Civic Advocacy Research Articles

Unclearing the air: Data's unexpected limitations for environmental advocacy.

What makes one dataset powerful for civic advocacy, and another fall flat? Drawing from a citizen science project on environmental health, I argue that there is an underacknowledged quality of datasets-their topology-that shapes the social, cultural, and political possibilities they can sustain or subvert. Data topologies are formal qualities of a dataset that connect data collectors' intentions with the types of calculations that can and cannot be performed. This configures how numerical arguments are made, and the sociotechnical imaginaries those arguments sustain or subvert. The citizen science project's data topology made any easy notion of shared exposure to pollutants, or singular health effects, unravel. The data appeared to tell a story of atypicality at scale, where each person suffers differently from different exposure. Lacking a central tendency, or pockets of tendency disproportionately carried by different subgroups, it became it harder, not easier, for citizen scientists to use data in regulatory contexts, where dominant sociotechnical imaginaries conceive of difference in epidemiological and toxicological terms.

Dimensions of the Universities Third Mission from the University Teachers and Students Perspective

The new roles of universities result in the expansion of traditional missions (teaching and research) in the direction of institutionalization and strengthening of the third mission and connecting the university with the community. Accordingly, the aim of the paper is to examine the perceptions of university teachers and students about different university missions, with special reference to the civic dimension, which is less studied in relation to the economic dimension of the third mission. The research included a total of 1 048 respondents, including 582 students and 466 teachers of the University of Novi Sad, and used the Questionnaire on the civic mission of the university and education for sustainable development. The obtained results indicate that there are more similarities between teachers and students than there are differences in the perception of the importance of different university missions. When it comes to differences, teachers attach more importance to the role of the university in promoting civic advocacy, while students attach more importance to the role of previous levels of education. Key words: civic engagement, third mission, teaching, research, university.

A Study on Participation and Practice Experience of Community-Based Citizens Advocacy Projects

시민옹호는 "자기결정에 기반한 장애인의 권익을 지키는 활동"으로 정의되며, 기존의 복지 지원체계인 사례관리와 다른 맥락을 지닌 것으로 이해된다. 특히 커뮤니티 케어가 강조되면서 장애인의 일상적 삶에서의 옹호체계의 중요성이 대두되고 있으며, 이로 인해 비장애인과 장애인이 지역내 관계와 신뢰를 형성하고 장애인의 권익이 개별적 상황속에서 옹호되도록 하는 시민옹호사업은 중요해지고 있다. 이에 본 연구는 시민옹호사업에 참여한 장애인, 비장애인, 사업 운영자의 참여 및 실천 경험을 살펴보고, 장애인복지현장에 어떤 변화와 필요가 있는지 알아보고자 하였다. 연구 결과, 장애인은 "자기 성장", "타인과의 관계형성", "사회적 자본의 확장" 등을 경험하였고 비장애인은 "장애 인식개선", "권익 및 옹호 관심의 확장" 등을 경험하였다. 사업 운영자들은 "새로운 복지 패러다임의 발견", "마을공동체 중심의 옹호", "지역 조직화의 한계" 등을 경험하였다. 이러한 결과를 바탕으로 본연구는 자기결정권을 중심으로 한 일상적 삶의 실현, 관계 형성을 위한 지원 방안, 마을 공동체 중심의 주민조직화, 인권 감수성 및 권리성, 지속적인 시민옹호사업을 위한 개선 방안 등에 대한 내용을 논의하였다. 또한 장애인복지현장에서 지역주민으로서 장애인이 지역내 관계와 신뢰를 형성하고 주체화 되는 과정을 옹호과정으로 도식화하여 분석하였으며, 장애인복지현장에서 본 시민옹호 사업이 갖는 의미와 향후 전망 등을 논의하였다. Citizen advocacy is defined as "activities to protect the rights and interests of persons with disabilities based on self-determination" and is understood to have a different context from case management, which is the existing welfare support system. In particular, as community care is emphasized, the importance of an advocacy system in the daily life of the disabled is emerging. This is a civic advocacy project that enables non-disabled and disabled people to build relationships and trust within the community and to advocate for the rights and interests of people with disabilities in individual circumstances. is becoming important. Therefore, this study tried to examine the participation and practice experiences of the disabled, non-disabled, and business operators who participated in the citizen advocacy project, and to find out what changes and needs were made in the welfare field for the disabled. As a result of the study, the disabled experienced "self-growth", "relationship with others", and "expansion of social capital", while non-disabled people experienced "improvement of disability awareness" and "expansion of interests and advocacy interests". Business operators experienced "discovery of a new welfare paradigm", "advocacy centered on the village community", and "limitation of local organization". Based on these results, this study is about the realization of daily life centered on the right to self-determination, support measures for relationship formation, village community-centered resident organization, human rights sensitivity and rights, and improvement measures for continuous civic advocacy projects. was discussed. Also, in the welfare field for the disabled, the process of forming relationships and trust and becoming a subject of the disabled as a local resident was diagrammed and analyzed as an advocacy process, and the meaning and future prospects of the civic advocacy project in the welfare field for the disabled were discussed.

Contesting property: urban commons, statecraft, and the ‘tyranny’ of liberalism in Lebanon

AbstractAs heterogeneous forms of commodification threaten the survival of urban commons worldwide, in Beirut a group of residents and professionals has resorted to civic advocacy to keep the beach of Dalieh of Raouche accessible, including calling on public authorities to intervene. Combining Polanyian analysis and recent developments in the anthropology of the state, civic advocacy is recast here as a case of ‘grassroots’ statecraft, adapted to, as well as shaped by, the logics and discourses of late capitalism that it seeks to undo. As such, counter‐movements are reconceptualized as not only defensive, but also offensive and explicitly generative of new political projects and modes of governance. At the same time, the article pushes the argument further to suggest that ‘grassroots’ statecraft in the context of the protection of the commons is inherently multivocal, and that calls for, and rejection of, state intervention may be contained at once within this counter‐movement, forced to coexist by the constraints imposed by the neoliberal political‐economic system it confronts.

Street Art and the Reconfiguration of Civic Advocacy in Nairobi City

Over the last two decades, social protests in Kenya have shifted to using art. Social protests involving art, such as the ‘State-Burial-ballot-Revolution’ and ‘Occupy-Parliament Movement,’ among others, have been witnessed in the country in the recent past. These artistic productions interpellate the spaces they interact with – the street, parliament, buildings, perimeter fences and public arenas – to denounce various issues, such as corruption, extra-judicial killings, political greed and other social injustices afflicting the nation. Espousing concepts of the carnivalesque by Mikhail Bakhtin, this article analyzes street art – street theatre and graffiti – utilized in Nairobi’s streets. In examining the literary aesthetics embedded in these innovative creative works, this article shows the significant potential of street art to stake, reclaim and reconfigure civil advocacy and, in the process, spur civic participation in various issues affecting the country today.

Advocacy journalism and climate justice in a Global Southern country

ABSTRACT Being among the world’s most affected countries by climate change, Pakistan is facing a variety of cases of climate injustice committed by internal and external drivers. Waisbord’s referred “Advocate-journalist” model carries a good potential to advocate these injustices to stimulate democratic dialogue among the audience that eventually pushes leadership to make eco-friendly policies. This study critically analyses advocacy journalism coverage of cases of local and regional climate injustice in the editorial contents of mainstream Pakistani newspapers by using the quantitative content analysis method. Results reveal that selected newspapers gave inappropriate coverage to climate injustice issues both in quantity and quality. Besides muddled local and regional climate injustice issues’ priorities, editorialists also excessively recommended dirty energy solutions to the policymakers. The final analysis suggests that the findings of climate and energy-related scientific studies were not being reflected in the advocacy journalism contents as well. This failure of “advocate-journalist” model to perform its normative role of potentially advocating the cases of climate injustice with compelling scientific evidence seems to attribute to the political economy of the press or editorial inattention. As a way out of this journalistic lack, Waisbord’s endorsed “civic advocacy” groups must intervene to plug the loopholes.

Community Self-Portrait in Data: A Replicable Model of an Equitable Data Cycle supporting Civic Engagement and Advocacy in Newtown, Sarasota, Florida

Community Self-Portrait in Data: A Replicable Model of an Equitable Data Cycle supporting Civic Engagement and Advocacy in Newtown, Sarasota, Florida

The Right or Wrong to the City? Understanding Citizen Participation in the Pre- and Post-COVID-19 Eras in Malaysia

The right to the city concept is widely debated in academic discourse yet ambiguously executed in public discourse. In much of the discussion, the right to the city is advocated as a right that humans should claim—i.e., participating in urban space living. Nonetheless, constraints and limits are imposed on such advocacy, resulting in a tokenized implementation state. With such a background surmounting the COVID-19 pandemic era, this study is aimed at understanding the right to the city propagation and revealing the possible wrongs of such civic advocacy. Multiple cases in Malaysia were selected for analysis and as the discussion context representing the state-of-the-art aspect of right to the city in the context of an emerging country. Two potential misconceptions through the action of right to the city were identified: first, the concept of right to the city has the potential to infringe the centrality of power, which both citizens and the authority have to make clear; second, the lack of a sign of contribution from citizens poses a severe challenge to build a co-created urban space for all. This paper contributes to removing a blind spot—the possible wrong to the right to the city—and provides ideas to achieve authentic citizen participation.

Can Deliberative Democracy Work in Urban India?

India faces extensive challenges of rapid urbanization and deficits in human well-being and environmental sustainability. Democratic governance is expected to strengthen public policies and efforts towards sustainability. This article presents a study in Pune, India, which aimed at exploring perceptions about public participation in urban governance and the potential of high-quality public deliberation to meet deficits. The research reveals disaffection of the public with government decision-making and government-led participation. Further, it shows that people are interested in participating in community life and seek to be partners in civic decision-making, but find themselves unable to do so. The study illustrates that high-quality public deliberations facilitated by an independent third party can provide a satisfactory space of participation, learning, and developing balanced outcomes. Citizens expressed readiness for partnership, third-party facilitation, and support from civic advocacy groups. Challenges with regard to government commitment to deliberative democracy will need to be overcome for a purposeful shift from conventional weak to empowered participation of ordinary citizens in civic decision-making. We anticipate that while institutionalization of high-quality public deliberations may take time, civil society-led public deliberations may help raise community expectations and demand for induced deliberative democracy.

The Missing Chapter: The Education of Surgery and Anesthesiology Trainees as Civic Advocates.

The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has highlighted existing systemic inequities that adversely affect a variety of communities in the United States. These inequities have a direct and adverse impact on the healthcare of our patient population. While civic engagement has not been cultivated in surgical and anesthesia training, we maintain that it is inherent to the core role of the role of a physician. This is supported by moral imperative, professional responsibility, and a legal obligation. We propose that such civic engagement and social justice activism is a neglected, but necessary aspect of physician training. We propose the implementation of a civic advocacy education agenda across department, community and national platforms. Surgical and anesthesiology residency training needs to evolve to the meet these increasing demands.

Civic advocacy for public service media? The case of Switzerland and its current rise in media policy activism

Civic advocacy for public service media (PSM) is rather rare. Switzerland, however, where civic associations play a vital role in politics and the economy, and where media policy activism is currently on the rise, offers ideal conditions for such advocacy. Combining document analysis and expert interviews with leading activists, this article investigates the aims, strategies and networks of seven associations dedicated to media policy activism. It also examines the connection between No Billag, a 2018 national referendum on abolishing the public broadcasting license fee, and the formation of new associations. Findings show that these associations are gatherings of media professionals and that PSM is not their main concern.

Vocal Empowerment Curriculum for young Maya Guatemalan women

This article explores the development of the SPEAK Vocal Empowerment Curriculum and provides an example of how voice training and theatrical approaches may be contextualised and hybridised to support young women’s self and civic advocacy. It presents and analyses data collected from January to July of 2017 on the curriculum’s impact for 48 seventh-grade students in the MAIA Impact School, a Guatemalan all-girls school serving Indigenous youth. It measures impact from several angles including self-assessment, mentor assessment, and analysis of content of recorded participant speech. Results from the research suggest that participation in this curriculum positively impacts on girls’ vocal empowerment. This evidence-based practice for supporting young women’s voices provides a way for voice and performance trainers to help young women unleash all that they are ready to contribute. Through vocal empowerment, the world can more fully benefit from young women’s authorship of a more just and equitable future.

Making Open Data Work for Civic Advocacy

The value of data in supporting citizen participation in processes of place-making and community building is widely recognised. While the open data movement now permits citizens to acquire governmental data relating to their communities, little to no effort is made to ensure that these datasets are accessible and interpretable by non-professionals. Through a series of community engagements spanning an 18-month period, we co-designed Data:In Place, an open source web tool which supports citizens in accessing, interpreting and making sense of open data. Leveraging visual map-based querying, citizens can access official statistics about their community, interrogate the data, and map their own data sources to create data visualisations. Reflecting on the participatory design process and the designed technology, we provide a framing to make open data work for civic advocacy.

Social Politics of Welfare Reform in Korea and Japan: A New Way of Mobilising Power Resources

Welfare politics can be largely assessed by the following three kinds of political prisms: bureaucratic politics, partisan politics, and social politics. Bureaucratic and partisan politics which accounted for the evolution of welfare states in East Asia are not adequate to illuminate the difference in recent welfare reforms between Korea and Japan after a significant political transition. Social politics is construed as a triangular relationship between civic advocacy groups, trade unions, and political leaders. The relative strength and weakness of civic advocacy groups in Korea and Japan, respectively, provide an analytical niche capable of explaining cross-national variations in welfare politics. The original version of the power resources model thus needs to be complemented by incorporating the role of civil society mobilisation in welfare politics. The core of new power resources in our comparative analysis is alliance-building led by non-parliamentary social forces, which cannot be easily measured by quantifiable strength of labour movements and affiliated political parties.

Gentrification and the Heterogeneous City: Finding a Role for Design

That cities will change is indisputable: urban evolution mostly signifies healthy growth, but it is also true that in the contemporary context, gentrifying neighborhood change increasingly operates on an extraterritorial plane, happening quickly, opportunistically and unilaterally. Neighborhoods are evaluated and disposed of as trading commodities in a process that violates the citizen’s fundamental right to the expectation of a stable dwelling situation. Gentrification also threatens a city’s spatial heterogeneity which, through its diverse forms and meanings, can support the enactment of democratic urban life. It leaves little room for a broader discourse around place – a discourse that might lead to the creation of more porous urban space, to the emergence of hybrid institutions and to new sites of pluralistic engagement. This paper will consider a pair of contiguous neighborhoods in Philadelphia where market-driven gentrification has come face to face with powerful grassroots civic advocacy; and it looks at what architects, landscape architects and urban designers can do to help neighborhoods resist gentrification and support heterogeneity in making places where the hand-print of multiple publics might be found.

Academic Civic Mindedness and Model Citizenship in the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme

ABSTRACTThis study uses interview and survey methods to describe the International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma Programme's (DP) development of students' “academic civic mindedness” and “model citizenship” at four public schools in California. Results indicate that the DP pedagogy enables students to develop many of the skills that are necessary for civic advocacy and that the DP places a strong emphasis on students' knowledge of issues related to public policy. The DP develops students' citizenship through promoting their awareness of political and social issues and required active engagement with a local or global issue. Most IB students and teachers feel that the DP develops students' academic civic mindedness and model citizenship to a considerably greater extent than other curricular alternatives. Finally, teachers feel that the strongest limitation to their prioritization of students' citizenship development is their lack of clarity on how to frame the civic implications of what they teach.

Assessment of the adequacy of advocacy as a strategy for championing the citizenry of persons with disabilities in Zimbabwe

This Different civic movements and advocacy groups the world over have committed much effort to championing the rights of persons with disabilities within the equality of rights and opportunities complex. These advocacy efforts have more often been targeted at rights to equal access and opportunities in social services and employment by persons with disabilities. It appears from literature that advocacy has not done enough in demanding those fundamental rights and freedoms which are central to the citizenship of persons with disabilities. As compared to their peers, persons with disabilities have limited, or to say the least, constrained citizenship rights. For a very long time, advocacy has been seen as a powerful strategy for championing the rights of persons with disabilities. This paper provides a critical analysis of the adequacy of the various advocacy initiatives to establish the extent to which the initiatives have addressed the citizenry issues affecting persons with disabilities. The author argues that citizenship rights form the basis for the equal opportunity complex inherent in the different types of advocacy. Thus, without addressing the issue of citizenry of persons with disabilities, the different types of advocacy cannot be endorsed as the panacea to the equal rights and opportunity problems facing people with disabilities in communities. From these arguments, the paper concludes that what has compromised the adequacy of advocacy for the citizenry of persons with disabilities is that the strategy has been patronized by non-disabled people. The author therefore recommends a multiple-advocacy approach coupled with practical policies, a genuine political will and strong political representation as the best way forward.

The Influence of a Community-Based Service-Learning Experience on the Development of Occupational Therapy Students' Feelings of Civic Responsibility

This qualitative study examined the influence of service-learning on the development of Students' feelings of civic responsibility while involved with a community-based organization. Occupational therapy students involved in a semester-long service-learning experience maintained weekly reflective journals. Six such reflective journals were randomly selected for analysis. Findings revealed that while engaged in service-learning the six participants voiced themes of increased self-awareness, awareness of homeless individuals as persons, awareness of social issues, and professional self-efficacy. These developing competencies are associated with the skills required for health care professionals to participate in civic engagement and client advocacy.

El Tequio: Social capital, civic advocacy journalism and the construction of a transnational public sphere by Mexican indigenous migrants in the US

This paper discusses the importance of transnational communication and civic practices of indigenous Mexican immigrants in the US. Using a content analysis of El Tequio, a magazine produced by a pan-ethnic and multi-sited organization called the Indigenous Front of Binational Organizations, it shows what Alexis de Tocqueville deemed to be the fundamental relationship between the production of media and civic participation. El Tequio is the expression of transnational communicative action and the creation of self-representation and civic advocacy journalism among marginalized communities. Stories in El Tequio are not only a “bilocal” connection between immigrants’ sending and receiving communities, but part of a transnational dialogue of global voices. This analysis demonstrates how communication practices across borders have helped in the development of bonding and bridging social capital, and have enabled the participation of marginalized minorities in at least two national public spheres through communicative action executed through immigrant networks.

Civic Studies:

Civic Studies: