Digital stories and emerging citizens' media practices by migrant youth in Western Sydney

This article provides a critical examination of community media practices by young recently arrived African refugees and Cambodian young migrants in Western Sydney, Australia. Against the backdrop of contemporary cultural politics of migration in Australia the article is grounded on a recent participatory community media research project conducted in 2008-2009, which aimed to conceptualise the emerging spaces for claiming new forms of citizen agency and contest the general representations of newly arrived migrants in the mainstream media. The paper argues that community media is better positioned to recognise changing attitudes towards migrants and refugees, and that these changes must also take place from the bottom up. Extending existing notions of citizens' media the paper articulates a view that young media practitioners become active citizens in the exercise of their civil and communication rights and their selfrepresentation, by owning the process of content creation and communication, thus redefining the content (rather than the form) of what citizenship means in different social contexts.