(Mis)Understanding Political Participation: Digital Practices, New Forms of Participation and the Renewal of Democracy

Description

The practices of participation and engagement are characterised by complexities and contradictions. All celebratory examples of uses of social media, e.g. in the Arab spring, the Occupy movement or in recent LGBTQ protests, are deeply rooted in human practices. Because of this connection, every case of mediated participation should be perceived as highly contextual and cannot be attributed to one (social) specific media logic, necessitating detailed empirical studies to investigate the different contexts of political and civic engagement. In this volume, the theoretical chapters discuss analytical frameworks that can enrich our understanding of current contexts and practices of mediated participation. The empirical studies explore the implications of the new digital conditions for the ways in which digitally mediated social interactions, practices and environments shape everyday participation, engagement or protest and their subjective as well societal meaning. Cover Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Contents Introduction PART I: Practices of Participation and Citizenship 1 (New) Forms of Digital Participation? Toward a Resource Model of Adolescents’ Digital Engagement 2 Long-Lasting Shadows of (Post)Communism? Generational and Ethnic Divides in Political and Civic Participation in Estonia 3 Enhanced Inter-visibility. The Experience of Civic Engagement in Social Media 4 ‘I Am Not a Consumer Person’ – Political Participation in Repair Cafés 5 Intimate Citizenship Politics and Digital Media: Teens’ Discourses, Sexual Normativities and Popular Social Media PART II: Mediated Representations of Participation and Citizenship 6 The Indignados in the European Press: Beyond the Protest Paradigm? 7 Speak Your Mind: Mediatised Political Participation Through Second Screens 8 “My Body, My Decision”. The Abortion Debate and Twitter as a Counterpublic Sphere for Women in Turkey 9 Repeat, Remediate, Resist? Digital Meme Activism in the Context of the Refugee Crisis PART III: (Re-)Framing Participation and Citizenship 10 Towards a Framework for Studying Political Participation in Social Media 11 Protest or Collaboration? How Perceived Opportunities and Constraints Shape the Activities of Anti-Infrastructure Citizen Action Groups 12 Visibility, Voice and Encounter in Cosmopolitan Online Communication. Rethinking Cultural Citizenship in Post-Migrant Societies 13 Mapping the ‘Search Agenda’: A Citizen-Centric Approach to Electoral Information Flows List of Contributors Index