Active Contemporary Citizenship as a Research Mode

Active citizenship is a form of civil participation in which direct involvement is emphasized over distanced reflection. As such it seems to be in juxtaposition to the role of the researcher who is typically an external spectator and observes, documents, and analyzes phenomena from outside. This quality of remaining in a state of professional distance and scholarly reflection can pose a dilemma when the multitude of problems in the world is obvious and the need for direct intervention becomes undeniable. Are active citizenship and scientific enquiry opposing modes of participation or can they be complementary? For the duration of 11 months, we pursued a first-person study, seeking to deepen a sense of engagement with the challenges of the time while simultaneously maintaining our role as researchers. We aggregate our findings into four categories—“feelings,” “insights,” “changes in perspective” and the “wrestling to find a balance between inertia and conscience.” The results are contextualized within the broader literature of the self, pointing to facets of identity that encompass both a local and a global form of “active” or “contemporary” citizenship.

Students expressions to a civil participation in communication and health: reflexions about thecurricularized socio-educational practices to the integral formation

El presente trabajo es resultado de la primera sis-tematización sobre el impacto del aprendizaje si-tuado, a partir de la puesta en marcha del Programa de Extensión “Integrando saberes para fortalecer la comunicación interna y externa en Instituciones de Salud”, que se ejecuta desde el año 2017. Desde esa fecha, estudiantes de tres cohortes en la materia Taller de Gestión de la Comunicación Institucional de la Licenciatura en Comunicación Social vivenciaron y experimentaron, desde la extensión crítica arrai-gada al territorio, parte de su formación profesional orientada en comunicación y salud. Así, las prácticas socioeducativas (PSE) curricularizadas y habilitadas mediante la propuesta del aula social junto al grupo educando y la metodología participativa, constitu-yeron el escenario deseable para la planificación y gestión desde una perspectiva comunicacional que puso en el centro a las prácticas vinculares. Esta visi-bilización de los procesos comunicacionales en con-texto, que habilita el diálogo de saberes para favo-recer la aprehensión de habilidades específicas, dio lugar a respuestas concretas a las demandas de las y los actores institucionales en cada interacción. La acumulación de experiencias presentadas para este Cuaderno es reflejo de una práctica de comunica-ción integral, que reconoce los recorridos diversos de los diferentes niveles de atención en salud y da cuenta de la importancia significativa del grupo edu-cando para la intervención en dichas instituciones.

The mediated discourse and voice of euthanasia: the Israeli media as a case study

Euthanasia is an important social and quality of life issue. However, it is highly controversial and thus continuously debated especially given its legitimacy and legality differ between countries. Little is known about the role media plays concerning this topic. To fill this gap, this study applies a mixed methods approach to a case study of Israeli media, including a quantitative content analysis of news articles (to measure the discourse of ‘civil participation’), a thematic analysis of news articles (to examine the ‘voice’) and a quantitative content analysis of Facebook comments (to measure ‘being heard’). Results indicate that while the media highly enables the media capability of ‘voice’ (both ‘voicing’ and ‘being heard’), it limits the media capability of ‘civil participation’ to a narrow array of discourse, hindering the social debate. These results reveal the role the media plays regarding euthanasia, integral to individuals’ quality of life through the realisation of their media capabilities, and in relation to the act of euthanasia itself.

Civil Participation-Driven Social Capitalization-Enabled Resilience Cycle for Community-based Tourism

Community-based tourism (CBT) is flourishing in Thailand, partly credited to the active local participation and engagement-driven national policies that aim to stimulate effective uses of local resources and destination attributes for income-earning and sustainable socio-cultural and ecological development. Against this policy-grassroot synergistic backdrop and given the scare literature on the civil roles in CBT, this study examines the civil participation as an important social capitalization bridge to enable and thrust the community development and organization towards realizing CBT potentials while creating positive impacts on the economics, cultural, social and environmental domains of sustainability. In particular, a civil participation-driven social capitalization-enabled resilience cycle model, with a root taken to social capitalization structure of destination management that relates and integrates thestructural andrelational elements, and the cognitive goals, is proposed, as a key conceptual contribution to the extant literature of CBT and tourism, and is empirically supported by the neural network simulations and structural equation modeling (SEM) fitting. The samples were drawn from the agriculture- livelihood based communities who exploit community-based tourism (CBT) to supplement their earnings and help them develop socio-cultural and ecological attitudes and sustainability results. The SEM and the neural network results were well-aligned and cross-supportive, which manifests another domain of contribution in the methodological aspect in social sciences, tourism and hospitality disciplines. The resilience cycle model fit is dynamic in nature, and provides a base for the continuous development of the communities in sustainable manner

Youth and civil participation in Hungary

Bognár Adrienn (2011): Youth and civil participation in Hungary.