of text in education.