Squee from the Margins: Interview with Rukmini Pande (Part III)

Many fans may argue that they are being respectful in not constructing minority-centered narratives because these are not “their stories to tell,” because of the dangers of appropriation or stereotyping. How do we create a learning space within fandom where such representations can be critiqued and debated without shutting down willingness to participate and contribute? 

I think there is a significant difference in terms of context between the conversations that occur in the publishing industry around appropriation and the ownership of particular stories/experiences and the unwillingness of fans to engage with already existing characters of color within popular cultural texts.  

In professional circles, non-white authors face significant barriers in accessing publishing opportunities that come much easier to white authors due to institutional racism. This is why there has been a concerted effort in genres such as romance novels and Young Adult literature, amongst others, to help spread awareness of more diverse voices in a white dominated field.   

However, within fandom, the conversation has always been more about creating communal modes of enjoying characters and texts. It is true that certain experiences are specific to cultures that may be unfamiliar to white audiences but to posit that the majority of narratives and tropes that make up fanfiction are somehow inaccessible to characters of color is once again ascribing a universalism only to whiteness.   

With regard to concerns about stereotyping, I would point out that fans routinely engage with (white) queer cultures of which they have no direct experience. The resulting fanwork regularly sparks in-fandom discussions about whether these are also problematic depictions of (white) queer lives. These discussions often become heated but I do not think fandom is going to stop writing those stories any time soon. Again, to posit that writing well rounded characters of color is an especially fraught process is to continue to validate the idea that whiteness is normative.  

The concept of cultural appropriation seems especially charged in writing about fandom since fandom studies has also celebrated the ways fans appropriate and rework materials drawn from mass culture. How might we work through these conflicting ideas about appropriation as we begin to incorporate race more fully into our analysis?

I don’t have specific thoughts on this but would point to Ebony Elizabeth’s excellent upcoming book The Dark Fantastic which considers this is more detail.  

Editor’s Note: Check out the podcast interview we did with Ebony Elizabeth Thomas about this project.

A push for greater awareness of racial exclusions and inclusions seems to be simultaneously playing out in fandom and fandom studies, helping us to map some of the potential fault lines (and continuities) in the aca-fan identity. What similarities and differences do you see in the ways the two communities have responded to the critiques you and others are posing at the current moment? 

I think that fandom and fan studies have had a similar range of responses to critique which is a mix of genuine engagement, defensiveness, and outright hostility. As I’ve mainly been discussing fandom so far I’ll address fan studies here.  

I will be honest that it remains a difficult area to discuss because I’ve received support for my work from my peers as an individual and I am always going to be grateful for that. However, I’ve also been confronted with the field’s whiteness in a very direct and aggressive fashion. This occurred in Feburary 2019, in response to my tweeting what was, in my opinion, a rather self-evident fact – that Fan Studies as a discipline is dominated by whiteness. I was extremely surprised by the pushback I received, the wider implications of which have been discussed in detail by Samira Nadkarni here.  

I think it is also really important to reflect on what this level of defensiveness means when talking about issues such as decolonization. After all, if we are still at the point where non-white scholars are asked to explain extremely basic concepts such as institutional racism and structural whiteness then it is a very damning indictment of our bibliographies, methodologies, peer review processes and publishing.  

I am often told that white scholars are afraid of speaking about race. In response I would say that firstly, this fear puts the entire burden of doing the work of decolonization on non-white scholars who, it must be pointed out, also face considerable anxiety and an equal possibility of messing up when approaching the topic. Secondly, this fear is damaging the field because it results in work that is fundamentally incomplete and also participates in further entrenching whiteness-as-default.  

As this debate around your book have unfolded, there has been some tendency of academics to acknowledge that systemic and structural racism impacts academic research as a whole but to push back on the idea that fandom studies might be particularly problematic in this regard. This no doubt reflects the perception within fandom, and fandom studies, that this is a more progressive, inclusive, and transgressive space than most traditional disciplinary spaces. Yet, your argument is that we can only really maintain that sense of ourselves by bracketing race from our conversation. And throughout the book, you offer a range of examples where the exclusion of race from our consideration erases, silences, or marginalizes. How do you respond to the “not only fandom studies” argument? 

I think that’s a rather blinkered argument to make because isn’t the whole point of an academic field to be self-critical so that it can move forward to produce better, more accurate, and more incisive knowledge? If we allow such defensiveness to shut down not just critique, but the possibility of enriching our research through rigorous and inclusive methodologies, theoretical frameworks, and publishing practices, then we will certainly fail in accurately portraying the complexity of fan communities today.

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Dr Rukmini Pande is currently an Assistant Professor in English Literature at O.P Jindal Global University, India. She completed her PhD at the University of Western Australia. She is currently part of the editorial board of the Journal of Fandom Studies and has been published in multiple edited collections including the Wiley Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies and The Routledge Handbook of Popular Culture Tourism. She has also been published in peer reviewed journals such as Transformative Works and Cultures and The Journal for Feminist Studies. Her monograph, Squee From The Margins: Race in Fandom, was published in 2018 by the University of Iowa Press. She is also working on an edited collection on race/racism in fandom in order to bring together cutting edge scholarship from upcoming scholars in the field.

Squee From the Margins: Interview with Rukmini Pande (Part II)

I suspect some fans are going to be more willing to accept the idea of more diverse participants in fandom spaces than are going to be willing to take on an obligation to personally expand the representations of race within fandom. Can we separate out inclusion from diversity in regard to representation within a participatory culture? Why or why not?

 I think the first thing to question here is the framing the concept of engaging with characters of color as “taking on an obligation.” Why should it be so?  

The assumption that characters of color do not offer the same possibilities of pleasure and exploration of fandom tropes and archetypes is in itself racist. Indeed, while characters of color that offer rich potential for fannish squee have always existed, as the roles offered to non-white actors within popular cultural texts have expanded this disjuncture has become even more clear. There are plenty of similarities between Bucky Barnes from the MCU movies and Finn from Star Wars in terms of their character arcs but only the former has become the locus of fan attention.  

To link this to my earlier responses, there is a clear connection between the attitude that assumes that characters of color are somehow inherently unsuitable for fannish modes of pleasure and the labelling of vocal fans of color as fandom killjoys. The foreclosure of the possibility of learning to find joy in characters of color (as I did in my experiences with Star Trek) and only framing this process in punitive language – policing, obligation, scoring social justice points, etc – is in itself a product of the logic of white supremacy.  

Also I think it is important to underline that fans of color have always been in these spaces and have contributed materially to their evolution through the production of fanwork, supporting projects like the AO3, and building community infrastructure. So, even though this labor has been invisibilized, I don’t think they need (or desire) the acceptance of white fans to validate their continuing participation.   

One of the more chilling observations running across your book is the idea that as Hollywood has developed marginally more inclusive representations, fan fiction writing communities have tended to lag behind rather than keep pace, still focusing on white characters even when they are peripheral to the original narratives rather than helping to further develop minority characters and re-center stories around them.  In what ways does the fan fiction community seem to reproduce the exclusions and silences of the entertainment industry more generally?  What obligations do individual fans bear in dealing with this situation? And what strategies have emerged in response to this process of marginalization? 

To pick up from my response to the last question, I think that framing these interactions in exclusively punitive terms is limiting. After all, there is a long and celebrated tradition of analyzing fandom as a learning resource. People have incessantly documented their experiences of this – from figuring out how to code, to deconstructing internalized attitudes towards sexism, homophobia, and slutshaming, to kink exploration, to researching what kind of lubricant would be available to the Victorians. However, when it comes to unlearning internalized racism – to which fans of color are equally susceptible – why is the possibility of fandom leading to that completely negated? Why do white fans need to see this engagement as an obligation or as policing? It is because there is a deep and immediate defensiveness sparked by the idea that whiteness is a racialized identity with specific effects.  

To address the second part of the question, fans of color are definitely in a continual state of overt or covert negotiation with the whiteness of fandom spaces and texts and have evolved strategies to deal with it – self segregation, fanwork fests, etc. However, it is also limiting to frame their fannish activities only through this lens. It is after all, not their responsibility, nor is it within their power, to fix the problem. For instance, sometimes an angry post about how the pairing of Steve Rogers/Darcy Williams (who have never met in the MCU canon) continues to have more fanfiction than the pairing of Steve Rogers/Sam Wilson (who are well established companions) is just that – an angry post that is meant to vent frustration without offering a solution.  

You argue that these silences or exclusions are not simply “glitches” in a system that otherwise works to embrace a range of identities and experiences. Rather, you see these “glitches” as part of how “fannish algorithms” operate. Explain. 

In my framing, fandom algorithms are structures that are seen to order the workings of media fandom, both in terms of communitarian etiquettes and technical strategies that involve fannish digital infrastructure like archiving fanworks and organisational strategies such as tagging. These algorithms are basically “strategies of squee.” They are seen to operate independently and without bias towards any particular individual fan or character.  

So when racism is seen to interrupt their workings, it is seen in the form of a “glitch,” an interruption of a system that otherwise works smoothly towards promoting such common fannish experiences such as the formation of safe spaces, the exchange squee, the pushback against a restrictive canon and the lessening of friction between opposed groups.  

Another effect of this formulation is to see the roots of these glitches, when they occur, as part of a larger systemic malfunction that fandom participants cannot influence. This allows for troubling patterns of behaviour to be deflected outwards onto flawed popular cultural texts or onto individuals who act in bad faith against fandom etiquettes, allowing the core liberal nature of media fandom spaces to operate without questioning. 

As an example, fandom algorithms can be axiomatic such as “Ship and Let Ship” which is seen as a basic common sense approach to fandom spaces where different individuals have different needs from a text. Theoretically, the operation of this algorithm would result in a harmonious fan space but the “glitch” would occur when fans of Finn from Star Wars would point out the anti-blackness that is influencing his sidelining in fanworks.  

The larger effect of this algorithm then is to encourage fans to ignore patterns of erasure over time, such as the inevitable elevation of white characters in text after text.

__________ 

Dr Rukmini Pande is currently an Assistant Professor in English Literature at O.P Jindal Global University, India. She completed her PhD at the University of Western Australia. She is currently part of the editorial board of the Journal of Fandom Studies and has been published in multiple edited collections including the Wiley Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies and The Routledge Handbook of Popular Culture Tourism. She has also been published in peer reviewed journals such as Transformative Works and Cultures and The Journal for Feminist Studies. Her monograph, Squee From The Margins: Race in Fandom, was published in 2018 by the University of Iowa Press. She is also working on an edited collection on race/racism in fandom in order to bring together cutting edge scholarship from upcoming scholars in the field.

Squee from the Margins: Interview with Rukmini Pande (Part I)

Few books have had the impact on the field of fandom studies that Rukmini Pande’s Squee From the Margins: Fandom and Race has had since it’s publication. I have been listening to Pande’s powerful and poignant critiques of our field take shape through multiple appearances on the Fansplaining podcast. The conversation about race and fandom has been long overdue. That moment of reckoning seems to be here, signaled not only by the publication of this important book, but also through important scholarly work by Rebecca Wanzo, André Carrington, Mel Stanfill and many others. Witness the recent issue of Transformative Works and Culture on “fans of color, fandoms of color” which was edited by Abigail De Kosnik and André Carrington. For those who want to de-colonize their reading and teaching, Pande has published a valuable bibliography.

These writers — many of them new, junior, and vulnerable — are rightly questioning some of Fandom Studies’s founding assumptions. It is not just that discussions of race (and fans of color) have largely been excluded from our previous work but that this absence has structured the field, determining what we see and what we don’t see, what we say and don’t say, throughout all aspects of our work.

As a founding figure in the field, I am trying to take ownership of some of my own past failures to fully address this issue. I have found myself rethinking some of my own work and shifting the ways I write about fandom to reflect what I have learned through these critiques, though I still have much to learn. I am also rethinking the syllabus for my fandom studies seminar which I will be teaching again this fall. I have come to recognize that the freedom to avoid writing and speaking about race is the worst form of white privilege inside the academy, and we — white scholars — cannot let ourselves off the hook here. Reading and assigning the works of scholars of color is not enough if it means we continue to ignore race and racism in our own scholarship.

This process of bringing issues of race and racism — and the perspectives of fans and scholars of color — into the center of our field and rethinking earlier work is painful, messy, and occurring in public. Pande has shown great courage in responding to the inevitable push-back her interventions are receiving, even as the field as a whole has embraced her important contributions to our scholarship.

As I thought about how to frame this interview, I wanted to give Pande a chance to respond to some of the pushback I have heard, both online and in private, from fans and aca-fans alike. As a consequence, with her agreement, I am playing devil’s advocate here, more than I might ordinarily do, as I bring some of these assumptions to the surface so they can be addressed. How we work through these debates will test the ethical core of our community, constituting a teachable moment as we learn from each other, listen to each other, and forgive each other. We need to confront certain issues directly, acknowledge histories of exclusion, marginalization, and dismissal, yet we also need to allow room for people to confront past mistakes and move beyond them. Above all, though, those of us who enjoy certain kinds of privilege need to err on the side of ethical listening.

From the book’s opening pages, you draw inspiration from Sara Ahmed’s concept of the feminist killjoy, asking “What does it mean to be a fandom killjoy with regard to being the subject of and reacting to racism in fandom spaces?” To this, I might add the question – what do you see as the dangers and potentials of taking on such a role at the current moment in the evolution of fandom studies? Is this a role which it is possible for fans of color (a problematic term for all of the reasons you note) to escape in regard to the racial dynamics you have identified in fandom spaces by remaining silent and complicit with a space which is safe for some but not for all, by “passing” within a space imagined to be post-racial? 

I think the position of the fandom killjoy is something that is ascribed to or imposed upon fans who point out the operations about race/racism in fandom spaces rather than a role that they seek out.  

It is important to make that distinction because fans who do talk about these issues are often branded as activists who are motivated by a desire to score social justice points rather than by a genuine fannish investment in a character or text. This othering also often comes with a hypervisibility that inhibits further fandom participation as their energy is expected to then go towards ‘fixing’ the problem they have identified. To quote Sara Ahmed (again!), she notes in Complaint as Diversity Work that, “A complaint teaches about institutional direction because a complaint is often treated as misdirection by the institution. Another way of saying this: to locate a problem is to become the location of a problem. Diversity work: becoming the location of a problem.”  

I think the question of escapism is a really interesting one for fans of color and one that I took up specifically in my research for Squee From The Margins. I wanted to hear about what kinds of escapism were available to fans of color in white-focused fandoms, especially in light of repeated claims by white fans that they come to fandom spaces to enjoy themselves and escape from having to consider “serious” issues (like racism) that they encounter in their daily lives.  

I found that while it is certainly possible for fans of color to “pass” within online fan spaces, their modes of escapism are mostly contingent – I can enjoy a source or fan text until it gets racist. Other fans articulated the importance of finding networks of fellow non-white fans so that they could curate their experiences to be safer. In all cases, fandom certainly isn’t a space where these fans can escape from race/racism even if it is not something that is engaged with publicly or vocally.   

Of course non-white fans have been building alternative fan spaces for a long time. Scholars like Kirsten Warner, Rebecca Wanzo and Andre Carrington have talked particularly about how Black fans in the USA have carved out space for themselves in this way. However, within anglophone media fandom this has been less successful and has been limited to events like one-off fanwork creation fests. There is certainly a level of self-segregation being practiced – non-white fans finding each other in white spaces, gravitating towards texts with better representation, etc – but fandom spaces today are simultaneously too scattered and too connected for this to be a large scale strategy. And of course, not all non-white fans like the same texts or want the same thing out of fanworks, so to treat them as a homogenous mass is also not productive. 

Across the book, you acknowledge what fandom offered you as a young woman growing up in small town India and the sense of frustration you felt in realizing that you were “passing” in a context where participants were always already assumed to be white. And you describe your growing awareness that you were not unique in having these experiences. Can you share some of the moments where you felt you were pushing against the limits of fandom in regard to race?  

The process of realising how deeply whiteness was structured into media fandom spaces was a gradual process for me. Initially, I was extremely resistant to the idea that my participation in fandom spaces could be racist. I think the first time I was confronted with evidence of this was in Star Trek (2009) fandom. As someone who’d been a Kirk/Spock shipper from the original series it was deeply enjoyable to see the explosion of fanwork around the pairing once again. I even nodded along with the dominant argument that the character of Nyota Uhura (Zoe Saldana) had been somehow lessened because of her canonical romance with Spock (Zachary Quinto).  

When some Black fans very rightly pointed out how problematic this argument was, and further that Kirk/Spock fans were either ignoring Uhura entirely or writing her character in extremely racist ways within their own fanwork, I was extremely discomfited and resistant. This was partly because as someone who had grown up in India with plenty of “people like me” on movie screens, I was unfamiliar with the racial dynamics of US-centric filmic representation. But it was also very much because I was, for the first time, being made to see how my modes of fandom were deeply implicated in whiteness even as they functioned to give me pleasure and the chance to explore (white) queerness.  

This experience was extremely foundational because once I was made aware of the racialization of my choices it gave me the chance to work through my own defensiveness. I realized that fandom had always encouraged me to be self-reflexive about my attraction to certain character archetypes and shipping dynamics in terms of gender and sexuality but had worked to elide their whiteness. This in turn helped me to value characters of color who also offered me the exact same modes of pleasure but which fandom had deemed to be uninteresting. This was a huge turning point for me, not because I was being policed into appropriate modes of fandom, but because I was able to actually expand notions of my own fannish pleasure. 

I don’t mean to imply that this was a smooth or easy process but it definitely showed me how fandom truisms (or algorithms as I term them in Squee From The Margins) like “Ship and Let Ship” while overtly functioning to maintain fandom harmony, also work towards making whiteness invisible. 

Your title, “Squee from the Margins,” evokes a fannish term that is bound up with notions of pleasure and affect. Fandom studies has long questioned the social construction of taste, whereas desire, fantasy, pleasure, and affect are seen as authentic or natural more often than not. Some would argue that the heart desires what the heart desires, so how can we push for broader representational practices in fandom without seeming to perform the kinds of policing of pleasure and fantasy which has been explicitly rejected within fandom communities in relation to gender and sexuality?  

The fact that fan studies has long questioned the social construction of taste and yet has left the deep racialization of fandom’s taste uninterrogated is, in my opinion, quite damning. As I have discussed earlier, the characterization of fans who critique the whiteness of fan spaces as ‘policing activists’ rather than people invested in communal pleasure is fundamental to how white supremacy maintains itself. This is also related to the reasoning that structures the positions that you mention where gender and sexuality are somehow magically de-racialized.  

I think the most blatant problem with the position of “The heart wants what it wants” is the accompanying unwillingness to name that “something” as whiteness because that would imply that fandom spaces are not neutral. White fans have, as decades of evidence proves, consistently chosen white characters to devote their fandom energies towards. Fannish pleasure and fantasy therefore are already fundamentally implicated in questions of race. It is simply a matter of acknowledging that fact. But, as is evident, naming whiteness triggers a deep defensiveness that manifests itself in trying to prove that those that point out the problem are the real location of disruption.   

You trace a “jigsaw puzzle of fandom histories” which led to the current moment. In particular, you focus on Race Fail 09 as a key event which helped develop a greater focus on the implicit and sometimes explicit racialized assumptions shaping fandom. Can you trace for us some of the paths which led from this incident to the growing attention to race and fandom? 

2019 marks 10 years since RaceFail ’09 and I think its legacy is an accurate reflection of the role of race in within fandom and fan studies. Firstly, it lead to a greater degree of openness in talking about the issues of race in SFF, both within fandom and in professional spaces. Secondly, it gave the chance for fans of color across media fandom to form points of connection and solidarity within these spaces at a time when that aspect of personal identity was less visible. These connections in turn amplified their critiques. I don’t think it is a coincidence that the debates in the Star Trek (2009) fandom that I discussed earlier were also happening at around the same time.

But equally, the trajectory of the debates around RaceFail ‘09 show that the presence of race/ism in fandom is noted only in times of crisis, located in the actions of individuals, and eventually excised from collective memory. When talking about fandom history, the number of scholars (and fans) who note StrikeThrough (which happened in 2007 and saw a mass purge of explicit sexual content on Livejournal) as foundational to the construction of contemporary fan spaces such as AO3 but completely ignore RaceFail (which happened only two years later) is remarkable. This forgetting is also seen in the lack of any reflection on the incident within the discipline of fan studies. For instance, during the roundtable on Race and Fan Studies at this year’s PCA/ACA conference, hardly anyone in the room could recall any scholars of color who were involved in the documentation and discussion of RaceFail. This is of course deeply troubling and points to the ways in which the discipline continues to actively enable its own structural whiteness.

__________

Dr Rukmini Pande is currently an Assistant Professor in English Literature at O.P Jindal Global University, India. She completed her PhD at the University of Western Australia. She is currently part of the editorial board of the Journal of Fandom Studies and has been published in multiple edited collections including the Wiley Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies and The Routledge Handbook of Popular Culture Tourism. She has also been published in peer reviewed journals such as Transformative Works and Cultures and The Journal for Feminist Studies. Her monograph, Squee From The Margins: Race in Fandom, was published in 2018 by the University of Iowa Press. She is also working on an edited collection on race/racism in fandom in order to bring together cutting edge scholarship from upcoming scholars in the field.

Participatory Politics in an Age of Crisis: Henry Jenkins & Nico Carpentier (Part V)

Henry

Yes, Yes, and Yes!!! I really find this approach very generative. So far, in mapping the ethics of participation, we have, at this moment of crisis, focused on anti-democratic and even fascistic players, seeking to recognize ideals and norms through their violation. But I wonder if we might reverse the lens for a moment and try to define what participatory leadership looks like. I know from our earlier conversation this was a key theme for you and it is something I am thinking about more and more. This brings me back to the figure of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the ways that she is disrupting conventional political rhetoric in order to create conditions that encourage participation by youth, women, and people of color within the political process. Here's a recent video she released about the Green New Deal, which seems particularly rich in terms of the ways it constructs, top-down though it may be, a model of what a more democratic/participatory society might look like.

First, I would note that her work is consistently pedagogical. She understands that if those who have been excluded from the political process (either formally through voter repression or informally through the ways established politicians talk) need a certain background to be brought into the conversation. We saw in the work I did for By Any Media Necessary that many young people felt the language of American politics was broken, both by partisanship and policy wonk rhetoric, both of which turned away first time voters. Here, she explains this potential set of policies in clear, vivid, and concrete terms. In this case, she's using animation and storytelling to illustrate both how we got to the current state and what a future alternative might look like.

Second, and tied to the first, she constructs an aspirational future -- not just telling us what the problem is but daring us to imagine, together, what alternatives might look like. And there are various explicit appeals here to participate, to get involved. She constructs herself as a model of a young person who has been able to become part of the most diverse group of congresspeople "so far" and she offers a model of a young Latinx girl who will grow up and replace her someday. She maps the transition between participatory or expressive politics (outside the formal system through protest) and institutional politics -- the ability to actively contribute to the decision-making process. Many young people say that they are never invited to participate in the decision-making process, never encouraged to vote, to petition, to protest, etc. and research shows that such direct appeals often make a difference.

Of course, the appeal is most effective when given by someone who plays a direct role in the young person's life. And that's why it matters that AOC's content is so damn spreadable, that she is actively encouraging people to circulate it through our everyday social networks, and thus her political speech goes where the people are rather than pulling them into uncomfortable, unfamiliar, spaces of formal politics.

I really value the ways that she embraces the civic imagination, that she dares to propose approaches that would be outside what the political establishment deems possible, given current constraints. She's pushing past what Stephen Duncombe calls "the tyranny of the possible." But at the same time, she does not mean for us to take this vision, literally, as the only possible way forward or the only way to achieve her goals. In the end, we do not have a utopia (problems persist) nor do we have a blueprint which is closed off from popular interventions. We have a provocation which encourages a continuing process of asking questions, proposing alternatives, and working to achieve them on the local, national, and global level.

Finally, if you look closely, you will see that she did the video in collaboration with Naomi Klein, best known for her book, No Logos, but more to the point, the author of a new work, No is Not Enough. This book makes the case that resistance is not enough to change what's wrong with global democracy, that we need to be willing to put effort into describing what alternatives look like, regardless of whether we yet have the means to achieve them. She describes work taking place in the environmental justice movement in Canada, which involves bringing diverse stakeholders together, to talk through problems and develop plans for alternative futures. The fact that these are considered alternatives (not THE answer) creates a space for people to participate in the process and contribute their own ideas.

There must be young leaders like AOC (or elders like Naomi Klein) all over the world who are working not just to resist authoritarian impulses in their cultures but to articulate and actively perform what an alternative might look like. Are there examples you might point to in Cyprus or the various European countries where you have been doing your work?

Our own Civic Imagination workshops are on a modest level trying to do something similar. We go into communities across America and elsewhere in the world to create temporary spaces where people can imagine the future together. Through our participatory process, we surface points of agreement as well as points of disagreement, helping communities to identify shared values and visions, as well as to recognize and pay respect to those things which differentiate their experiences and perspectives. Surprising things emerge -- a discussion of religious freedom in Beirut, a discussion of the need for national health care in Kentucky -- which do not fit our assumptions or mental categories of how such groups constitute themselves. We certainly hear some conservative perspectives, but we are also seeing people agree on things that set them apart from the institutional political leadership. It is through such a process that people may become awakened to and inculcated into the kinds of ethics of participation we have been discussing.

What does participatory leadership look like? How does it help to create conditions and provide resources that support the kinds of expansion of opportunities to participate you described in your last post? Too often, we talk about flat organizations and leaderless movements, terms which undervalue the importance that good leaders can bring to democratic processes. I am struck by the difference in the ways AOC represents herself and the ways that Trump does. Consider a news story today about the ways some servicemen wore badges on their sleeve which signaled their allegiance to Trump rather than to the American Constitution, badges which look pretty damn much like the kinds of iconography that surrounds other fascistic states. No wonder AOC has received such attacks from the alt-right -- she embodies the exact opposite of their vision for the future of American society.

Nico

Yes, I agree that leadership matters, and significantly matters, in the debates about participation, and in the debates about the protection of democracy. Where I would like to start is that participatory processes are affected by how leadership, expertise and ownership are defined and performed. Authoritarian forms of leadership disable participation, as they are contradictory. Authoritarianism is grounded in the centralization of power, while participation is based on its decentralization. The same point applies to expertise and ownership, that, depending how they are defined and performed in a particular context (and not only politics), can increase or decrease participatory intensities. Actually, there is quite a lot of mid-20th century literature in the field of leadership studies (e.g., Lewin and Adorno) that tries to think through these issues, for instance, by distinguishing between democratic and authoritarian leadership. That kind of literature can be re-interpreted and extended, to capture how participation and leadership interact, in constructive and destructive ways.

One of the additions that I would like to make is that we are up against a deeply rooted desire for these stronger forms of leadership. Different authors, e.g. Gramsci and Reich, have tried to provide answers to the question why people chose for authoritarian regimes. Without delving too deep into these discussions, I would argue that the fantasy of the ultimate charismatic leader, that manages to fulfill all contradictory demands of the people, and cares for the people as a father/mother figure, is a strong force, that we should take into account. I would also argue that this fantasy links to another fantasy, namely the fantasy of homogeneity, where there is no conflict, no dissensus, and no disagreement. Authoritarian leaders tap into these fantasies, offering to fulfill all these wishes and demands, and offering a construction of the people as the One. However tempting it is to believe that we can safely rest in the caring arms of the Leader, these fantasies are bound to be frustrated, through the heterogeneity of the social, the irreconcilability of demands, and thus the unavoidable presence of conflict.

But, as I argued earlier in our discussion, we are living in the era of the both, and I would argue that there is also another fantasy circulating, which is the fantasy of equality and horizontality. It is the fantasy of the absence of hierarchy. We find this fantasy in many different variations, some of which I would consider benevolent, while others can be deeply troubling. I would argue that when the two fantasies, the fantasies of horizontality and homogeneity, become integrated, the outcome can be deeply troubling. This is actually where populism (or what some would qualify as regressive or reactionary populism, see Mouffe's and Fraser's work) is situated, because of its anti-establishment discourse, that unifies (homogenizes) the people in its wish to remove the establishment that is considered to have betrayed it. In a next move, populism then brings in the (contradictory) logic of verticality, as it presents a new elite to the people (replacing the old established elite) that "truly" represents the people.

I think it is also possible to translate the fantasy of horizontality (and what I would prefer to label equivalence) into social practice without triggering the fantasy of homogeneity, but instead by respecting radical diversity. That is (I think and hope) where my position is situated. And (after this long detour): This is the playing field where I situate participatory leadership, or, as I prefer (to better connect to the existing reflections) democratic leadership. I do not want to articulate horizontality and homogeneity, which also means that I do not believe that we should eliminate leaders (or experts, and even (sic) owners), simply because we are all the same and we should not have leaders at all. I think this would imply the denial of human diversity, ignoring the idea that people have developed different skills throughout their life trajectories, for instance at the level of understanding, argumentation, communication and organization (which are qualities that define leadership).

Instead, we need to respect and cherish these qualities, which brings me to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who seems to have accumulated a number of these qualities, although it might be a bit early days to evaluate this. But more in general, democratic leadership is built on the articulation of horizontality, equivalence and diversity, which recognizes the particularity of individual leadership skills, but which also prevents that these differences (or particularities) harm or destroy the logic of equivalence. Or, in other words, democratic leaders are aggregators, translators and protectors of diversity, that use empathy to connect to the plurality of demands, defend the participatory ethics and avoid the creation of the incontestable 'One Narrative'. To refer to an ancient idea, democratic leaders have to have a little memento mori voice in their heads, which is a permanent reminder that they are mortal, and not divine.

I know that this is a lot to ask from individual leaders, but I think that this re-articulation of leadership is very necessary to protect contemporary democratic cultures (and, by the way, our environment as well, but that is for another discussion). At the same time, we should not blindly trust the authority of leaders, even if, at first, these leaders seem to fulfill all criteria of democratic leadership. We should keep in mind that time plays a role, and that the maintenance of democratic leadership poses a serious challenge, as leaders are exposed to the seductive capacities of power. That is, of course, the main reason why rotation remains a crucial democratic principle. But I would argue that also collective leadership structures, with leadership teams (without having a primus inter pares) instead of individual leaders, should be considered and implemented more.

And even when these more protective scenarios, driven by a structural distrust in the necessarily benevolent authority of leaders, are implemented, I would still argue that we simultaneously need mechanisms that undermine this authority of leaders. Historically, the jester has shown to be a crucial figure, that could speak truth to power. The carnavelesque is a more structural form of this kind of disruptive practice, which has the capacity to undermine authority, even if it is only for a limited period in time. A more contemporary version is political satire, which again has the capacity to desacralize leadership. Of course, political satire has gained a strong position in the US media sphere, but maybe the not-so-exclusive focus on one particular leader (which we now often find in these late-night talk shows) would be more beneficial, however tempting it is to focus on the current US president. And I would like to add that we need a better comprehension of the current transgressions and the enjoyment they create, but we also need to develop counter-transgressions, that strengthen the democratic tissue, instead of weakening it.

The shift towards a different (democratic) leadership model is part of a broader change towards a more progressive politics. There is, of course, paradoxically, the need for democratic leaders to develop an ideological project that elaborates these more progressive politics, including the identity of democratic leaders. In order to move outside this paradox, we need to broaden the notion of democratic leadership, not restricting it to institutionalized politics, but incorporating and connecting democratic leaders from all social fields. That returns us to Gramsci's concept of hegemony, or the creation of a dominant ideological project through a series of political alliances. This does not imply that all progressive forces need to agree on all issues, or that they need to become assimilated into one impossible meta-project. Instead, we need these forces to generate, in a non-defensive way, what Laclau and Mouffe call a chain of equivalence, with the many different progressive groups collaborating in the development of a new progressive ideology for the 21st century, without denying their internal differences.

But we also need a second, much broader, political alliance, with all democratic political forces, conservative and progressive, to protect the idea of democracy itself. I would argue that this is even more urgent, as anti-democratic forces are gaining strength in the West, and there is a strong need to re-hegemonize democracy. This does not mean that this broad alliance, a democratic front, needs to agree on particular ideological projects. They do not even have to agree on what kind of democracy is preferred. The plan to establish more intense forms of democracy, including participatory democracy, in a variety of fields (including media and communication), does not need to disappear from the progressive agenda. But there is a need for a new democratic social contract, that pledges to actively defend the idea of democracy itself. Now is about the time, I would say.

__________

Henry Jenkins is the Provost's Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts, and Education at the University of Southern California. He is the author or editor of twenty books on various aspects of media and popular culture. He is perhaps best known for Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture and Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. He is celebrating the paperback publication of By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism, of which he is co-author. His forthcoming books include Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies in Creative Social Change (which he co-edited with Sangita Shresthova and Gabriel Peters-Lazaro), Participatory Culture: Interviews, and Comics and Stuff. 

Nico Carpentier is Docent at Charles University in Prague; he also holds part-time positions at Uppsala University and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB - Free University of Brussels). Moreover, he is a Research Fellow at the Cyprus University of Technology and Loughborough University. Earlier, he was ECREA Treasurer (2005-2012) and Vice-President (2008-2012), and IAMCR Treasurer (2012-2016). Currently, he is Chair of the Participatory Communication Research Section at IAMCR. His latest books are The Discursive-Material Knot: Cyprus in Conflict and Community Media Participation (2017, Peter Lang, New York); Cyprus and its Conflicts. Representations, Materialities, and Cultures (2018, co-edited), Critical Perspectives on Media, Power and Change (2018, co-edited), Respublika! Experiments in the Performance of Participation and Democracy (2019, edited), and Communication and Discourse Theory (2019, co-edited).

Participatory Politics in an Age of Crisis: Henry Jenkins & Nico Carpentier (Part IV)

Henry

Your question here about whether a Lynch Mob would be participatory is a compelling one. Frankly, I am still trying to work through your question to my own satisfaction. Your position gives you a more stable vantage point from which to address this. But if you accept, as I do, that the goal should not to automatically assume that all participation is going to be progressive, if you accept that there is a continuum of different degrees of participation, and if you assume there is a blurry boundary between interaction/expression and participation, then you are left in an uncomfortable position right now.

You are correct that any formal or mechanical notion of participation poses some problems as we deal with right wing populist movements around the world. For example, there is strong evidence that the alt-right is using debates among fans of Star Wars, and other recent franchises (Ghostbusters, say) which have sought to move in more inclusive directions, to identify and recruit angry white male fans into their cause. And my friend, Tara McPherson, is researching Neoconfederate and white supremicist groups and finding that they are similar recruiting from gaming platforms. Fandom and gaming are both spaces I have read as central to what I describe as a more participatory culture. In some ways, these groups, whatever their politics, are helping young people bridge from the expressions associated with participatory culture and involvement in some political process. So, what allows us to discount them as participatory? I know, not your problem to address.

Or consider another example. I am really interested in a media event that occured in Forsyth County, Georgia, which was a so-called “sundown town” -- no Blacks lived there and they were not safe if they remained in the county after dark. (A white supremicist lynch mob had cleared out all of the black residents in the 1920s and as of the 1980s, none had moved back). Civil Rights protestors were directing national attention towards this segregated city and early in her career, Oprah chose to make this issue a focus of her program. She made a controversial decision to only allow people who lived in Forsyth County into the studio audience, much to the outrage of the Civil Rights leaders and protestors who had come in from elsewhere. When the episode aired, we got the spectacle of Oprah as the only black person on the set, dramaticizing more powerfully than anything else could the exclusion of blacks from the county. Inside the studio, the locals engaged in heated debates around the issue of being a white only community.  

Most showed some form of racism but within the terms of the conversation, there were real notable disagreements and these dissenting views were tolerated within the norms of the community. This group would ultimately make the decisions which impacted this policy. (Today, by the way, Forsyth County is a multiracial/multicultural community with demographics that look very much like all of the other counties in this part of Georgia.) Is this process participatory? It cuts to your question of who gets to participate, I think, since by one definition, the members of the community were allowed to participate where-as by another definition, there are visible acts of exclusion going on here. I often use this example to think through the issues we are both raising here.  

Your focus on participatory ethics gives us one path forward, and that’s why it interests me so much. If we develop an ethical definition of participation, then the fact that those who were excluded from membership within this community -- by force in some cases — were not allowed to participate surely limits the quality of participation, even if by a mechanical definition, the event follows participatory procedures and is in fact broadly inclusive within a narrower definition of what constitutes the community. This is why the other distinctions we are both proposing may be helpful.  From my opening post, we have: 

Participation in what?

Participation for whom and with whom?  

Participation towards what ends?

Participation under what terms?  

Participation to what degree? 

From your recent post, we have: 

What makes participation possible?

What is the level of participation?

And what does participation then do?  

There is a certain amount of overlap here, as well as a few nuanced differences. For example, “participation towards what ends?” describes motives while “What does participation then do?” focuses on results. “What is the level of participation?” and “participation to what degree?” are pretty interchangeable, unless I miss a more nuanced distinction. I love the “what makes participation possible?” question since it points to the issue of causation or at least the conditionality of participation, a question I had not included in my list. But it seems possible that the two lists could be merged, which would give us some ways to define different kinds of participation with a high degree of precision, even if I hold onto some messiness for descriptive rather than prescriptive purposes.  

Your question of “What makes participation possible?” suggests ways expression/interaction may enable deeper forms of participation (or may keep participation alive as an ideal even during times of repression). Here, I am thinking about the work of Yomna Elsayed who participated in one of the conversations in the series and also contributed to an earlier exchange about popular religion. She’s interested in mapping the democratic potentials within Egyptian popular/participatory culture following the collapse of the Arab Spring uprisings there. She sees critical voices emerging through anti-fandom, popular music, internet humor, and memes, which may not be overtly political, but do allow young people to form alliances and express oppositional perspectives on the values underlying the current power structure in their country. Within cultural studies, these practices has all the markings of cultural resistance but it has not yet coalesced into a formal political movement and would not meet your definition of participation in that they do not get to collectively participate in decision-making. Yet, if a new resistance movement emerged there, it might build on the foundation that such cultural expressions provide, just as earlier cultural practices (more-so than Twitter or Facebook as specific platforms) helped to foster the preconditions for the Arab Spring. For me, expressions are one of the cultural factors that shape the civic imagination and make participation on a more political level possible. 

Now, can we do similar work in terms of identifying some of the ethical norms essential to create what you describe here as a democratic culture? I’ve focused on not working to exclude others from meaningful participation. A second norm which might seem definitional of a democratic culture is a willingness to accept the outcome of democratically arrived decisions, something we are not seeing much of in America today, where Trump has sought to actively negate every law or policy that Obama passed and refused to enforce or promote those which remain on the books. And we might point to an obligation to defend rather than delegitimize democratic institutions and practices. What else would you add to the mix?

Nico

Let me start with the dilemma that your last reply starts with, and that we have been talking about for a while: The limits of participation. It is a very simple question that has been the starting point of my theoretical work: When does participation stop being participation? As you know, I find it hard to accept that every human action is labelled participation. Once that assumption is accepted, then the unavoidable question becomes: Which human interactions are outside participation?

One of the dilemmas that comes out of this simple question is the democratic limit of participation. My argument is that participation is a concept that loses its meaning if it is pushed outside democratic culture. Of course, there are many grey zones, and there, the discussion is famously complicated, but that should not spoil the fun right now. There is one important addition, and that is that we need to distinguish between progressive politics and democracy. It is implicitly present in your last reply, but I want to emphasize this distinction, because I think it is important. As you write, there is now ample evidence that participatory logics can be activated by a wide variety of political ideologies, and that is not the exclusive territory of progressive politics. This, of course, is combined with the realization that civil society is not necessarily progressive, and not even necessarily democratic. Some have proposed the term 'uncivil society' for this, but this idea segregates civil from uncivil society, which is sort of missing the entire point. Even then, it was about time that we got all this documented and made explicit.

But all this to say that I do not want to locate the cut-off point, the point that decides about the limit of participation, with progressive politics, thus excluding democratic-conservative politics from participation. I do think that it is perfectly feasible, and actually for me almost too obvious to mention, that we can combine conservatism and participation. I see democracy as a site of permanent struggle between a wide range of democratic ideologies, and participation has to be part of this, otherwise we would theoretically create one gigantic (progressive) echo chamber. I think that this cut-off point lies elsewhere, for instance when social interactions becomes antagonistic, and an enemy is created, even if the "us" is characterized by the most intense decentralization of power. These scenarios also include symbolic violence, in its many variations, which places, for instance, racism outside democratic culture, exactly because of its violent nature.

Of course, this is my stepping stone to the ethical discussion, but let me wait, and bring out one more complexity, that is also part of our limits-of-participation discussions. Again, this is one of the more troubling sides of defining participation. My argument would be that participation only occurs when (members of) a dis-privileged group becomes privileged through the participatory process. This question was one I was working on with a couple of great teams of Uppsala University students, who, in a wide range of case studies, always got confronted with these dilemmas. They looked at restaurants, churches, and so many other places, and the question that kept on coming back was: Who is part of a dis-privileged group, and who thus gets empowered through the participatory process? In an article with Derya Yüksek, about participatory contact zones and conflict transformation in Cyprus, we analyzed the role of youngsters in a Cypriot bi-communal education-related project, called the Cyprus Friendship Program (CFP). Here, and especially in the theoretical part, we really spelled out that discussions about youth participation need to be grounded in the idea that youngsters have a weaker power position in society, for instance, through the logic of adultism, and thus can become empowered through participatory processes. We can also turn the argument around, as I would never label the decision-making processes of elites participatory, especially when they find themselves in more or less the same power positions. I often use the example of a meeting of media company executives, which I do not consider a participatory process. But, if a union representative would be invited to that very same meeting, it would actually become participatory process (at least in my eyes).

And that brings me to our questions and lists. I think it is fairly easy to integrate both lists, and I agree with how you are approaching this integration (including your emphasis on messiness). But the previous paragraphs also bring me to suggest one more question: Who becomes empowered through the participatory process? Or, in a slightly more complicated language: Which members of a dis-privileged group find their power position strengthened through the participatory process? And if I may go back to my 12-step model for participatory analysis from 2016, I would also suggest these questions: In which context is the participatory process situated? And, maybe more importantly, what are the differences in the sub-processes that together make up a participatory process? The latter is important, I think, because one thing that I have seen in different research projects, is that participatory intensities can be quite high in one room, and much lower in another room, even if it is all about the same house.

These are, of course, analytical questions, but they are important, because there is a need for more reflection about participatory analysis. Still, now that we are talking about questions, I have two more (related) questions, that have been fascinating me: Why does participation matter? And what drives people to keep on engaging in these participatory processes, especially given the power mechanisms, that do not welcome maximalist participation? My curiosity resulted in the decision to edit a special issue for the Portuguese journal Comunicação e Sociedade ("Communication and Society"), together with two Portuguese colleagues (Ana Duarte Melo and Fábio Ribeiro). Related to the Participatory Communication Research (PCR) Section of the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR), this special issue had as remit to at least offer a few clarifying thoughts on why participation matters. The special issue is expected to come out in 2020, so we'll have to wait for a bit, and there is still a lot of work to be done, in order to figure things out.

And all this finally brings me to the ethical discussion. As I wrote a bit earlier, my starting point is that the ethical is constructed through the struggle between different normative frameworks (that is where Ernesto Laclau's influence on my work kicks in). At this stage, the ethics of selfishness and selectivity seems to be winning, but that is not a reason not to try to champion an alternative normative framework. My first proposal would be that participation is ethical in itself. This might sound obvious, but I think this has not been elaborated sufficiently. Actually, the ethical is problematically absent in contemporary Western political discourse as a whole. That is one more reason why we should explain that the redistribution of power is deeply ethical. Dis-privilege, in all its variations, ranging from the economic exclusion of poverty, over exclusions from public spaces to the exclusions from governing, is simply an unethical phenomenon, because it violates and damages the principle of universal equality.

My second proposal would be to argue that particular characteristics, can, firstly, intensify participation, and can, secondly, prevent that participatory procedures (or what you call the mechanics of participation) become disconnected from the ethical. The ensemble of these characteristics is what I would call participatory ethics. One place to start, slightly unusual for me, I must confess, would be the (normative dimension of the) ideal speech situation (ISS), as developed by Habermas. It is based on (1) the right to gain access, (2) the right to question, (3) the right to propose, and (4) the right not to be coerced. Of course, the critiques on the ISS are/were considerable, but I still very much like the ethical and rights-based dimension of the ISS, as a tool to develop a participatory ethics. But using my own conceptual language, I would also have to say that these norms behind the ISS are mostly related to access and interaction ethics (with the exception of the fourth one, which refers to autonomy).

So there is a need to add more characteristics. I would like to propose three other sets of characteristics, even if these are only snippets of ideas. The second cluster is the acceptance of the hegemony of democracy. Of course, the exact realization of democracy is object of legitimate socio-political conflict, and there should be a radical embrace of diversity, but there is also a need for the acceptance of the idea of democracy to become integrated in this normative framework of participation. A second cluster is related to the respect for democratic procedure and institutions. These are the issues you refer to, ranging from the acceptance of micro-level decisions to the acceptance of democratic institutions. But, and the "but" is important, this respect should not be blind. In this discussion, I believe that there is a lot to learn from the model of delegative democracy, which has the built-in principle to revoke the mandate of representatives, if they stop functioning properly. I think this is an idea that we can use at micro and macro/institutional levels. And finally, there is a need for an ethics of care, which I would translate in a collective care and responsibility for the participatory process itself, and in, secondly, the care of all participants for all participants.

__________

Henry Jenkins is the Provost's Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts, and Education at the University of Southern California. He is the author or editor of twenty books on various aspects of media and popular culture. He is perhaps best known for Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture and Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. He is celebrating the paperback publication of By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism, of which he is co-author. His forthcoming books include Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies in Creative Social Change (which he co-edited with Sangita Shresthova and Gabriel Peters-Lazaro), Participatory Culture: Interviews, and Comics and Stuff. 

Nico Carpentier is Docent at Charles University in Prague; he also holds part-time positions at Uppsala University and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB - Free University of Brussels). Moreover, he is a Research Fellow at the Cyprus University of Technology and Loughborough University. Earlier, he was ECREA Treasurer (2005-2012) and Vice-President (2008-2012), and IAMCR Treasurer (2012-2016). Currently, he is Chair of the Participatory Communication Research Section at IAMCR. His latest books are The Discursive-Material Knot: Cyprus in Conflict and Community Media Participation (2017, Peter Lang, New York); Cyprus and its Conflicts. Representations, Materialities, and Cultures (2018, co-edited), Critical Perspectives on Media, Power and Change (2018, co-edited), Respublika! Experiments in the Performance of Participation and Democracy (2019, edited), and Communication and Discourse Theory (2019, co-edited).

Participatory Politics in an Age of Crisis: Henry Jenkins & Nico Carpentier (Part III)

Henry

Let me thank you again for your role in shepherding me through the process of receiving my honorary doctorate -- a process literally straight out of Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries. I should note that I still wear the gold ring given to me in a ritual which “marries” me to my discipline. My wife of 35 plus years has been surprisingly understanding about this arrangement. She said that she has suspected such a relationship for years and is just glad to get it out in the open.

Seriously, as always, I found your remarks provocative and generative. You are right that the series has largely taken the idea of an “era of crisis” at face value. Certainly, as an American, raised with notions of “exceptionalism,” I was thinking about our own crisis in democracy, a term which I do not take as overstated. I certainly have seen many presidents in my lifetime whose positions and policies I found objectionable, but this is the first president who I felt was systematically undercutting the norms and institutions upon which the prospects of democracy in America depend. I came of age politically with Nixon and Watergate, but whatever threat Nixon posed, I always had a sense that the system of checks and balances was working to right things again, including with some degree of bipartisan cooperation. Republicans were willing to call out Nixon but have been much slower to call out Trump. We are seeing institutional politics fail to hold Trump accountable and we are seeing participatory politics struggling from within with the influence of the alt-right.

That said, I share your sense that the crisis we are discussing is a global phenomenon with the rise of authoritarian or authoritarian-leaning leaders in countries around the world. While there is definitely a U.S. bias in the mix of participants in these exchanges, I am also proud that we saw insights here from scholars situated in or at least focused on Latin America, Eastern and Western Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, offering us models of how cultural and political resistance is playing out around the world. And you’ve added several other important examples to the mix with your wide-reaching opening statement.

As always, we arrive at similar points with somewhat different terminology. You want to distinguish between interactions and participations, and we’ve discussed these terminologies before in our earlier exchange. For me, interaction is too close to interactivity, and in my work, I try to draw a distinction between interactive technologies and participatory cultures. I might be prepared to use the term, expressions, for some of what you mean by interactions, but there’s some loss here, since many talk about self-expression and I still want to keep our focus on the social exchange of meaning and the formulation of public opinion, even where expression may be closer to what we mean than participation, especially in the context where both neoliberal discourse and progressive critique of neorealism keeps wanting to pull us back towards individualism and privatization. To me, a central element of participation is that we participate in something larger than ourselves, however we want to imagine what it is we are participating within. At the current moment, participation pulls us towards the idea of networks, communities, collectives, in ways which we can not stress enough. At heart, a discussion about participation is a discussion of the potentials for collective intelligence and collective action. 

Surely part of the issue here is the relationship between expressions/interactions and political participation. This is in part why I started my opening salvo with my reference to Huszar’s distinction between talk-democracy and do-democracy (although I also want to stress that do-democracy depends heavily on the formation of public opinion and above all, the emergence of what you describe in your post as participatory ethics). If cultural and educational interventions, as you suggest later in your post, are important tactics for keeping alive the prospect of democratic participation, then we must have a model which takes us from the exchange of meaning to the formulation of public opinion to the capacity to act on those shared opinions in ways that influence core decision-making processes. Part of what keeps my hope alive even in an era of global crisis is that I am seeing examples where this circuit is being completed.  For example, a group of high school students, impacted by a school shooting, are able to work together to spread the word via networked technologies, form alliances with other young people of diverse backgrounds across the country, mobilize through public rallies, expand their access to mass media, and lobby effectively in order to get more than 200 state and local gun control laws passed in under a year’s time.

This brings us to the paradox you discussed here: “the increasing levels of participation and the decreasing levels of control over the levers of societal power.” At the local level, the #NeverAgain movement has been highly successful, but at the national level, the stranglehold that the National Rifle Society has over Federal gun policy does not seem to be weakened by this movement, even as the organization is ripe with internal conflicts and in the midst of a financial crisis. Here, we see an enormous gap between public opinion which overwhelmingly supports gun control and national policy which resists even the more common sensical efforts to regulate who has access to military grade weapons. 

The concept of the civic as I described it in my opening post depends on shared meanings, norms, identities, and visions and these exchanges are most apt to emerge through what you are describing as interactions on a more casual, informal, and frankly, more local level. These exchanges occur within communities as they start to work together to address common concerns, and to me, this requires identifying and sustaining a sense of civic connections with each other.  In Huszar’s sense, this is “do-democracy,” as democratic values and ethics are embedded the practices of everyday life. Often, at the most local level, when the problems are how we are going to fix potholes or deal with schools that are failing our students, successful working through problems together provides the foundation for mutual trust.  

From my American perspective, it is important to note that these shared civic imaginations have historically often depended on exclusions and marginalizations, a false consensus can arise when the most diverse segments of the population are not invited to the table or worse, held down by the majority of the population. And so, a key question for us right now is how we may build a culture which is both more diverse and more participatory/democratic at the same time. In fact, the right-wing leaders in our country have won power by playing up distrust amongst different segments of the American public and damaging the credibility of institutions, such as the free press or educational institutions,  which have the potential to work towards shared understandings.  

What’s disappointing to me is the ways that the mechanisms which I have long looked towards for the kinds of expressions that might push us towards a more participatory culture are themselves being used to damage the prospect of a more diverse and more democratic culture. This is what I was trying to get at with my talk of “bad participation,” though I take your pushback against this term in the spirit with which you intended it.  

I am trying to come up with a term which acknowledges that expanding the scope of participation will not necessarily result in progressive outcomes. This does not make participation “bad” per se; it does mean that building a more participatory infrastructure will simply create a new space for struggle where different groups fight over resources and opportunities. But that struggle is more apt to achieve satisfactory outcomes  if we are able to establish a shared set of civic commitments, a trust in the infrastructure and institutions required for democratic governance, and the participatory ethics we both are advocating for. For example, a more democratic culture is apt to emerge if there is a shared commitment to the idea that my participation does not emerge at the cost of excluding other groups the right to participate.  These are to me issues which may be addressed best through cultural and educational tactics, rather than confronted head on the level of institutional or participatory politics. 

I would love to know more about where you see a participatory ethics coming from and perhaps what some of its core principles might be.  

 Nico

That is a very rich reply, Henry. There is a lot to be said about what you wrote. I'll skip the Uppsala confirmation of your marriage-with-academia vows, although it is tempting to go into this. After all, there is a lot to be said about our complex relationship to academia, but that will have to wait.

I want to start with the focus on the USA, which can be found in a lot of the contributions of the Participatory Politics in an Age of Crisis series. First of all, you are completely right, there is no exclusive focus on the USA in the series. For instance, I very much appreciated the conversation between Arely Zimmerman and Andres Lombana about Colombia. And there is another argument: A call for balance should never be interpreted as a call to cease analyzing the USA. There is obviously a lot to learn from the USA, and some of the analyses are simply brilliant in their depth and insightfulness. But at the same time, we should, in particular when discussing the topics that are now on our agenda, be careful not to create nation-based myopias.

I am deeply concerned by the disruptions of democratic culture that we have been seeing, for years now, in the USA, and the disturbing lack of willingness to defend democracy, with so many people, despite the resistance of so many others. But I would like to argue that this problem, the crisis of democracy, is not restricted to the USA, and that this broad analytical span is important. I'm writing these lines right after the EU parliamentary elections, which took place from 23 to 26 May 2018 (Disclaimer: my opening statement was written before the results came out), and the bad taste in my mouth has not disappeared (yet?). In North Belgium, we had the resurrection of the extreme right-wing party Flemish Interest ("Vlaams Belang"), with close to 20% of the votes in the north of the country, making it the second largest party in Belgium. In France, the former Front National, now called National Rally ("Rassemblement National"), received 23% of the votes, more than any other political party in France. And then there is Italy, with the Northern League ("Lega Nord") receiving 34% of the votes, more than 10% more than the Italian social-democrats, who came in second. Even if the story is more complicated in many other countries (for instance, in Greece, “Laïkós Sýndesmos - Chrysí Avgí”, or "Popular Association  Golden Dawn" lost a significant number of votes, probably to another nationalist party, focusing on the (North) Macedonia issue), what we can see is the institutionalization of racism and nationalism in the West. Even if these parties come to power in only a limited number of cases, in some cases they do, but what is more important is that these parties now have strengthened their capacity to disseminate hatred, de-humanizing forms of othering and toxic leadership models, and are contributing to their normalization (which is even worse). What we also should not forget is that these parties gain strength from each other, also across the Atlantic, and actively reinforce their networks at a more global level.

But these problems are even more global, I would argue. We cannot ignore the impact of the Arab spring (and what became of it), the civil war in Syria, the Iraqi wars, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (and a series of other conflicts all over the world) on the Western crisis of democracy. The harm these conflicts did to the populations in these regions is already horrific enough, but these conflicts have also played a role in the destabilization of Western democracies, not necessarily only by the flows of refugees they caused, but also the inability of the West to care and to display hospitality. I think that my argument here, after what almost looks like a long detour, is that we cannot think about resolutions for the Westerns crisis of democracy without incorporating global justice and peace in these reflections.

The defense of democracy, against the onslaught of antagonism, is thus quite a challenge, to use an understatement. The defense of participation is an important part of this, although it is not the only part. Still, what we now need to be careful with, as defenders of the democratic revolution, is the calls to roll-back participation, because they lead to participation becoming perceived as dangerous. There is a bit of irony here, because, at first, participation was celebrated as a way forward in this process of democratization, while I would argue that we mostly got "stuck" into minimalist forms of participation, and structural power imbalances remained unchallenged. And then these minimalist forms of participation are considered dangerous, consciously or unconsciously, supporting the evolution towards more centralized and elite-based societies.

I would add that all this was not helped by the very broad approaches towards participation, where all of a sudden everything became participation. My impression is that whatever (inter)action/expression could be found, it got labelled participation. There is really a need to be much more specific. That's where your question kicks in: In what do we participate? This is, for me, something crucial: Participation is always participation in something. But, predictably, I would add a few other questions (and this comes from the 12-step model of participatory analysis), namely, which actors are involved in the participatory process, what decisions are being made, and how do the disempowered actors gain a stronger power position through this process.

But I would argue that there is also another set of questions, that is equally important. They are three: What makes participation possible? What is the level of participation? And what does participation then do? Or, in slightly different terms: What are the conditions of possibility of participation? What are the participatory intensities of a participatory process? And what are the outcomes of a participatory process? It feels a bit like systems theory, but I think that these three questions are relevant here, because they allow to discriminate between the participatory process and its outcomes. For me, process and outcomes are substantially different, and should be analyzed differently. I do not like to qualify a participatory process as good or bad, but I certainly like to acknowledge that the outcomes of a participatory process can be deeply problematic. Behind this is the idea that the notion of participation is so deeply linked (at least in how I think about participation) with democratic culture that it ceases to exist when we disconnect it from democracy.

In these kinds of discussions, I like radical thought experiments, as they tend to clarify conceptual meaning. And I like to take one sentence from your reply, because it is, I think, an absolutely vital statement: "my participation does not emerge at the cost of excluding other groups the right to participate". But I want to push the argument further with an example (or two). What about the pogrom? Is that a participatory event? What about the lynch mob? Is that participatory? If we look at these horrific social practices, we have to acknowledge that, at the level of collective decision-making, there is actually power-sharing by ordinary people, "taking justice in their own hands". A group of Nazi skinheads that uses an online platform, to collectively plan and implement a murder on a refugee, has the formal (or procedural) characteristics of participation, but I would be very uncomfortable to label it participation. My discomfort is caused by transgression of democratic culture in these examples, which for me, makes it hard to still use the concept of participation.

The alternative way of theorizing this is by including all social practices that redistribute power, even if they are antagonistic, murderous, anti-democratic, and call all of them participation. And then, there is of course the need to distinguish between good and bad participation. But as my previous paragraph indicates, I am not comfortable with the line of argument. I'm curious here, where you stand? How do you deal with these dilemmas, with the issues whether the transgressions or perversions of participation are still participation, or whether they are something else? And what are they then?

And that brings me to the question about participatory ethics, but let me be short here, because that might be something for our next iteration. Still, let me give some basic ideas, which I'll develop further, later on. My starting point on ethics is that the ethical is, like, for instance, freedom, an empty signifier (in the way that Ernesto Laclau uses this concept). This means that the ethical is an absolutely central category in our worlds, but struggled over by diverse normative frameworks, that all want to give it (=the ethical) their own meaning. I think that this is important, as, for instance, in the West, there is an ongoing struggle over the ethical, where different groups argue for an ethics of selfishness. To give you one illustration, the extreme-right in North Belgium uses "Own people first" ("Eigen volk eerst", or, a variation, "Our folks first" ("Eerst onze mensen")) as their key slogan, and I cannot find a better illustration for this ethics of selfishness.

Vlaams Belang "Our folks first" slogan 2019 - Belgium

This theoretical position has implications for our discussion on participatory ethics, I would say. We need to engage in this struggle over the empty signifier of the ethical, by developing and strengthening a counter-discourse, a different normative framework, that does, in my opinion, two things. First, participation itself needs to be defined as ethical. And second, social interactions and participations need to be embedded in a democratic culture, driven by, among other models, an ethics of care.

__________

Henry Jenkins is the Provost's Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts, and Education at the University of Southern California. He is the author or editor of twenty books on various aspects of media and popular culture. He is perhaps best known for Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture and Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. He is celebrating the paperback publication of By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism, of which he is co-author. His forthcoming books include Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies in Creative Social Change (which he co-edited with Sangita Shresthova and Gabriel Peters-Lazaro), Participatory Culture: Interviews, and Comics and Stuff. 

Nico Carpentier is Docent at Charles University in Prague; he also holds part-time positions at Uppsala University and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB - Free University of Brussels). Moreover, he is a Research Fellow at the Cyprus University of Technology and Loughborough University. Earlier, he was ECREA Treasurer (2005-2012) and Vice-President (2008-2012), and IAMCR Treasurer (2012-2016). Currently, he is Chair of the Participatory Communication Research Section at IAMCR. His latest books are The Discursive-Material Knot: Cyprus in Conflict and Community Media Participation (2017, Peter Lang, New York); Cyprus and its Conflicts. Representations, Materialities, and Cultures (2018, co-edited), Critical Perspectives on Media, Power and Change (2018, co-edited), Respublika! Experiments in the Performance of Participation and Democracy (2019, edited), and Communication and Discourse Theory (2019, co-edited).

Participatory Politics in an Age of Crisis: Henry Jenkins & Nico Carpentier (Part II)

Nico

It feels like forever since the last discussion on politics and participation, that Henry and I had. I think this has a number of reasons. First, that discussion was published six years ago, as an article in the journal Convergence, which actually is quite some time ago. The plan for this article started even earlier, after a symposium organized by the Institute of Communication Studies and Journalism, at Charles University in Prague, which took place on 18 June 2012. Many things have happened since. One thing I cannot let go unmentioned is that I somehow dragged Henry to the Swedish city of Uppsala, to have him crowned (to specific: with laurels). The pictures of the Uppsala University pomp and circumstance have been rescued from oblivion and are well-worth of any reader’s attention. There is another reason why this last discussion feels so long ago, and that is because I have been totally immersed in my recent move to another city, and to a new full-time position, at the Institute of Communication Studies and Journalism of Charles University (the very same, indeed). So, Henry, when you asked me what I was thinking about these days, the first answer that came to mind was “unpacking boxes”. Luckily, I never lost my good spirits (or my sanity) and none of the 139 boxes were lost, even though some attempted to escape nevertheless.

But there is yet another reason why this discussion from 2012/2013 seems so long ago, and that is because times have changed rapidly. Times always change, of course, but my sense is that we have entered into an era that is qualifiable different from the state of affairs only a decade ago. Something happened in the way we think, and it gives cause to deep concerns. I believe that this ideological shift is captured well by the last part of the title of this conversation series (“Participatory Politics in an Age of Crisis”), which has not been addressed enough in these conversations: Crisis. Even if we might agree that the idea of crisis has reached the West, we should first avoid the all-too-common Western arrogance, and acknowledge that other parts in the world have been in deep crisis. Some managed to handle these crises well, but others remain in crisis, and have been for too long. And maybe the West has its own crises, and failed to see and acknowledge them. Some of my recent work, together with Vaia Doudaki, is on the construction of homeless identities. It shows the impact of the (poverty) crisis that has been with us, in the West, for a very long time. And second, if we want to use the signifier crisis, we might want to specify what this crisis is about, in order to avoid that every little change becomes labeled a crisis. In French, you have this wonderful word, the crisette, to indicate these minor crises that are not really crises. I would argue that keeping a long-term, historical perspective is a very necessary safeguard against overly agitated analyses that label every set-back as a crisis. 

But still, I do think that the use of the signifier ‘crisis’ in the title is appropriate. And I would argue that it is the idea of democracy itself that is in crisis. The crisis of representative democracy has been going on for a while, as Tormey (2015: 149) documents in The End of Representative Politics. It consists out of this idea: 

“The democracy of the representatives has come to be regarded by many as not only a rather pale imitation of the real thing, but a mechanism for preventing ordinary citizens exercising greater control over their own lives.” 

Now, we have reached a point where the crisis of representative democracy has evolved into something bigger, and much more troubling and threatening, and that is the crisis of democracy itself. The many contributors to “Participatory Politics in an Age of Crisis” might not have discussed the notion of crisis that explicitly, but as they are often writing about the USA, there are ample references to the democratic threats posed by the current US regime and the alt-right movement. But I would hate to get stuck into discussing one particular country, and believe that this democratic crisis is pervasive in the West, albeit in always different forms. Using a European perspective, for now, I would like to argue that after the Yugoslav wars (in particular the 1991-1995 phase) there was a strong desire to strengthen European democracy, human rights and peace. This has slowly changed, with the so-called refugee crisis—which I prefer to call a hospitality crisis—as a pivotal dislocation, ‘assisted’ by a series of successful terrorist attacks throughout Europe. This, in combination with a wide variety of other processes and events (think of Russia’s strong-handed return to the international stage, for instance, resulting in the annexation of part of the Ukraine, making it rather easy for the West to invoke an enemy image, even when this is still too easy), has produced strong voices that wish to move outside democracy, and that advocate the establishment of more authoritarian, nationalist and exclusionary regimes. What is even worse, these voices do more than speak: for instance, the Greek Racist Violence Recording Network reported in its annual report, “117 incidents of racist violence, with more than 130 victims” in 2018 in Greece. 

But let us not forget that there are several ‘older’ conflicts that feed into this assemblage of violence. One European example I am familiar with is Cyprus (see The Discursive-Material Knot: Cyprus in Conflict and Community Media Participation and Cyprus and its Conflicts: Representations, Materialities, and Cultures). Without going too much into detail, Cyprus is still a divided island, after decades of violent conflict, with the independence war against the British colonizer (1955-59), which also included violence between Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots, with the intra-communal violence of the 1960s after independence, with the 1974 coup, instigated by Greece, followed by a Turkish military invasion and the segregation of the island’s population, with mass displacement as a consequence. Currently, the Republic of Cyprus, which is the legally recognized state power in Cyprus and a member-state of the European Union, finds itself in an uneasy state of de facto power-sharing with the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, which is only recognized by Turkey. Despite an almost endless series of peace negotiations, the deadlock continues, with the island split in two parts, by an UN-controlled militarized/demilitarized buffer zone. Even if this conflict is a low-intensity conflict, and its details are not very well known, it remains a highly disruptive force on the island and in Europe, with the tensions with Turkey rising again because of the disputes over the Aphrodite gas field off the southern coast of Cyprus. 

These conflicts, and the threats to democracy they pose, coincide with the grown levels of participation in a variety of societal fields. Allow me to recycle here two paragraphs from an earlier publication, the foreword of Networks, Movements and Technopolitics in Latin America, where I argued that we are living in the era of the both, a contemporary political configuration which is characterized by the increasing levels of participation and the decreasing levels of control over the levers of societal power. Often, this paradox is mediated and “solved” through a defense (or a critique) of either utopian or dystopian perspectives, where this dys/utopianism is sometimes related to communication technologies, or in other cases to citizen or civil society powers, or to state or company powers. I believe we need to treat this paradox much more as a paradox, as a seemingly contradictory statement. We need to take both components of the paradox serious, acknowledge that there is a history of coexistence combined with a present-day intensification of power imbalances, and scrutinize how they dynamically and contingently relate to each other. In other words, we need to gain a better understanding of how we now live in the era of the both.  

If we apply a Longue Durée approach (Braudel, 1969) to the establishment and growth of democracy, we can hardly deny that we have come a long way. Of course, the history of our diverse democratization processes is characterized by continuities and discontinuities, dead-ends, contradictions, and horrible regressions. But what Mouffe (2000: 1–2) called the “democratic revolution” “led to the disappearance of a power that was embodied in the person of the prince and tied to a transcendental authority. A new kind of institution of the social was hereby inaugurated in which power became ‘an empty place’.” Even if we zoom in on the twentieth and twenty-first century, it is hard not to see the differences with the past. It is equally hard to ignore that the history of more than 200 years of democratic revolution has brought us more participation, in a variety of ways and levels. 

And this finally brings me to participation. I would see participation, defined as the redistribution of power (see my Beyond the Ladder of Participation article for more), as the exact location of that democratic revolution, where participatory intensities increased within the institutional political system (the deepening of participation in politics) and where they increased in many other social realms (the broadening of participation, moving outside politics). I would argue that this process has been one of the most significant processes in the past centuries, and key to our societal happiness and well-being. I tend to see this, as you mention in your opening statement, as an unfinished project, with ample opportunities to further decentralize power relations, which serves our deeply rooted desire for power. Not in the negative Nietzschean way, but as a deeply rooted desire to be empowered, to gain control over our everyday lives, and to be protected from the power abuse that absolute power brings about. (We should keep John Emerich Edward Dalberg’s words in mind: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority.”) I also see maximalist participation as an unfinishable project, as a utopia that can never be achieved, as new power imbalances will arise and disrupt the power equilibrium of maximalist participation. Participation is object of a permanent political struggle, and as I think that it is unlikely for elitist forces to disappear, the radical realization of maximalist participation is inherently unstable. But thirdly, I think that participation could also be finished. It could come to an end. Democracy, as a political and social practice, is not a given, but could cease to exist. It is always under threat, and its disappearance might also imply the end of participatory practices. This is why participation and democracy need to be actively protected, and not just silently appreciated and considered to be a given. 

To give one example from the city I have just moved to: Have a look at the struggles of the Plastic People of the Universe, the alternative rock band that was active during the times of communist Czechoslovakia, and see what damage the oppressive state machinery did to it. We can celebrate their courage, and rightfully so, and we can acknowledge how important their prosecution was to rally the dissident movement into action (producing Charta 77). But maybe we could prevent landing into this kind of un-participatory mess again, avoiding a political system that necessitates this kind of resistance in the first place. Or, to give another example, with which I open my Media and Participation book and that has always deeply touched me: During the Nazi occupation of Bohemia and Moravia, the garrison town of Theresienstadt (or Terezín in Czech) had been transformed into a concentration camp that became “home” to more than 50,000 Jewish people, awaiting their deportation to the Auschwitz extermination camp. A group of young boys, housed in Barracks L417 (or Home One) started, in secret, to produce a newspaper, Vedem (“We lead”). The remarkable collection of essays, reviews, stories, drawings and poetry, written by the 13-, 14- and 15-year-old boys in Home One, were preserved and are now in the collections of the Memorial of Terezín. Only 15, out of the 100 or so occupants of Home One, survived the war. Vedem’s editor-in-chief, Petr Ginz, was murdered in Auschwitz in 1944. One can only admire that their resilience in the face of this extreme violence, but at the same time we should hope that their resistance will never be necessary again, and their tragic destiny can be avoided for the generations to come.  

The current political reconfiguration is also an explicit attack on the more intense forms of participation. Populist projects are built, I would argue, on the core idea that the old establishment is betraying the people, and needs to be replaced by a new elite, that truly represents the people. The latter is an ideological construction that is impossible to realize, given the heterogeneity of the social and the diversity of the people. This is the Lie of populism. That, in itself, is already problematic enough, but many (although not all) populist projects articulate the elite as an authoritarian elite, advocating leadership models that are non-democratic. Participatory politics has no place in these models, as the authoritarian elite sees itself as the ultimate representative of the people, where the latter no longer has to speak for itself. We might want to keep in mind that democracy is the (always different) balance of the people’s exercise of power (participation) and the delegation of power (representation); Authoritarianism is the radicalization of the delegation of power, and the elimination of participation. 

But there are more threats to participation, as participation is becoming more and more problematized. I tend to see participation not as a problem, but as a solution, even though there are particular pre-conditions that have to be met (see below) for participation to be able to play this role. There is an ongoing tendency to problematize participation, focusing on (the) dark (side) of participation, or on bad participation. This might be one of the things to discuss further, but I am not too convinced that the best thing to do is to create dichotomies between good and bad participation (there is a long tradition of doing this in participatory theory, which I think is problematic), or to label destructive interactions “participatory”, while I would argue that these are interactions, not participations (even if the latter is not very grammatically correct, I must confess). My starting point would be the broader question: “Can democracy be bad?” I definitely agree that democracy can be weak, an argument nicely made by Barber (1984) in his Strong Democracy. Participatory Politics for a New Age, and many others. But can it really be bad? And that brings me to the question whether participation can be bad? Or is it more a matter of participation being weak or strong, or, in my terms, minimalist or maximalist? Of course, the preference for minimalist or maximalist participation is an ideological-normative matter, just as the preference for weak or strong democracy is one. But that’s not the question. Are we not defending the hegemony of democracy, and thus the hegemony of participation as a democratic principle, which also implies that we do not wish to contest the principles of democracy and participation, even though their exact realizations and materializations are still object of democratic struggle? I could undust the distinction I make between interaction and participation, where I would argue that interaction is the establishment of socio-communicative relationships, and participation is the equalization of power relations in formal or informal decision-making moments. This matters at the normative level too, because I would argue that interactions can be “bad”, or ethically problematic. Murder is a form of social interaction, and deeply problematic. But this is where the difference between interaction and participation plays out (and the usefulness of this distinction becomes apparent), because I would argue that participation, or the decentralization of power relations, cannot be “bad”. 

I need to further problematize the previous statement, because there are preconditions attached to this position. This line of reasoning only works when a substantive definition of participation is used, and not a procedural definition. In democratic theory, this distinction is crucial. Procedural democracy restricts democracy to the “rule-centered and outcome-centered conceptions of democracy” (Shapiro, 1996: 123). In procedural democracy, an outcome is “[…] acceptable as long as the relevant procedure generates it,” while in the case of substantive democracy, a “[…] [re]distributive outcome or state of affairs (equality, lack of certain types or degrees of inequality, or some other) […]” (Shapiro, 1996: 123) is defined, which is then used to evaluate the results of the decision rules. My argument would be that this distinction also applies directly to participation, where substantive participation then refers to how the outcomes of the participatory process relate to power imbalances beyond the participatory process, and other societal groups. Or, in other terms, for participation to be participation, it needs to be embedded into a participatory-democratic ethics. Of course, this necessary articulation of participation might not be taken for granted in social practice, but I would still like to argue that conceptually, for participation to be participation, it needs to be embedded into a democratic ethics. I do not have this conceptual requirement for the much broader concept of interaction, but I would see this requirement as a necessary component of participation. Yet, again there is a need to defend and strengthen participatory ethics, as part of the project of defending democracy in itself. And that is supported by (the need for) an ethics of interaction, which together come close that what you have labeled civic imagination. 

This brings me to the questions of strategy. I have, quite carefully, looked at the many contributions to the “Participatory Politics in an Age of Crisis” conversation series, because they offer a variety of strategies to strengthen democracy, and protect it. Without aiming to be exhaustive, because the conversations were very rich, there are a few examples that I want to mention. First, we, as teachers have a role to play. Gabriel Peters-Lazaro mentions in his conversation with Winifred R. Poster, the New Media for Social Change course he has been teaching with Sangita Shresthova, which I think is a crucial model for strengthening participation and democracy through the educational system. In the conversation between Kevin Driscoll and Pablo Martínez-Zárate, the latter also argues for a radical pedagogy, which I would like to support.  

But, when he writes about his work with “documentary and experimental art”, Pablo’s comments open up a second field that can contribute to the defense of democracy, which is the arts. The arts, with its reflective and critical components, has the capacity to strengthen democracy. Sometimes it is a matter of holding up a mirror, and showing, for instance, the horrible cost of exclusion and inequality. One example comes to mind, and that is Barca Nostra (“Our ship”), which is also a reference to “Mare Nostrum”, a Roman name for the Mediterranean Sea), created by the Swiss-Icelandic artist Christoph Büchel for the Venice Biennale. The art work consists out of the wreckage of the fishing boat that sank on 18 April 2015, close to the Libyan coast, after a collision with a ship that tried to rescue the fishing boat’s passengers. Around 800 people, trapped inside the fishing boat, drowned.  

In other cases, art can not only thematize democracy and its values, but it can actively intervene in the organization of (maximalist) participatory practices. One example here is the Respublika! exhibition Participation Matters, which I curated. Its catalogue, entitled Respublika! Experiments in the Performance of Participation and Democracy gives an overview of the fascinating variety of art projects, that reflected about participation and democracy, organized participation and democracy, or did both, as a modest attempt to contribute to the strengthening of Cypriot democracy. 

And, of course, as the conversations in the “Participatory Politics in an Age of Crisis” series show in great detail, popular culture also the capacity to strengthen democracy and participation (even if there are no guarantees). Without wanting to go into great depth in the analyses of this field—the many authors in the conversation series do this with much more knowledge and eloquence—there is one example I like to add, also because it reiterates the argument in the Rox Samer and Raffi Sarkissian conversation that humor and parody matters, and it brings in counter-culture. For instance, as the example of the 2019 Eurovision Song Festival in Tel Aviv (Israel) shows, parody can be used when dealing with militarist and oppressive states. The Icelandic group Hatari, who performed the song Hatrið mun sigra (“Hate will prevail”) at the Festival, not only held up Palestinian flags at the very last stage of the broadcast, but also turned their entire presence (and not just their 3-minute performance) at the Festival into a situationist intervention, which was, I must confess, most entertaining to watch. The confrontation of their counter-cultural codes (combining EBM and BDSM—Electronic Body Music and Bondage/Discipline/Dominance/Submission/Sadism/Masochism) with a cultural event that is very much organized through/for dominant mainstream culture, produced an absurd deconstruction of Israel’s deployment of the Festival to strengthen its international legitimacy and to further render its militarist and oppressive characteristics further invisible, but also of the Festival’s deep capitalist structure.

Finally, in this last paragraph I want to return to what the intellectual field can do, and to Kevin Driscoll’s wise words, in the conversation with Pablo Martínez-Zárate, when the former wrote: “to thrive in the long term, we need a shared vision of the future marked by accountability and justice.” I would argue (and I have argued, in an article entitled A Call to Arms) that is a strong need to develop a new imaginary that is democratic, participatory, just, and peaceful, and that intellectuals have a crucial responsibility in this endeavor. Possibly, we cannot do this on an individual basis, and this needs to be a collective and modular project, but there is a strong need for a long-term approach, which is global and transgenerational, and which can act as a counter-weight for the permanent attacks on the heart of democracy. We have work to do.

References

Barber, Benjamin (1984) Strong Democracy. Participatory Politics for a New Age. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Braudel, Fernand. (1969). Écrits sur l’Histoire. Paris: Flammarion.

Carpentier, Nico (2014) A call to arms. An essay on the role of the intellectual and the need for producing new imaginaries, Javnost – The Public, 21(3): 77-92.

Carpentier, Nico (2018) Foreword - The Era of the Both, in Francisco Sierra Caballero and Tommaso Gravante (eds.) Networks, Movements and Technopolitics in Latin America. Critical Analysis and Current Challenges, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. v-xii.

Jenkins, Henry, Carpentier, Nico (2013) Theorizing participatory intensities: A conversation about participation and politics, Convergence, 19(3): 265-286.

Mouffe, Chantal. (2000). The Democratic Paradox. London: Verso.

Shapiro, Ian (1996) Democracy’s Place. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Tormey, Simon (2015) The End of Representative Politics. Cambridge: Polity.

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Nico Carpentier is Docent at Charles University in Prague; he also holds  part-time positions at Uppsala University and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB - Free University of Brussels). Moreover, he is a Research Fellow at the Cyprus University of Technology and Loughborough University. Earlier, he was ECREA Treasurer (2005-2012) and Vice-President (2008-2012), and IAMCR Treasurer (2012-2016). Currently, he is Chair of the Participatory Communication Research Section at IAMCR. His latest books are The Discursive-Material Knot: Cyprus in Conflict and Community Media Participation (2017, Peter Lang, New York); Cyprus and its Conflicts. Representations, Materialities, and Cultures 
(2018, co-edited), Critical Perspectives on Media, Power and Change (2018, co-edited), Respublika! Experiments in the Performance of Participation and Democracy (2019, edited), and Communication and Discourse Theory (2019, co-edited).