Post structuralist Media Education?

One of the key ideas I have been grappling with for my PhD is the question of what underpins media education on a theoretical level. This relates to the theory I believe underpins the relationship between young people and media and how education might productively intervene in that relationship.

Structuralist thought has been seriously challenged as a convincing theory because it assumes that society is inherently structured through relationships of domination. For example, the media dominates the beliefs and values of young people, and the role of media education is to somehow release individuals from that domination. However, numerous theorists have demonstrated that the relationship is not nearly so neat. For example, during the 1970s cultural studies theorists used French post structuralist theories to argue that individuals negotiated meaning with media texts in an active and constructive manner. While ideology and social regulation played a role in how individuals participated with media, they also had agency and helped to define the meaning of media texts.

My research aims to identify whether or not particular post structuralist theories might convincingly describe the relationship between young people and media. In particular, I am using Judith Butler's theory of perfomativity to identify how students perform their identities in relation to new media forms such as video games.