Young listening: An ethnography of YouthWorx Media's radio project.

Listening as the act of aural consumption has commonly been the moment in cultural practice around which analysis has cohered. This has certainly been the case with the cultural objects of popular music and radio broadcasting. Where young people have been brought into the frame of such analyses, the impact of listening on the formation of the self has been highly pronounced - leading at times to public panic around particular musical genres and their associated socio-cultural practices, for instance around hip-hop, heavy metal and emo music. This paper investigates the combination of radio broadcasting and young people from the perspective of cultural production as a redemptive process. The taxonomy of a reflexive 'listening to oneself '; collaborative 'listening to others'; and the empowering and responsibilizing process of 'being listened to' grounded in an ethnography of radio production is employed to explore the social processes of 'learning to listen' undertaken by the YouthWorx Media program that engages disadvantaged young people in media creation, while setting a scene for the project's evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]