Citizen Agency Research Articles

Participatory design games for citizenship education A public space approach with children

Citizenship education plays a key role in urban societies, as it supports the construction of inclusive, sustainable and healthy communities, promoting values of responsibility, activism, inclusivity, diversity, collaboration. Civic and Citizenship courses in schools’ curricula worldwide gives positive results, but critical barriers can be noted, including: the difficulty for children to understand complex theoretical and abstract notions. Some scholars suggest that education is more effective when democratic processes are experienced by children through decision-making, including through the use of games. Participatory design strategies for the public space, together with placemaking actions, have been promoted since the 1970s to engage adults in decision making processes, with the objective of collecting proposals on urban transformation, strengthening communities, educating to citizenship, with values of inclusivity, diversity, sustainability, activating the citizen agency by encouraging activism. Participatory design strategies can benefit from the use of gamification strategies and serious game approaches to achieve audience development, engagement and conflict resolution. This research appraises the possibility to use participatory design games, focused on the public space, as tools for citizenship education of children (aged 5-12). Three case studies developed in Spain and Italy are presented, based on the use of digital and analogue interfaces. Case studies are assessed and compared on their capacity to stimulate interest in children through time, foster interaction and active collaboration between peers, educate to conflict resolution, Educate to inclusivity and diversity, promote behavioural change towards sustainability, collect Data on desires in relation to the public space. Results suggest that participatory design games focused are successful as educational tools, regardless of the real implementation of the design solutions.

Democracy, epistemic agency, and AI: political epistemology in times of artificial intelligence

Democratic theories assume that citizens have some form of political knowledge in order to vote for representatives or to directly engage in democratic deliberation and participation. However, apart from widespread attention to the phenomenon of fake news and misinformation, less attention has been paid to how they are supposed to acquire that knowledge in contexts shaped by artificial intelligence and related digital technologies. While this topic can also be approached from an empirical angle, this paper contributes to supporting concerns about AI and democracy by looking at the issue through the lens of political epistemology, in particular using the concept of epistemic agency. It argues that artificial intelligence (AI) endangers democracy since it risks to diminish the epistemic agency of citizens and thereby undermine the relevant kind of political agency in democracy. It shows that next to fake news and manipulation by means of AI analysis of big data, epistemic bubbles and the defaulting of statistical knowledge endanger the epistemic agency of citizens when they form and wish to revise their political beliefs. AI risks to undermine trust in one’s own epistemic capacities and hinder the exercise of those capacities. If we want to protect the knowledge basis of our democracies, we must address these problems in education and technology policy.

Agents, structures, and the moral basis of deportability

Deportability is the omnipresent possibility of deportation, which gives rise to constant fear among migrants. In this article, I argue that a focus on deportability’s structural causes – such as global capitalism – obscures how the agency of state leaders and citizens produces policies that entrench this vulnerability and fear. Many in the West believe that the precarity of deportability is what migrants deserve because they are unsuitable for membership in the political community. These people are not scared of migrants. They just believe that the latter do not deserve to reap the benefits of living in their state, even if they contribute their fair share. Therefore, leaders will constantly have an incentive to securitize migrants and enact deportability-enhancing policies because the public will acquiesce. To mitigate deportability, states must cultivate a broader sense of cosmopolitan empathy about those from outside the political community. For if citizens cannot see migrants as worthy of aid or participation in their political community, they will remain susceptible to policies that reinforce deportability.

CORRUPTION, UNDERDEVELOPMENT AND THE MASSES IN AFRICA

Much contemporary scholarship on corruption and underdevelopment in Africa focuses on the role of the elite with scant consideration for the interpellation and agency of non-elite citizens. The paper complements the tenor of available literature. Drawing on a dynamic perspective on corruption, the paper argues that political elites are influenced in part by demands and expectations from regular citizens. These demands and expectations are a major motivation that fuels and validates certain practices which are widely regarded as corrupt. This is not a pro-elite paper. Rather than a pro-elite standpoint, the paper offers a nuanced analysis of how the actions and inaction of citizens affect the conduct of governing elites. Ignoring the role of the masses makes for an incomplete understanding of the vignettes of corruption and crisis of development in Africa. While the paper focuses on Africa, the findings are applicable to other regions of the global south.

The role of middle actors in electrification of transport in Swedish rural areas

In this paper, we use the middle-out perspective to analyze the diffusion of electric cars and plug-in hybrids in Swedish rural areas and small towns. In Sweden, electrification of the transport system is a priority, particularly in car-dependent rural areas. However, the transition to electromobility mainly takes place in major urban areas. To understand the dynamics of the transition to electrified transport and identify how it may be facilitated, we identify top actors, bottom actors, and middle actors and analyze how middle actors exert influence. Our case study is based on in-depth interviews with civil servants who work with energy and transport issues in rural areas throughout Sweden and with representatives of energy companies and government agencies.We show that three middle actors are important: municipalities, local energy companies, and local car dealers. The municipalities and local energy companies mainly exert influence by knowledge diffusion and by contributing to projects such as charging infrastructure development. The car dealers are examples of middle actors who could play a central role by influencing consumers, but who currently often obstruct electric vehicle diffusion.We find that the support of top actors is very important for middle actors to be able to facilitate diffusion of electric cars and plug-in hybrids. Municipalities are in a unique position to use their knowledge, local networks, and sideways and upwards connections to strengthen the agency and capacity of citizens and small businesses (bottom actors). However, as small Swedish municipalities often have limited resources, long-term support from government agencies (top actors) is crucial. As middle actors are so important for the diffusion of electric vehicles, especially in the rural context where market forces are weaker than in the urban context, national policy for electrification of transport should support them.

New species in the Mediterranean: a visual essay on human impact on biodiversity

Our work begins with the collection of waste on beaches with environmental activists. This waste, dumped into the sea, is returned and swallowed up again by the sea. Plastic bottles, cutlery, bags or condoms replace shells, crabs and other marine flora and fauna. We wanted to portray this new invasive plastic species that we find in our seas in a series of images made by means of the cyanotype photographic process, also known as blueprint. We took the collected waste to the photography laboratory and we created photograms through physical contact. It is an artistic, documentary and critical project that aims to inform, signify and reflect on the impact of human presence on the environment. This is all done by harnessing the potential of artistic expression to generate social bonds as well as to facilitate collective action and citizen agency (Fowles, S., and J. Arterberry. 2013. “Gesture and performance in Comanche rock art.” World Art 3: 67–82.; DeMarrais, E., and J. Robb. 2013. “Art makes society: an introductory visual essay.” World Art 3 (1): 3–22.).

Are community health programmes always benign? Community health worker perceptions and the social construction of users in Brazil’s primary healthcare policy

ABSTRACT We examine how community health workers (CHWs), while working as links between doctors, nurses and vulnerable groups, participate in the social construction of citizens in the implementation of Brazil’s primary healthcare policy. Drawing on interviews and a vignette experiment with CHWs in the city of São Paulo, we show that perceptions of CHWs about the vulnerability and agency of health system users impact upon their referrals to other levels of service. Judgments about the socioeconomic, cultural and moral conditions of families determine different referrals – on the one hand, to practices based on persuasion and respect for individual choices; on the other, to ‘top-down’ or forcible interventions. While implementing the same healthcare policy, CHWs construct users as (responsible) agents or (helpless) targets, thus determining different pathways in the health system and shaping the relationship between citizens and the state. Brazil’s primary health policy, while seeking to tackle vulnerability, is also a site where social representations are reproduced that contribute to the denial of the agency of citizens deemed more vulnerable and to the definition of their bodies as sites for state intervention.

The art of bribery! Analysis of police corruption at traffic checkpoints and roadblocks in Kenya

ABSTRACT The discreetness of street-level corruption resides in somewhat coded languages, techniques, networks and trust (solidarity) by key players. The newcomers become indoctrinated as the oldtimers, found at different levels of the police hierarchy, acting as the gatekeepers. Therefore, bribery occurs within a syndicate requiring privileged knowledge, coping strategies, and a network that would descriptively qualify as the art of bribery. Dissidence comes with a greater cost. This paper shows how Kenyan police corruption and behaviour at checkpoints occurs within a syndicate underpinned by policing culture and loosely regulated institutional environments. Traffic policing features a well-established and expansive network of institutionalised corruption regulated by the rules-of-the game where each party play their parts. Motorists pay bribes to circumvent traffic regulations or be on the right terms with corrupt officers while the police maximise illicit incomes for personal and institutional gains. The unstructured public transport and overlapping regulations exacerbate corruption at the roadblocks, creating a corruption complex and spiral effects between the police and motorists. This discussion also indicates the incompetence of police personnel and citizen agency deficits in anti-corruption reforms in Africa. Most importantly, the paper shows that tighter traffic regulations unexpectedly produces and legitimises corruption in weaker regulatory systems.

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.

Pandemic, Protest, and Agency: Jury Service and Equal Protection in a Future Defined by COVID-19

This essay calls for an expansive view of Fourteenth Amendment equal protection against the discriminatory empanelment of juries grounded upon a culture of systemic racism. For an individual juror fundamental elements of survival during a pandemic are access to health care, safe transportation, and connective technology. Yet, structural and systemic racism precludes many potential jurors of color from securing these necessary supports, thus denying them the ability to be recognized on juror source list or accommodated for jury service. Jury service is a direct and impactful act of citizen agency over the justice system, and the systemic exclusion of individuals from jury service based on race and economic status is a denial of that agency and a constitutional violation. Supreme Court rulings like Duren v. Missouri are inadequate to provide relief in the face of such violations and only provide outdated and ineffectual remedies to this mass denial of equity.

The biopolitical president?: Sovereign power and democratic erosion in El Salvador

ABSTRACT States have adopted a range of policies to address the COVID-19 pandemic. Some, mainly democracies like New Zealand and South Korea, took quick health measures without curbing citizen rights. Others, especially those led by populists like Bolsonaro and Erdogan, denied the seriousness of the health crisis even as they curbed political and civil rights. El Salvador is virtually unique in its COVID-19 response, combining a strong rhetorical commitment to health measures with clear efforts to undermine democratic controls and rights. President Nayib Bukele adopted an early travel ban and publicly vilified those who broke curfew by sending them and all who tested positive to quarantine centers for 30 days. He derided and defied Constitutional Chamber decisions against such practices, ordered militarized actions, and crowded gang-affiliated prisoners together in humiliating ways that risked exposure to COVID-19. We examine how Bukele’s policies conform to, and seemingly exemplify, Michel Foucault’s theoretical concepts of biopolitics and disciplinary power. However, the Salvadoran case also challenges key features of Foucault’s theory, suggesting the need to modify his Western assumptions about highly institutionalized states. Our analysis suggests that strong leaders can undercut citizen rights and agency, visible at the intersection of biopolitical social theory and democratic backsliding.

Political Campaigns, Voter Outreach, and American Democracy: Socializing Effective Participation and Citizen Agency in the United States

ABSTRACTDrawing from linguistic and ethnographic data collected from Women for Obama, South Hills (WFOSH) volunteers and Obama for America (OFA) campaign operatives in western Pennsylvania during the 2012 general election cycle, this study examines metacommentary about the ideal form and function of citizen‐to‐citizen political interaction in the United States, focusing on the persuasive impact of language objects, mediation, and the construction of relatability in voter outreach, as well as subsequent assessments of outreach effectiveness. Voter outreach, considered as direct communication between local campaign volunteers and voters, was strategically advanced by both OFA and WFOSH for meeting campaign goals. However, clashes between volunteers and operatives reveal competing understandings of effective political participation within outreach interactions. This analysis suggests that operatives within contemporary data‐driven American political campaigns more and less overtly socialize citizens’ understandings of democracy in ways that can exacerbate polarization and devalue citizens’ knowledge and agency in political practice. [democracy, discursive political participation, political agency, language materiality and mediation, political campaigns, United States]

The Professional Agency Narrative—Conceptualizing the Role of Professional Knowledge in Frontline Work

Abstract The street-level bureaucracy literature teaches us that frontline workers draw on both policy logics and social, cultural, and personal logics in their work. This has been conceptualized as the state agency narrative and citizen agency narrative, and it is both well documented and well theorized. However, the literature on street-level bureaucracy and frontline work is remarkably silent on how to understand the role of professional knowledge in frontline work. In this article, we seek to fill this gap by theorizing and empirically demonstrating how frontline work is characterized by what we call a professional agency narrative centering on problem solving and the use of knowledge on “what works.” We do so through in-depth qualitative analyses of data from two empirical studies on frontline work in schools. The first is an interview study consisting of 42 semi-structured interviews with Danish preschool and school teachers on the topic of prevention of social and health risks. The second study is an ethnographic study consisting of more than 500 h of observation, two focus groups with teachers and seven semi-structured interviews with teachers on the topic of health risk prevention in Danish schools. Based on the analysis of this rich qualitative data, we develop the concept of the professional agency narrative and discuss how this concept can contribute to the broader literatures on street-level work and the management of street-level work.

Tout pour le peuple, rien par le peuple: una crítica al populismo de Chantal Mouffe

La obra teórico-política de Chantal Mouffe puede ser leída a partir de dos registros. Por un lado, es atendible su propuesta de una democracia agonista, capaz de sacudir las osificaciones y letargos que aquejan a nuestras repúblicas liberales de masas, mediante un adecuado procesamiento del conflicto y una ampliación del pluralismo que expandan la agencia ciudadana allende los formatos tradicionales. Por el otro, el sesgo ideológico, la incapacidad para dar cuenta del pluralismo constitutivo de la sociedad contemporánea y el divorcio con la evidencia histórica del populismo realmente existente siembran dudas sobre el populismo de izquierda mouffeano como vehículo de la soberanía popular y alternativa de democratización radical. En esta última dirección, el presente texto dará cuenta de las contradicciones entre los presupuestos del enfoque populista mouffeano y la deriva autocrática venezolana. Apostando a la construcción colectiva de una democratización ampliada, posliberal y no populista, para los retos del presente.

Edgelands of practice: post-industrial landscapes and the conditions of informal spatial appropriation

ABSTRACT Do-It-Yourself urbanism has often been attributed with the capacity to revitalise urban environments in the absence of formal planning activity. However, there is still limited understanding of the ways in which such practices emerge and establish agency within their respective environments. We bring a relational lens to the debate, presenting a framework for identifying how the socio-spatial conditions within the urban landscape enable and constrain citizen-led spatial appropriation. Using a visually oriented, multi-modal approach, the framework is applied to five sites in Glasgow, Scotland, which we conceptualise as Edgelands in a post-industrial city. Findings reveal that informal citizen practices adaptively come into being through a process of negotiation with their social and material context. The paper concludes with policy recommendations for fostering citizen agency in revitalising the post-industrial city and other urban settings that include wastescapes.

Alexis de Tocqueville's Reluctant “Democratic Language”

AbstractMany readers of Alexis de Tocqueville have noted the ambiguity in his formulation of the term “democracy.” This essay suggests that this ambiguity can be clarified by considering what Tocqueville calls “democratic language”—i.e., the use of generalizations, abstractions, and personifications in writing and speech. Tocqueville investigates these novel linguistic devices to understand the transformation of language in democratic times. More importantly, he employs them to appropriate the Doctrinaires’ formulation of democracy and to criticize their legitimation of the July Monarchy's exclusive government. Yet Tocqueville's use of democratic language is a reluctant one. He finds that the tendency to use abstract and personified concepts obfuscates the political agency of citizens. Wary of the despotic effects of such obfuscation, Tocqueville argues that individuals must practice their concepts. In the context of the July Monarchy, this becomes a call for the extension of democratic rights and institutions.

THE RIGHT TO THE CITY AND DATA PROTECTION: COMPLEMENTARY FOR DEVELOPING CITIZEN-CENTRIC DIGITAL CITIES?

In digital cities, urban space integrates physical and digital worlds. Information and communication technologies, often controlled by private companies, become ubiquitous, not least to capture and process (personal) data. While private governance can reconfigure public values and relations between public institutions and citizens, the question arises who decides what cities become, whose interests they serve. This paper presents ongoing research about the Right to the City (Lefebvre, 1968) and the right to personal data protection, guided by a social constructivist perspective and the methodological framework of actor-network-theory. As part of a four-year research track, we conducted an empirical cross-case analysis of urban data processing projects affected by the GDPR. The aim was to answer the question of how ‘users’ of cities can be represented meaningfully in processes that shape cities by means of those two rights. To do so, we interviewed people directly involved in Belgian ‘smart’ city projects. The main results of this research show that the two rights can be complementary in fostering agency and protecting citizen interests in technologically enhanced, citizen-centric cities. Data protection impacts smart city developments, but true agency of citizens as in the Right to the City remains limited. We will discuss why especially interdisciplinary research is required to further understanding in this complex, cross-domain environment and to lower barriers to citizen inclusion in practice.

Citizen Agency and Ecology in Krasnoyarsk

ABSTRACT The agency of citizens in influencing the environmental agenda in Krasnoyarsk is analyzed, with special attention to the role of online ecology activism. The ecology and politics of “black sky” pollution is discussed, as well as the concept of “citizen science,” based on a possible “democratization of data.” Background and history of industrialization of the region is provided, as is comparative context for other ecology protests. The author argues that her internet ethnography case provides some differences from “traditional” eco-activism practiced in the city, in terms of statements and goals, as well as understanding environmental problems. She theorizes about the constructedness and contingency of environmental activism.

Teaching and Learning amid Demographic Change: A Thematic Review of School Responses to Newcomer Students in the New Latinx Diaspora

ABSTRACT Immigration from Mexico and Central America to the United States has resulted in dramatic demographic changes in communities across the country since the early 1990s. Newcomers and longstanding residents make sense of and construct their shared society and the rules and norms by which they live alongside one another, and this construction of citizen identity is especially relevant to the work of schools. Schools in receiving communities in the New Latinx Diaspora (NLD)—new receiving sites in which Latinx newcomers have not traditionally settled—face the unique work of responding to and transforming (or not) in response to their new demographics. Framed by an overarching question of how newcomers construct citizen identities in school, three themes emerged from this thematic review of peer-reviewed scholarship exploring school responses to newcomers in the NLD: 1) the many ideological and practical challenges of the mismatch between schools’ longstanding policies and processes and newcomers’ realities, 2) the ways in which improvisation and ideologies limit newcomers’ access to equitable educational experiences, and 3) a handful of cautiously optimistic strategies and opportunities toward equity and inclusion for all students. Taken together, these themes reveal the problematic nature of the spaces in which newcomers construct citizen identities wherein they are regarded as a problem and in which their rights are qualified based on assimilation. However, they also demonstrate how newcomers assert citizen agency – through various forms of resistance and by claiming space – to transform the nature of their schools and communities and the notion of citizenship.

A Harm Reduction Approach to the Ethical Management of the COVID-19 Pandemic

The post-confinement phase of the COVID-19 pandemic will require that governments navigate more complex ethical questions than had occurred in the initial, ‘curve-flattening’ phase, and that will occur when the pandemic is in the past. By looking at the unavoidable harms involved in the confinement and quarantine methods employed during the initial phase of the pandemic, we can develop a harm reduction approach to managing the phase during which society will be gradually reopened in a context of managed risk. The principles that are at the heart of such an approach include a reckoning with all of the harms involved in policy choice, including harms that might be given rise to by policy implementation itself; a focus on the harms to which already vulnerable populations are susceptible; and a strong preference for policies that economize on the use of prohibitions and of coercive state enforcement, and that instead emphasize the agency of citizens in realizing health-promoting behavior change. This framework is applied to a policy proposal that has been discussed in policy circles in a number of countries, that of immunity ‘passports’, and to policies that emphasize the creative use of space and time to achieve physical distancing goals.