Citizen Agency Research Articles

The Politics of Privacy—A Useful Tautology

While communication and media studies tend to define privacy with reference to data security, current processes of datafication and commodification substantially transform ways of how people act in increasingly dense communicative networks. This begs for advancing research on the flow of individual and organizational information considering its relational, contextual and, in consequence, political dimensions. Privacy, understood as the control over the flow of individual or group information in relation to communicative actions of others, frames the articles assembled in this thematic issue. These contributions focus on theoretical challenges of contemporary communication and media privacy research as well as on structural privacy conditions and people’s mundane communicative practices underlining inherent political aspect. They highlight how particular acts of doing privacy are grounded in citizen agency realized in datafied environments. Overall, this collection of articles unfolds the concept of ‘Politics of Privacy’ in diverse ways, contributing to an emerging body of communication and media research.

Police Violence and the African-American Procedural Habitus

How should an African American respond to a race-based police stop? What approach, disposition, or tactic will minimize his risk within the context of the police stop of being subject to police violence? This Essay advances a conversation among criminal procedural theorists about citizen agency within the field of police-administered criminal procedure, highlighting “The Talk” that parents have with their African American children regarding how to respond to police seizure. It argues that the most prominent version of The Talk — the one in which parents call for absolute deference to police authority in the event of a police stop — may be as reasonable as it is ineffective. If African Americans, as a matter of course, respond to the race-based stop with unqualified submission to police authority, the race-based stop becomes a tidy and efficient exercise, the ease of which is likely to raise the rate at which African Americans are stopped and battered by police. Blanket conformity would seem to create a deleterious feedback loop for this targeted racial cohort. African Americans could instead opt for a discrete, transactional form of nonconformity in response to the race-based stop — one that accords with the principle of police accountability. Rather than reflexive submission, when subject to such stops African Americans could follow a nonconformist protocol that includes a request for the name and badge number of the seizing officer(s) followed by the filing of a formal complaint. I identify these and similar discretionary maneuvers taken during and after the race-based police stop as “administrative nonconformity.” Such practices require an alternative disposition toward the race-based stop — a reformulation of the African American procedural habitus.

Democracy Without Citizens: Australian Citizen Agency and the Symbolic Significance of Not Having Rights

In a global context of narrowing civil liberties and intensifying state repression, it is critical to have adequately nuanced theories to account for the conditions of the emergence of democratic subjectivities. Guillermo O'Donnell's theory of citizen agency, in which citizens are rights-bearing moral agents and the 'vectors of democratization', bridges democratic and citizenship theory, normative and empirical approaches. In O'Donnell's rendering, the significance of rights lies in their capacity to legitimise rights claiming and other performances of citizenship. Australia is unique among democracies insofar as it does not recognise the rights of the citizens constitutionally or in a bill of rights. I use O'Donnell'sDemocracy, Agency, and the Stateas a focus for reflecting on the meanings and symbolism of Australian citizenship, and the symbolic significance of not grounding citizenship in rights. My discussion combines ethnographic analysis of citizenship ceremonies with critical discussion of recent laws. I argue that the absenting of rights in constitutional and ceremonial evocations of citizenship has created a vague and contradictory figure of the citizen that straddles authoritarian and democratic values and symbols. This empty and contradictory mythology unhinges citizenship from democracy in Australian political culture, leaving it susceptible to authoritarian creep. Nonetheless, democracy's symbolic openness offers hope for the emergence of new democratic subjectivities, even amidst conditions of narrowing civic possibility. O'Donnell's study of citizen agency hones attention to the importance of the cultural conditions amenable to democratic subjectivity and warrants further comparative exploration.

A happy choice: wellbeing as the goal of government

AbstractIn this article, we lay out the basic case for wellbeing as the goal of government. We briefly review the history of this idea, which goes back to the ancient Greeks and was the acknowledged ideal of the Enlightenment. We then discuss possible measures on which a wellbeing orientation could be based, emphasizing the importance of acknowledging the political agency of citizens and thus their own evaluations of their lives. We then turn to practicalities and consequences: how would one actually set up wellbeing-oriented decision-making and what difference should we expect from current practice? We end by discussing the current barriers to the adoption of wellbeing as the goal of government, both in terms of what we need to know more about and where the ideological barriers lie.

Sociological Theory from Dialogic Democracy

Despite the long dialogical tradition both in Eastern and Western societies, in recent years the social dialogical turn is more and more evident in many domains of life. Citizens increasingly demand to have a saying in the seeking of solutions for their problematics, and advocate for a more democratic approach to science that fosters the inclusion of all voices and enhances the agency of citizens in social transformation. Therefore, global scientific research is progressively more oriented towards co-creation as a means to ensure social impact. In this context, social theory can provide the theoretical foundations to better address the societal challenges of concern, as well as the mechanisms to properly design research oriented to produce social impact, such as communicative methodology, and to monitor and evaluate such impact. Social theory would then serve its ultimate goal: to contribute to the improvement of societies. Sociology was born as part of the democracies to provide citizens with elements of analysis that would make it possible for them to make their decisions with the prior evidence of the consequences of each option. After a process of democratization, we return to the original sense, but now in a more democratic situation.

Political Resistance and Citizenship Agency: Exploring the Experiences of Black African Zimbabwean and South African Women

This article addresses how marginalised black African women in South Africa and Zimbabwe understand themselves as citizens, express agency and practise political resistance. Little research has been done on this topic in Southern Africa, especially in Zimbabwe, making this study particularly relevant. Literature relating to citizenship, agency and the political resistance of women in non-Western society is also discussed. Focus is placed on a case study analysis of women who live in Zimbabwean and South African townships and who self-identify as members of the Ndebele and Zulu ethnic groups respectively. In-depth interviews, which consisted of closed and open-ended questions, were conducted with these women, and each participant also completed a form requiring them to provide socio-demographic information. Content and relational analysis was used to analyse the responses of the participants. The results indicated that these black African women participated politically in invented spaces that typically exist outside of the public political sphere. The women use everyday resistance strategies to negotiate their relationship with the state. These resistance strategies were found to be framed in terms of the women’s daily economic struggles and the structural challenges they faced.

The centre cannot (always) hold: Examining pathways towards energy system de-centralisation

‘Energy decentralisation’ means many things to many people. Among the confusion of definitions and practices that may be characterised as decentralisation, three broad causal narratives are commonly (implicitly or explicitly) invoked. These narratives imply that the process of decentralisation: i) will result in appropriate changes to rules and institutions, ii) will be more democratic and iii) is directly and causally linked to energy system decarbonisation. The principal aim of this paper is to critically examine these narratives. By conceptualising energy decentralisation as a distinct class of socio-technical transition pathway, we present a comparative analysis of energy decentralisation in Cornwall, South West UK, the French island of Ushant and the National Electricity Market in Australia. We show that, while energy decentralisation is often strongly correlated with institutional change, increasing citizen agency in the energy system, and enhanced environmental performance, these trends cannot be assumed as given. Indeed, some decentralisation pathways may entrench incumbent actors' interests or block rapid decarbonisation. In particular, we show how institutional context is a key determinant of the link between energy decentralisation and normative goals such as democratisation and decarbonisation. While institutional theory suggests that changes in rules and institutions are often incremental and path-dependent, the dense legal and regulatory arrangements that develop around the electricity sector seem particularly resistant to adaptive change. Consequently, policymakers seeking to pursue normative goals such as democratisation or decarbonisation through energy decentralisation need to look beyond technology towards the rules, norms and laws that constitute the energy governance system.

Civic Action, Historical Agency, and Grassroots Advocacy: Historical Inquiry Into Freedom Summer

In this article, the authors discuss how to explore the agency of ordinary citizens using local institutions to combat Jim Crow segregation laws during Freedom Summer. Primary sources from Miami (OH) University website about Freedom Summer and Susan Goldman Rubin's trade book ground the inquiry. Through the series of activities discussed, middle school students utilize the steps of the Inquiry Arc in the C3 Framework to analyze primary and secondary sources about Freedom Summer to determine how ordinary citizens took civic action to address the economic, social, cultural, and political inequalities of Jim Crow segregation laws. These experiences equip students with the knowledge and skills to be change agents in their own communities.

The micro-politics of implementing and resisting principal-agent relations in a weak state

ABSTRACTTo understand why quality of government (QoG) varies, scholars have drawn on two theoretical approaches: principal-agent and collective action theories. The literature tends to bifurcate these two theories, and focuses on the national scale and the structural conditions under which collective action and principal-agent problems arise. This article highlights how principal-agent relationships and collective action problems shape the implementation of decentralisation policy in two subnational governments in Papua New Guinea. It is argued that pathways to QoG are contextual, and determined by both principal-agent and collective action relationships. In the case of PNG, these relations are shaped by history, culture and the agency of elites and citizens.

From the hydrosocial to the hydrocitizen: Water, place and subjectivity within emergent urban wetlands

This paper argues that the expansion of corporate social responsibility initiatives within the English water sector, and in particular the opening up of privately owned public spaces (POPS) in urban settings, have generated spatially fixed forms of human-environment relationships that we have termed ‘hydrocitizenships’. Utilising empirical fieldwork undertaken within an emergent wetland POPS, we suggest that these novel modes of citizen agency are primarily enacted through the performativity of volunteering, in multiple civic roles such as landscapers, citizen scientists, stewards and storytelling guides. Members of the local community thus effectively curate new civic subjectivities for themselves in response to the site and its organisation, by producing for themselves new modes of ‘hydrocitizenship’. These hybrid intertwined forms of practice prompt us to ask questions about the extent to which these apparently new forms of environmental citizenship are self-directed, or manipulated. As access, control over, and use of, water resources are a synecdoche of structural power relationships within contemporary neoliberal economies, we can go further to suggest that these blue-green POPS are emblematic of a new iteration of hydro-social relations in which water, place and subjectivity become the collateral through which new POPS are secured. For water companies seeking to deploy corporate social responsibility there is, then, a subtle two step move to be made, by building brand loyalty and then developing new forms of resource management in which local communities accept heightened levels of responsibility for sites to which they are offered recreational access. These emergent ‘hydrocitizenships’ thus encapsulate very specific geo-spatial subjectivities and performativities which lock in access to waterscapes with closely scripted conditionalities regarding activity and behaviour.

Citizen Social Science for More Integrative and Effective Climate Action: A Science-Policy Perspective

Governments are struggling to limit global temperatures below the 2°C Paris target with existing climate change policy approaches. This is because conventional climate policies have been predominantly (inter)nationally top-down, which limits citizen agency in driving policy change and influencing citizen behavior. Here we propose elevating Citizen Social Science (CSS) to a new level across governments as an advanced collaborative approach of accelerating climate action and policies that moves beyond conventional citizen science and participatory approaches. Moving beyond the traditional science-policy model of the democratization of science in enabling more inclusive climate policy change, we present examples of how CSS can potentially transform citizen behavior and enable citizens to become key agents in driving climate policy change. We also discuss the barriers that could impede the implementation of CSS and offer solutions to these. In doing this, we articulate the implications of increased citizen action through CSS in moving forward the broader normative and political program of transdisciplinary and co-productive climate change research and policy.

A Happy Choice: Wellbeing as the Goal of Government

In this article, we lay out the basic case for wellbeing as the goal of government. We briefly review the history of this idea, which goes back to the ancient Greeks and was the acknowledged ideal of the Enlightenment. We then discuss possible measures on which a wellbeing orientation could be based, emphasising the importance of acknowledging the political agency of citizens and thus their own evaluations of their life. We then turn to practicalities and consequences: how would one actually set up wellbeing-oriented decision-making and what difference should we expect from current practice? We end by discussing the current barriers to the adoption of wellbeing as the goal of government, both in terms of what we need to know more about and where the ideological barriers lay.

Challenges for Peacebuilding and Citizenship Learning in Colombia

Some education practices can impede learning democratic citizenship agency by reinforcing injustices or omitting dissenting perspectives. Other practices may help address conflict issues through problem-posing inquiry activities. This literature review explores the ways social sciences’ curriculum practices can select knowledges that enhance peace or exacerbates violence. Considering peace and conflict theories, I highlight the limitations and possibilities for peacebuilding of Colombia’s citizenship and social sciences’ curricula. Also, I discuss the ways certain social studies curriculum decisions (selections and omissions) may reproduce violence, injustice and passivity. Finally, I discuss how certain practices may develop critical citizenship capacities to handle conflicts.

The shifting politics of patient activism: From bio-sociality to bio-digital citizenship.

Digital media provide novel tools for patient activists from disease- and condition-specific communities. While those with debilitating conditions or disabilities have long recognised the value of collective action for advancing their interests, digital media offer activists unparalleled opportunities to fulfil their goals. This article explores the shifting politics of 'activism' in the increasingly digitally mediated, commercialised context of healthcare, asking: what role have digital media played in the repertoire of activists' strategies? And, to what extent and how has the use of such media impacted the very concept of activism? Building on sociological ideas on emergent forms of 'biological citizenship' and drawing on findings from an analysis of available media, including television and print news reportage, online communications, published histories and campaign material and other information produced by activists in HIV/AIDS and breast cancer communities, we argue that digital media have profoundly shaped how 'activism' is enacted, both the goals pursued and the strategies adopted, which serve to broadly align contemporary patient communities' interests with those of science and business. This alignment, which we characterise as 'bio-digital citizenship', has involved a fundamental reorientation of 'activism' from less of a struggle for rights to more of a striving to achieve a public profile and attract funding. We conclude by calling for a reconceptualisation of 'activism' to more adequately reflect the workings of power in the digital age, whereby the agency and hopes of citizens are central to the workings of political rule.

Linguistic Messianism

Mozambique, like many nations in the geopolitical South, is a country grappling with issues of equity and justice. One of the more pressing issues pertains to the role of language in ensuring citizenship agency and voice. Much of this debate has been concerned with how to envisage the interrelationships and divisions of labor between local languages and Portuguese, that is, the form and organization of multilingualism. Mozambique since independence in 1975, has given increasing recognition to its many languages and to the diversity of its population, rolling out mother-tongue programs across the country (albeit experimentally) and recognizing the importance of local languages for plurality and cultural heritage. Nevertheless, Portuguese has remained the official and most significant language since colonial times to the present, and has strengthened its status as the language of modernity, national cohesion and global networking.

Waiting for the state: Gender, citizenship and everyday encounters with bureaucracy in India

This article focuses on practices and meanings of time and waiting experienced by poor, low-class Dalits and Muslims in their routine encounters with the state in India. Drawing on ethnographic research from Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh, it presents experiences of waiting around queuing and applying for paperwork, cards, and welfare schemes, in order to examine the role of temporal processes in the production of citizenship and citizen agency. An analysis of various forms of waiting – ‘on the day’, ‘to and fro’, and ‘chronic’ waiting – reveals how temporal processes operate as mechanisms of power and control through which state actors and other mediators produce differentiated forms of citizenship and citizens. Temporal processes and their material outcomes, we argue, are shaped by class, caste and religion, while also drawing on – and reproducing – gendered identities and inequalities. However, rather than being ‘passive’ patients of the state, we show how ordinary people draw on money, patronage networks and various performative acts in an attempt to secure their rights as citizens of India.

Law as a global entity through Italian eyes and minds

ABSTRACTThis contribution discusses, from the perspective of global comparative law, how Mariano Croce’s English translation of a major book by an important early-Italian scholar, Santi Romano, allows helpful insights into early twentieth-century Italian thinking about the intrinsically plural nature of law. This debate connects directly to current worldwide discourses about legal pluralism, showing how Romano’s exciting project forms an early precursor of the gradual movement towards obtaining a better grasp of the inner nature of the deeply plural concept of law. Romano’s work, as a remarkably pertinent early contribution, of lasting relevance to global legal theorizing, indicates that a reductionist, positivistic conceptualization of law that ignores the legal agency of common citizens could easily lead to disastrous outcomes through abuses of state-centric powers. Connecting Romano’s early theorizing to many currently ongoing debates in different jurisdictions and legal orders about the plurality of laws, this article seeks to demonstrate the powerful impact that such kind of pioneering work can have even today. It strengthens, above all, the currently growing realization that law is certainly much more than state law, and that people’s laws and their diverse values and ethics should be treated with more respect by legal orders.

The dynamics of citizen sociolinguistics

The objective of this paper is to explore the dynamics of citizen science (CS) in sociolinguistics or citizen sociolinguistics, i.e. the engagement of non‐professionals in doing sociolinguistic research. Based on a CS‐study undertaken in Norway where we engaged young people as citizen scientists to explore linguistic diversity, this paper aims to clarify the definition of citizen sociolinguistics; it seeks to advance the discussion of the advantages of CS and of how CS can contribute to sociolinguistics; it also addresses the opposite: how sociolinguistics can contribute to the general field of citizen science; and it discusses the challenges of a CS‐methodology for sociolinguistic research, epistemologically and ethically, as well as in terms of recruitment, quality control and possible types of sociolinguistic tasks and topics. To meet the needs of society and societal challenges of today there is a need to develop methods and establish scientific acceptance for the relevance of public engagement in research. This paper argues that citizen sociolinguistics has the potential to advance the societal impact of sociolinguistics by constructing a dialogue between ‘the academy’ and ‘the citizens’; citizen sociolinguistics relies on and encourages participatory citizen agency, provides research experience, stimulates curiosity, further research, public understanding of science and (socio)linguistic awareness, and encourages linguistic stewardship.

No More “Local” Insurrection or Terrorism: The Dark Side of the Cobweb

World Society was the leitmotif of John Groom. It was a pluralist vision of International Relations set against Realism and state hegemonies. In this, it sought to establish an enhanced pluralism, citizen organisation and action, as a norm. It was a prescient forerunner of what we now commonly recognise as international civil society. Groom’s other resonant work on third-party and Track II mediation—citizen agency and intervention on behalf of norms of shared needs and equality—was an expression of that. However, all this took place within the context of an interlinked world system described as a cobweb. Not only did this model fail to predict the spiders and slaughter in today’s cobweb, it shared an Enlightenment view of civil society as secular. This paper talks about religious spiders and the sort of atrocious but anti-hegemonic pluralism that is now vexatiously glued to all we do internationally. However, the paper recognises that, reconfigured, Groom’s work laid first foundations for today’s International Relations.

An Exploration of the Concept of Community and Its Impact on Participatory Governance Policy and Service Delivery in Poor Areas of Cape Town, South Africa

ABSTRACTThe inclusion of citizen participation as a means to the equitable delivery of public services has distinguished South Africa’s democratic development trajectory over the last 20 years. While equitable resource allocation remains high on the agenda of more recently democratised states, most of which have highly diverse and unequally resourced populations. Influencing the design of more inclusive participation is the notion of a universal citizenship that applies the concept of the equality of individuals to the needs, identities and sense of agency of citizens both between and within states. The liberal democratic theoretical conceptualisation of the individual centres on the notion of universal citizen, who is the recipient and embodiment of democracy through the rights bestowed through the democratic model. This conceptualisation has been criticised for its inability to deal with the imprecision of individual and collective political identities, especially as these evolve in newly democratic contexts. The construction of a single identity citizen living in communities imbued with homogenous characteristics is carried forward into the policy construction of participatory governance. This article explores and challenges the notion of the single identity citizen that belongs to one homogenous community that can be identified and drawn into formally constructed government spaces. The paper explores the construction of political and socio-economic identities and how notions of community are constructed by citizens, on the one hand, and government policies, on the other.