Social media performance in school: Youth practice of humor and resistance through TikTok trends

Youth representations of school on social media offer critical glimpses of student conceptions of their roles and agency within the institution. Current research on youth public performances on social media applications such as TikTok describe them primarily as reflections of how social media use acts on youth and, less often, as ways that youth can develop agency through social media. Much less examined is how youth use social media to practice resistance to dominant narratives. Using literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque as a lens into youth social media performances in and about school, this investigation asks to what extent do public social media videos in and about school allow for youth practice of resistance to dominant narratives of control. Focusing on two different samples of TikTok videos taken in school, the first a time sample of seven videos and the second a close reading of six videos of a hashtag-based search, this analysis examines humor and parody as a space of resistance in youth expression and emphasizes the need to consider how educators and systems create and uphold official hierarchies that necessitate a vibrant second world of youth-created play.