Civic Potential Research Articles

Good critics, good criticism: rethinking critical pedagogy in a production economy

ABSTRACT As symbolic production has eclipsed critical consumption, teaching critical communication methods is marked by challenges and opportunities. In this essay, I describe the impact of a critical-pedagogical incongruity on our discipline’s ability to fulfill its vocational and civic potential. I trace the confluence of historical, institutional, and economic factors contributing to our discipline’s critical-pedagogical challenges. And I consider how critical communication instructors can reaffirm the centrality of criticism through a meliorative pedagogy that amplifies critical communication’s unique contributions to a comprehensive liberal arts education by teaching students how to unite critical methods, character, and lived experience.

Социальные и политические основания конструктивной девиации студенческой молодежи: анализ цифровых следов в региональных сетевых сообществах

Deviant behavior is a popular research topic. The article examines interdisciplinary approaches to its causes, types, and consequences in university students. Constructive deviation is a relatively new phenomenon, which requires systematization and formalization. The current socio-political changes encourage certain socially significant values and helping behavior practices, which makes it possible to develop social resources, as well as social, intellectual, and civic potential in young people. The authors studied internet activities of first-year university students to reveal the social and political prerequisites of constructive deviation. These foundations included the institutional conditions for the development and implementation of the state youth policy, youth initiatives, helping behavior practices, hypernormality, such socially significant values as patriotism and altruism, etc. The sociological interpretation of constructive deviation clarifies the challenges that are relevant for young people and directions for their social consolidation.

The role of religion in ethnic minority youth’s civic agency: theoretical considerations and a case study from Finland

ABSTRACT This article discusses the multifaceted relationship between religion and civic agency. We present a conceptual framework representing the individual foundation and social aspects of civic agency. Based on qualitative semi-structured interviews, we investigated how young people and religious communities contribute to civic agency. The findings indicate that participating in religious groups provides pleasant emotional experiences, cognitive opportunities, experimental circumstances, a sense of belonging, engagement with others, and responsibility. However, normative adult – youth hierarchies may compromise young people’s agency in everyday decision-making processes. The civic potential of religion for meaning, value, and social relations can be addressed in religious and civic education, and pupils’ experiences in their religious communities can be used to enhance civic engagement. Furthermore, education in young people’s own religious traditions would give them the tools to negotiate issues in their religious communities.

Развитие на компетентности и умения чрез медийната грамотност в часовете по история

The development of educational processes and implementation of new methods of teaching and learning are established as a fundamental characteristic of the beginning of the new millennium. Appling key competences as the goalsetting of educational tasks has the potential to ensure the transition to the digital and innovative school ecosystem. The rapprochement between traditional academic disciplines and modern aspects of everyday life and environment is a condition for the development of the individual and civic potential of young people, for building life-ling skills. Media literacy in the classroom has the potential to become a compass that directs the resources form History as study of change over time to the needs of the present and ensures the most valuable aspect for humanity - freedom.

Identifying Civic Opportunity Structures Within Professional Football Fan Clubs

The current study focuses on identifying civic opportunities embedded in associational involvement in football fan clubs. The context of this research was confined to fan clubs affiliated with two German football teams (i.e. Hamburger SV and FC St. Pauli) located in close proximity yet revealing contrasting cultural traits. The methodology used followed the stages of critical ethnography to explore the dimensions of active engagement in football fan clubs. The results of the study indicate a within-group variation in the civic opportunity structure between the football fan clubs examined. Specifically, the degree to which each member develops social ties and acquires hard skills varies significantly. Such variation is facilitated by two conditions that underpin associational engagement within the fan clubs and identified by this study on a reactive/proactive and simple/complex value structure schema. The findings regarding the within-group variation and the conditions that facilitate such a variation provide an effective platform to assess civic opportunity structures of voluntary associations in sport fandom. While this study presents additional support to regard the within-group variation when assessing civic potential of voluntary associations, practitioners are encouraged to develop promotion and communication strategies to better target core fans that reflect level of engagement and value structure.

The promises and limitations of digital participation in heritage: Planning transmedia heritage districts in superdiverse cities

ABSTRACT New technologies have been argued to drive a more inclusive heritage discourse that accommodates a plurality of narratives. This article aims to examine this assumption based on the analysis of the heritage digitalisation strategies of Doha and Singapore. These cities have made significant investments in heritage preservation and digital technologies, positioning themselves as smart, creative, and culturally diverse urban centres. At the core of these strategies are transmedia heritage districts, which, despite having limited physical remnants of the past, revive their heritage across a range of online and offline channels. Based on an analysis of policy documents and on fieldwork in these cities, this article raises questions regarding the transformative power of the digital and its ability to democratise and pluralise the heritage discourse. I argue that while heritage digitalisation can function as a tool to showcase openness, strategically empower co-opted civic dynamics, it can also reinforce the prevailing heritage narrative. The transmedia heritage district serves as a policy instrument that displays the civic potential of digital heritage technologies in order to enable urban transformation and incorporate selected minority voices into the authorised heritage discourse.

Political Cartoons as Burkean Frames of Acceptance: The Comic Framing of Ramaphosa’s Revolution

While political cartoons have been read as criticism in Kenneth Burke’s burlesque rejection frame, this paper presents an alternative reading, to consider their potential for expressing attitudes of acceptance via comic framing. A Burkean vocabulary for studying cartoons is provided, including the mechanism of perspective by incongruity, the attitudinal alignments of acceptance and rejection, the genres of comic framing and burlesque, as well as the phenomenon of bureaucratization of the imaginative. South African cartoons featuring president Ramaphosa are then analyzed to illustrate how cartoons can potentially offer more nuanced political critiques when expressing comic discounting rather than burlesque debunking. The paper is concluded by reflecting on the civic potential of comic framing, as a constructive alternative to polemical cartooning.

Lessons in Empowerment: The Civic Potential of Historically Grounded Conversations among Racially Marginalized Youth

Civic education is associated with the development of democratic capacity. However, this concept is measured using a limited battery of metrics (e.g., trust in government) that do not adequately capture the political sentiments of racially marginalized youth. Drawing from conversations with Chicago high school students and their teachers, I argue that democratic capacity should comprise a broader set of attitudes and behaviors, including political empowerment and acts of public voice. In the process, I identify one pedagogical technique associated with the development of empowerment: historically grounded conversations about politics that validate students’ distrust of government. Nationally representative survey data suggests that civic learning experiences of this kind are associated with feelings of political empowerment and that empowerment is associated with multiple forms of political participation, particularly among Black and Latinx youth. Overall, this study provides a path forward for those interested in reimagining civic education in the U.S.

New social contracts and digital intimacy in mammalian diving reflex’s the lockdown resolution

ABSTRACT In July 2021, Canadian performance company Mammalian Diving Reflex premiered The Lockdown Resolution at Arnolfini, a contemporary art centre in Bristol, UK. Combining virtual reality (VR) hardware, 360° film and Zoom teleconferencing, the performance connected ten ‘in real life’ (IRL) audience members to ten remote audience members around the world. Through conversations and immersive, tech-mediated interaction, audiences found out about each other and the lives of three young Bristolians during lockdown. Drawing on research in VR and social dynamics, this paper examines human-tech interfacing in The Lockdown Resolution, exploring synchrony, social presence and intimacy to social cohesion. Examining social engagement through multiple-reality performance, producer Nadia Abdelaziz and Mammalian Founder Darren O’Donnell investigate digital intimacy in performance and its role in creating an opportunity for civic development. At the centre of this activity, Mammalian create space for young people to lead these interactions. Bristol-based young performers Chris Lewis (18), Alke Schwarz (19) and Germain Loud (21) co-devised the show working with local creatives over a series of workshops, meetings and rehearsals. Offering insight into Mammalian Diving Reflex’s working methods, we imagine and discuss the civic potential of new social contracts that might be created through intimate and immersive digital performance.

Religiosity and civic activism of youth in Kazakhstan: potential link and possible contradictions

The role of religion as a mean of promoting the growth of civic engagement, both positive and negative, is generally recognized throughout the world. The growing interest of young people in religion actualizes the problems of interaction of the religiosity of Kazakh youth with modern trends in the development of civil society, determining the civic position of the younger generation and its participation in socio-political transformations.  The potential link and possible contradictions between youth religiosity and civic activism are analyzed using data from a representative survey and available secondary sources of information using methods of descriptive statistics, conjugacy tables and chi-square tests. The study revealed that young people do not set out to deeply comprehend religious knowledge, as they perceive religion as a tradition and part of culture. In Kazakhstan, it is rather imposed by external trend hobbies and attitudes, and is not the basis for an active civic position. The study of the relationship between religiosity and civic activity of young people in Kazakhstan shows that religion and politics are not differentiated in the understanding of the majority of young people. The analysis of secondary data made it possible to assess the influence of religion on civic engagement and political participation at the discursive level. Based on the conducted research, the article assumes that the observance of all religious rites is a behavior that demonstrates discipline, responsibility, respect for the traditions and culture, which can be considered as an explicit and implicit resource in public life. The article provides recommendations for a better understanding of the active civic potential of religious youth in a secular Kazakhstani society. Keywords: youth, religiosity, religious identity, civic activism, political participation.

Городской код: политика городского моделирования в эпоху больших данных

A model is "any representation or concept that helps us to understand the world whenever common sense or direct observations are inadequate." Common sense and direct observation often prove inadequate to the complexities of the twenty-first-century cities. Thus, models abound in urban life and governance. However, a model is not only a tool for control but a way of defining a situation. Framing the city so as to render it susceptible to interpretation and intervention is an exercise not merely with scientific or technological value but with rhetorical power. The tradition of comprehensive urban models, beginning with the advent of computers and culminating in the self-analyzing "smart city," I argue, sidelines this rhetorical power in favor of a tone of scientific authority that, while justifiable in technical domains, does not legitimately scale to the level of a political community. Making good on the civic potential of Big Data thus requires recontextualizing properly scientific enterprises within an adequate political philosophy of the city, allowing for the construction of cultural urban models that set human freedom at the core of its inner workings.

Cultural practices of creative unions in the development of civil society

The purpose of the article is to investigate the impact of creative unions on the culture of civil society based on the cultural practices they have created. Methodology. Interdisciplinary study of the problem is based on the application of methods of analysis, synthesis, generalization, systematization in accordance with the cultural discourse. The historiographical method made it possible to critically comprehend the publications of scholars on our stated topics; the historical method made it possible to outline the origins, way of life, and transformation of creative unions in the context of the corresponding cultural environment. Scientific novelty work is to identify the civic potential of cultural practices of creative unions. Conclusions. Systematization of further activity of creative unions is represented by the following cases: content-filling - cultural mission of creative unions is aimed at forming a modern cultural space of Ukraine; thematic-ascertaining - relevance and multi-vector characterizes the themes of cultural practices, these are events of patriotic, civic, national, ecological, charitable, artistic and aesthetic orientation; formative - cultural initiatives of creative unions are represented by formative diversity: exhibitions, openings, installations, happenings, performances, plein airs, biennials, master classes, etc.; organizational and cluster - cooperation of creative unions with united territorial communities with the use of civic activism of the population for the purpose of cultural development of local territories and creation of logos by designers; art-therapeutic - we recommend directing the activity of creative unions to rehabilitation cultural practices for participants of anti-terrorist operation, environmental protection, people with special needs, victims of the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns; educational - in quarantine it is advisable to intensify the activities of creative unions online. This approach will make the process of cultural creation of civil society effective, involving broad sections of the population.

Theorizing the “Home” in Homeschooling: Pragmatist Analyses of the Family, Education, and Civic Belonging

AbstractOver the past twenty‐five years, homeschooling has been growing in popularity. Conventionally, the actions of homeschoolers are understood as a rejection of the public school — and, by extension, a rejection of participation in the public sphere writ large. Yet such interpretations are made without due attention to the meaning of both “home” and “school” in larger social discourses. This article explores the wisdom of such analyses through an examination of the place and function of home and school in pragmatist views of democracy. Using the thought of John Dewey and Jane Addams, Kyle Greenwalt shows how the relationship between household and school was reconfigured at a key moment in the history of American public education. After demonstrating how this is so, Greenwalt extends his outlook by considering pragmatic thought as it interacts with the Chinese tradition — through the lens of Confucian role ethics. In particular, he argues that Confucian role ethics provides a way of thinking about the family household that emphasizes its civic potential through the promotion of relationships that are fluid, sustainable, and educative. In short, Greenwalt argues for a new way to think about the educative potential of family‐centered, community‐based living.

PHILOSOPHICAL CONCEPTUALIZATION OF SCIENCE EDUCATION AS A TOOL OF PEACEBUILDING

In this paper, science education is considered as a crosscutting approach, which should be implemented at every level of education (playschools, primary and secondary schools, universities, as well as in lifelong learning). This will make it possible to radically modernize outdated forms of education. Modern education should be based primarily on research because it can protect the educational process from becoming an overt or veiled indoctrination. The training of similar characters is easily exposed to various external manipulations. This approach to education is de facto “education for war” because it doesn’t contribute to the development of holistic personalities that will realize their professional and civic potential in their careers and everyday life. Science education should play a leading role in the philosophy of education for peace offering new style of communication between lecturer (teacher) and student (pupil), as well as an atypical attitude to knowledge, encouraging freedom of knowledge and creativity in the educational process.

City in Code: The Politics of Urban Modeling in the Age of Big Data

Abstract A model is “any representation or concept that helps us to understand the world whenever common sense or direct observations are inadequate.” Common sense and direct observation often prove inadequate to the complexities of the twenty-first-century cities. Thus, models abound in urban life and governance. However, a model is not only a tool for control but a way of defining a situation. Framing the city so as to render it susceptible to interpretation and intervention is an exercise not merely with scientific or technological value but with rhetorical power. The tradition of comprehensive urban models, beginning with the advent of computers and culminating in the self-analyzing “smart city,” I argue, sidelines this rhetorical power in favor of a tone of scientific authority that, while justifiable in technical domains, does not legitimately scale to the level of a political community. Making good on the civic potential of Big Data thus requires recontextualizing properly scientific enterprises within an adequate political philosophy of the city, allowing for the construction of cultural urban models that set human freedom at the core of its inner workings.

The civic potential of the campus: Federal University of Santa Catarina and democracy in the city

This article advocates the potential space for promoting public democratic environments. In recent decades, public university policies in Brazil have provided an expressive shift towards more inclusive campuses. On the other hand, the growing urban commercialization has significantly reduced diversity within the city’s public areas. This study aims to highlight the relevant role that university campuses can play in providing civic areas for the city and to evaluate the spatial characte­ristics that facilitate democratic gatherings. In 2019, the Federal University of Santa Catarina’s main campus was the stage of several events to protest against the government’s reduction of the education budget. The study starts from the recognition of the university areas that house students from more diverse areas of study. Subsequently, university community assemblies have been registered within this area and their spatial attributes have been analyzed. More flexible and permeable spaces on the buildings’ ground floor influenced these choices to gather and confront ideas. These findings point to solutions that go against current practices, aimed towards more protected entrances. Furthermore, they suggest directions so the university reduces its boundaries, inviting the city into its open areas through buildings that offer free services to its citizens.

The civic potential of memes and hashtags in the lives of young people

ABSTRACT Young people today are immersed in digital culture: often considered savvy navigators of online ecosystems and adept at using everyday technologies to share, create and express. These technologies are often seen as social and personal tools instead of spaces for meaningful participation. This paper shares the results of an investigation in young people’s attitudes towards popular social communication modalities – memes and hashtags – for civic purposes. The study employs Emerging Citizens: a suite of digital literacy tools and accompanying learning content that teach people of all ages how to critique and create hashtags and memes. This inquiry explores how young people perceive memes and hashtags as relevant avenues for civic expression, and the impact that a digital literacy intervention can have on youth attitudes. An analysis of the student experience using the Emerging Citizens tools and reflection of their creations finds that digital literacy interventions impact young people’s perceptions of popular social modalities for civic impact.

Политический и гражданский потенциал молодежи Поволжья и Крыма в современных условиях

In modern societies, the younger generation is growing up in conditions of constant socio-economic crises and instability, which entails the social uncertainty, affects the stability of normative value structures, causing the socio-cultural features of the formation and development of the social potential of different youth groups. The political potential of young people, being a part of social potential, is also affected by ongoing social transformations in Russian society. It is characterized, firstly, by rather high level of electoral activity, secondly, by low level of development of political and legal values, political culture, and civic consciousness, thirdly, by mobility in the field of political orientations, protest and civic activity depending on modern social and political economic situation. On materials of sociological research among young people of Volga Region and the Republic of Crimea and on the secondary analysis of data from other studies, the authors consider the value components of political and civic potential of today's youth, such as political and legal values, attitudes towards politics and political participation, and the development of civic consciousness among young people.

Miejskość jako styl życia, czyli gdzie się podziali nowi mieszczanie?

Artykuł opisuje społeczno-kulturowy fenomen, jakim w ostatnich latach zdaje się być rosnąca atrakcyjność kultury miejskiej. Głównym celem tekstu jest odniesienie tego zjawiska do kategorii nowego mieszczaństwa i jej ponowne przemyślenie. Starając się dokonać rewizji tego terminu, szczególną uwagę zwracam na praktykowane miejskie style życia oraz heterogeniczne systemy wartości i sensów nowych mieszczan. Artykuł jest tym samym próbą uchwycenia rytmu życia po miejsku i dotarcia do bogatszego opisu kultury mieszczańskiej dzięki koncentracji na postawach i zachowaniach, na tym, co mieszkańcy myślą, jak interpretują życie w mieście, jak spędzają w nim czas i jak je wartościują. Refleksję nad nowym mieszczaństwem ilustruję wynikami badań własnych oraz koncepcjami socjologicznymi skupiającymi się na typowych dla późnej nowoczesności procesach i zjawiskach.

The civic potential of Bollywood based dance flash mobs: on youth participation and digital networks

ABSTRACTIn this paper I argue that artists/activists in India use Bollywood dance and songs to choreograph flash mob performances with the aim of addressing issues of public importance because Bollywood is a common performative site that can be used to mobilize people. In order to understand how Bollywood based dance flash mobs have civic potential for activists-cum-performers, I conducted in-depth interviews with 20 flash mob choreographers in four cities of India. Based on my findings, I suggest that Bollywood based dance flash mobs are identified by the urban youth as inherently political and democratic in nature. These performances are often accompanied with the organizer-generated subgenre of flash mob videos recorded for the online audience. In archiving these performances, organizers also enable a virtual network of connections where individuals who share the same civic aspirations can come together and build solidarity around the cause.