Tom 1 (2014): Zeszyt 1 (November 2014)
Participatory Cultural Citizenship

This article is a conversation between David Gauntlett and Amy Twigger Holroyd, who have shared interests in craft, making, sustainability and social change. Our discussion starts with the importance of small steps towards creativity: the personal satisfaction of making something yourself and of gaining recognition from others. These ‘micro’ steps, combined together at the macro level, become significant in contributing to social change. In particular, we explore the ways in which amateur making is important for sustainability – through offering an alternative to the mass consumption model and building a sense of engagement with the world. We then explore the idea of design as a process of action, change and creativity, which can be used to address social and environmental problems – whether by designing systems to support activity and reflection, or by creatively intervening in the complex systems within which we live.

The article focuses on 1001 Stories of Denmark: an internet site and a mobile app that collects and displays stories and visual material connected to places all over Denmark. This site offers a “social media-like” communication frame with various levels of participation. But in reality, 1001 stories of Denmark is mainly a one-to-many dissemination of expert knowledge, and actual user participation is limited. However, the site does host user-generated material, e.g. a number of amateurish videos and stories that often do not follow the guidelines, but in some cases construct willful and affective narratives. I argue that these videos and stories demonstrate the potential of mobile and digital cultural heritage sites; however, it requires strategic initiatives and long-term engagement from museums and cultural institutions to create and maintain the level of the dialogue and participation.

The article is based on the case of a group of homeless people who in the fall of 2013 occupied a central site in the Danish town of Aarhus. The authors argue that this specific case is an ideal object of investigation for casting light on a new situation in the field of public administration. Public administration has recently moved from the paradigm of New Public Management to a new and still undetermined paradigm, which focuses on activating and engaging citizens, treating them as equal partners in the process of co-creating welfare services and the community itself as a brand. Using the case of the homeless, the authors argue that participatory citizenship should not only be viewed as “added value” to the field of public administration, but rather as emerging within a dynamic and conflict-ridden field between citizens and administration where new types of value are potentially created

Multiculturalism has become a charged arena in recent times with proponents and critics focusing on the value of its utility. Existing models measuring the outcome of multiculturalism emanate from the social sciences that attempt to assess the degree of inter-cultural integration through cultural indices on ethnicity and tradition. This article argues that arts impact studies in general, and emergent cultural indicator frameworks in particular, provide a more robust arena for considering the utility of multiculturalism to claims of social, cultural and economic wellbeing. This article examines the impact of multicultural arts through the quality of cultural participation. It begins by critically surveying global, national and local indicator frameworks on measuring multiculturalism in recent developments of cultural policy. It suggests that current frameworks for thinking about cultural diversity and cultural participation are inadequate, and there is a need to develop a more nuanced understanding of these relations as they are played out in the context of people’s everyday cultural lives. It proposes a new framework that highlights a bi-directional theory-based approach to cultural citizenship and tests its utility against original fieldwork conducted in the growth corridor outer suburb of Whittlesea in Melbourne, Australia.

Young people’s civic engagement through online communities and peer networks has received increased attention in recent years. This paper examines groups rooted within participatory cultures, which mobilize their participants toward explicit civic goals. We draw on our research of Invisible Children and the Harry Potter Alliance—two media-centric, youth-oriented, participatory organizations—to identify their distinctive practices. Building on our analysis, we propose that both organizations engage in “Participatory Culture Civics” (PCC) as they support organized collective action towards civic goals, while building on the affordances of participatory culture. We describe three innovative PCC practices employed by these groups: Build Communities, Tell Stories, and Produce Media. The organizations’ ability to combine civic goals with the pleasures of participatory culture allows them to successfully engage young people. However, both organizations struggle to balance between the creative and community-based tenets of participatory culture, and the focused, product-driven goals of a civic engagement organization.

While Digital Storytelling has been lauded as an exemplary model of participatory cultural citizenship (particularly in initiatives for and with marginalised people), many mediating influences make ‘authentic’ self-representation far from straightforward. In this article, I consider some of these mediating influences, from both theoretical and practical perspectives, and underline their regulatory and constitutive nature. While some of these mediating influences are timeworn and pre-date digital technology, others are perpetuated and amplified, as is the case in networked personal storytelling disseminated online. I draw on some well-established strategies derived from anthropology and narrative practices to propose a new purpose for old tools. These tools support the nuanced and sensitive facilitation of both face-to-face and online Digital Storytelling workshops as well as the curation of web spaces in which they eventually circulate. I argue that making complex mediating influences visible to participants affords redress of the inherent social and technical privileges of institutions, facilitators and platforms. Finally, I consider the implications of these strategies for voice, marginalised identity, cultural citizenship and social change.

This article studies Nagieb Khaja’s documentary film My Afghanistan. Life in the Forbidden Zone (2012), produced from footage by locals. It is Khaja’s aim to create awareness of how daily life is maintained in a war zone in Afghanistan. In 2013 he launched a webpage to further the interest in the matter. News on the withdrawal of military forces and interviews with locals were posted on the site, which was used as an educational participatory platform. This article highlights the participatory engagement by including the Deleuzian concept of ‘the intercessor’ – i.e. the use of the film camera as a creative rather than a documenting device – and it contends that the intuitive use of the camera momentarily has a participatory impact on the users and an affective impact on spectators and users alike.