(Mis)Understanding Political Participation Digital Practices, New Forms of Participation and the Renewal of Democracy Routledge Studies in European Communication Research and Education Series

The practices of participation and engagement are characterised by complexities and contradictions. All celebratory examples of uses of social media, e.g. in the Arab spring, the Occupy movement or in recent LGBTQ protests, are deeply rooted in human practices. Because of this connection, every case of mediated participation should be perceived as highly contextual and cannot be attributed to one (social) specific media logic, necessitating detailed empirical studies to investigate the different contexts of political and civic engagement. In this volume, the theoretical chapters discuss analytical frameworks that can enrich our understanding of current contexts and practices of mediated participation. The empirical studies explore the implications of the new digital conditions for the ways in which digitally mediated social interactions, practices and environments shape everyday participation, engagement or protest and their subjective as well societal meaning.

Introduction: (Mis-)Understanding political participation

Jeffrey Wimmer, Cornelia Wallner, Rainer Winter, and Karoline Oelsner

Part I: Practices of participation and citizenship

1. (New) Forms of digital participation? Toward a resource-model of adolescents’ digital engagement

Annika Schreiter, Sven Joeckel and Klaus Kamps

2. Long-lasting shadows of (post)communism? Generational and ethnic divides in political and civic participation in Estonia

Veronika Kalmus, Ragne Kõuts-Klemm, Mai Beilmann, Andu Rämmer and Signe Opermann

3. Enhanced inter-visibility. The experience of civic engagement in social media

Maria Francesca Murru

4. ‘I am not a consumer person’ – Political participation in repair cafés

Sigrid Kannengießer

5. Intimate citizenship politics and digital media: Teens’ discourses, sexual normativities and popular social media

Sander de Ridder and Sofie van Bauwel

Part II: Mediated representations of participation and citizenship

6.The Indignados in the European Press: beyond the protest paradigm?

Maria Kyriakidou, José Javier Olivas Osuna and Maximillian Hänska Ahy

7. Speak your mind: Mediatized political participation through second screens.

Udo Göttlich and Martin R. Herbers

8. "My body, my decision". The abortion debate and twitter as a counterpublic sphere for women in Turkey

Perrin Öğün Emre and Gülüm Şener

9. Repeat, remediate, resist? Meme activism in the context of the refugee crisis

Elena Pilipets and Rainer Winter

Part III: (Re-)Framing participation and citizenship

10. Towards a framework for studying political participation in social media

Julie Uldam

Jeffrey Wimmer is Professor in the Institute of Media, Knowledge and Communication at Augsburg University, Germany.

Cornelia Wallner is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Communication Science and Media Studies at Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Germany.

Rainer Winter is Professor of Media and Cultural Theory and head of the Institute of Media and Communication Studies at Klagenfurt University, Austria.

Karoline Oelsner is a researcher in the Department of Public Relations and Communication of Technology at Ilmenau University of Technology, Germany.