At the Digital Margins? A Theoretical Examination of Social Media Engagement Using Intersectional Feminism

This article applies an intersectional feminist lens to social media engagement with European politics. Disproportionately targeted at already marginalised people, the problem of online abuse/harassment has come to increasing public awareness. At the same time, movements such as #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo have demonstrated the value of social media in facilitating global grassroots activism that challenges dominant structures of power. While the literature on social media engagement with European politics has offered important insights into the extent to which social media facilitates democratic participation, it has not to date sufficiently accounted for patterns of intersectional activism and online inequalities. Using Nancy Fraser’s feminist critique of Habermas’ public sphere theory and Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality, this article explores patterns of gender and racial inequalities in the digital public space. By analysing both the role of racist and misogynistic online abuse targeted at women, nonbinary, agender, and gender-variant people in public life, as well as the opportunities for marginalised groups to mobilise transnationally through subaltern counter-publics, I argue that social media engagement is inextricably linked with offline inequalities. To fully understand the impact of social media on European democracy, we need to pay attention to gendered and racialised dynamics of power within the digital public sphere that have unequal consequences for democratic participation. This will involve expanding our methodological repertoire and employing tools underpinned by a critical feminist epistemology.

Participatory Literacy and Taking Informed Action in the Social Studies

The purpose of the social studies is to prepare students for life as citizens in a democratic society, and this requires attention to the variety of digital spaces inhabited by our K-12 students in today's increasingly digitized world. Incorporating participatory technologies into structured inquiries in the social studies may help develop students' skills and abilities in critically sourcing, evaluating, sharing, and creating media, and provides the opportunity for increasingly democratic participation and civic engagement both in and out of the school setting. In this chapter, the authors suggest the integration of participatory literacy with the College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) framework as a means of supporting students in taking informed action.

Love-based relationships between teachers and students in early childhood education

As a philosophical basis of education, ‘love’ is crucial to early childhood education. For this reason, early childhood education should cultivate young children’s loving attitudes. Hence, by analysing related work, this paper explored how love-based relationships may be developed between preschool teachers and young children in early childhood education. The methods are as follows: (1) fostering love in preschool teachers’ hearts; (2) creating loving relationships between preschool teachers and young children; (3) providing opportunities for young children to practice loving behaviour; (4) giving young children freedom; (5) maintaining an open dialogue; (6) emphasising democratic participation; (7) avoiding indoctrination; (8) respecting young children’s experiences and discoveries; (9) allowing young children to make choices and (10) understanding young children as individuals.

Making waves: A cross-study analysis of young people’s participation arenas in Scotland’s schools

This article compares democratic participation research in Scottish schools over a 10-year period. The comparison reveals how ‘organic’ aspects of decision-making arise in arenas of school activity. We argue that research heretofore has focussed on pupil councils to the exclusion of more everyday embedded and embodied choices. Primary researchers in the studies revisited data, drawing on their respective theoretical frameworks, to consider how new materialist perspectives offer ways to attend differently to the recursive, relational dynamics of participation.

Exploring participatory heritage governance after the EU Faro Convention

PurposeThis paper aims to analyse the key Faro notions of “heritage community” and “democratic participation” as defined in the Faro Convention, and how they challenge core notions of authority and expertise in the discipline and professional practice of cultural heritage.Design/methodology/approachThis paper examines notions of “heritage community” and “democratic participation” as they are framed in the Faro Convention, and it briefly introduces two cases (Finland and Marseille) to explore their application. It then focusses on the implications of these two notions for heritage administration (expertise) in terms of citizen agency, co-creation of knowledge and forms of decision-making processes.FindingsThe Faro Convention favours an innovative approach to social, politic and economic problems using cultural heritage. To accomplish this, it empowers citizens as actors in developing heritage-based approaches. This model transforms heritage into a means for achieving socioeconomic goals and attributes to the public the ability to undertake heritage initiatives, leaving the administration and expert bodies as mediators in this process. To bring about this shift, Faro institutes the notion of “heritage communities” and fosters participative governance. However, how heritage communities practise participation may follow different paths and result in different experiences due to local and national political circumstances.Originality/valueThe Faro Convention opens up a window by framing cultural heritage within the realm of social and democratic instrumentality, above and beyond the heritage per se. But it also poses some questions regarding the rationale of heritage management (authority in governability), at least as understood traditionally under official heritage management discourses.

Starbucks and Aristotle

Aristotle argued that democratic participation in decision-making rests on informal encounters between citizens, because these interactions help to build civic friendships. In modern-day North America, the Starbucks corporation has posited itself as a “third place”, a space other than work and home that acts as a theatre for the development of civic friendships. In this essay, I investigate whether visiting Starbucks allows customers to connect to their larger community by providing the opportunity for meaningful social interaction. While Starbucks’ marketing strategies capitalize on the human desire for belonging, its expensive brand succeeds in differentiating citizens by their socioeconomic status, thereby undermining social unity. Furthermore, the environment in Starbucks stores emphasize experiences of personal pleasure rather than the enjoyment of community, as evidenced by the lack of authentic civic dialogue occurring within these spaces. As it encourages customers to settle for less than the formation of civic virtue, Starbucks’ commodification of community may challenge the flourishing of contemporary democracy.

Why Europe Does not Need a Constitution: On the Limits of Constituent Power as a Tool for Democratization

In this article, I question the use of the notion of ‘constituent power’ as a tool for the democratization of the European Union (EU). Rather than seeing the absence of a transnational constituent power as a cause of the EU’s ‘democratic deficit’, I identify it as an opportunity for unfettered democratic participation. Against the reification of power-in-action into a power-constituted-in-law, I argue that the democratization of the EU can only be achieved through the multiplication of ‘constituent moments’. I begin by deconstructing the normative justifications surrounding the concept of constituent power. Here I analyze the structural aporia of constituent power and question the autonomous and emancipatory dimension of this notion. I then test the theoretical hypothesis of this structural aporia of the popular constituent power by comparing it with the historical experiments of a European popular constituent power. Finally, based on these theoretical and empirical observations, I propose to replace the ambivalence of the concept of popular constituent power with a more cautious approach to the bottom-up democratization of European integration: that of a multiplication of transnational constituent moments.

Algorithms, Manipulation, and Democracy

Algorithmic communications pose several challenges to democracy. The three phenomena of filtering, hypernudging, and microtargeting can have the effect of polarizing an electorate and thus undermine the deliberative potential of a democratic society. Algorithms can spread fake news throughout the society, undermining the epistemic potential that broad participation in democracy is meant to offer. They can pose a threat to political equality in that some people may have the means to make use of algorithmic communications and the sophistication to be immune from attempts at manipulation, while other people are vulnerable to manipulation by those who use these means. My concern here is with the danger that algorithmic communications can pose to political equality, which arises because most citizens must make decisions about what and who to support in democratic politics with only a sparse budget of time, money, and energy. Algorithmic communications such as hypernudging and microtargeting can be a threat to democratic participation when persons are operating in environments that do not conduce to political sophistication. This constitutes a deepening of political inequality. The political sophistication necessary to counter this vulnerability is rooted for many in economic life and it can and ought to be enhanced by changing the terms of economic life.

Community Forum on Education in Wellington's Eastern Suburbs: A Case Study on Choice and Democratic Community Participation in New Zealand Education Policy

<p>Two different ideologies were entwined in the revolutionary reforms of the New Zealand education system implemented in 1989. One was represented by a belief, long held in New Zealand, in democratic participation of communities in decisions that affect them, as a way of empowering diverse groups of people and promoting equity for minority and disadvantaged groups. The second was the free market neo-liberalism of the New Right which emphasised the rights and responsibilities of individual people to choose for themselves what they wanted. This belief is seen as an epiphyte growing vigorously onto the main trunk of democratic egalitarian ideals. The notion of choice seemed, in the initial rhetoric of the reforms, to span both beliefs in a way that represented a settlement of the two different ideals. Community Forums on Education was one of the new policies which seemed to meet both these ideals, providing a means for communities to affect decisions about education issues in their own district and for parents through their Board of Trustees to exercise their own choice for what kind of school they wanted. The way in which the two parts of the tree of education policy grew together is examined first through an analysis of the intentions of those who developed the policy for Community Forums on Education, and then in a case study of the implementation of the policy in the third of the Forums which took place in the Eastern Suburbs of Wellington in 1990. The perceptions of some of the participants in this Forum are reported and analysed. Tensions and conflicts between the two ideals are revealed in both the process and the outcomes of this Forum, as the participants discover that the simple market understanding of choice is increasingly favoured by the politicians who still make the final decisions. The participants describe the conditions which they believe are needed for the more complex democratic community participation to succeed. Their growing frustration and disillusionment is described as they discover that political imperatives for quick decisions, tighter central control, and constrained resources ensure these conditions are not met. This Forum is perceived by many to have given the choice to the already privileged minority, who have advantages of time, access to information, confidence in the language of the market and money. In the light of this Forum, I consider in the concluding section the relationship and interaction between two interpretations of democracy - 'strong' democracy characterised by community participation and 'thin' democracy extolling individual freedom of choice. The question that is raised is whether it is possible, under a New Right regime committed to individual freedom of choice, for the conditions necessary for democratic participation to flourish.</p>