Introduction

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">In 2012 the Danish city of Aarhus was appointed European Capital of Culture for 2017. The appointment was based on an ambitious programme that – under the headline Rethink – tried to set an agenda of societal transformation, mainly by seeking to increase the impact of art and culture, and to enhance civic participation at all levels of society. In this article we examine one of the first attempts of Aarhus 2017 to realize these grand ambitions: ‘The Playful Society’, a series of micro grants aimed at enabling young people to make their own art/culture projects and participate in the overall Rethink project. Informed by theoretical distinctions between different forms of participation, and the diverse interests invested in participatory processes, we investigate how the young cultural entrepreneurs and the artistic administrators of Aarhus 2017 separately, in conjunction, and sometimes even in opposition to each other, translated these overall ambitions into practice. We argue that they illuminate some of the dilemmas of contemporary cultural participation, including the importance of questioning who participates in what, how they do it, and in what context.</abstract>

PhD and associate professor in Aesthetics and Culture at Aarhus University

at the Aarhus University IDEAS Pilot Centre

Rethinking Participation and Re-enacting Its Dilemmas? — Aarhus 2017 and “The Playful Society”

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">This article explores community-driven participation in education beyond the institution. By reflecting on two MA courses at Aarhus University and including educatees’ reflections in the article, the concept of Participatory Academic Community is developed. The article discusses how an evolved understanding of participation in education can move educatees’ learning beyond institutions through focusing on educatees as researchers, participating in society, building a research community and obtaining academic citizenship. Further, the article discusses how a value-based, vision-driven approach to education and the use of ICT might nurture participation and construction of community within education. The article is genuinely transdisciplinary in its approach, applying different theoretical lenses to obtain a more holistic view on participation in education. The article creates a prismatic lens, illuminating participation in education from different viewpoints and positions. In conclusion, the article also reflects on some of the shadowy traits of participation in education when creating participatory academic communities.v</abstract>

Participatory Academic Communities

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">The emergence of social network sites as a part of everyday life has given rise to a number of debates on the democratic potential afforded by these technologies. This paper addresses political participation facilitated through Facebook from a practice-oriented perspective and presents a case study of the political grassroots organisation, Fight For The Future. Initially, the paper provides a basic theoretical framework that seeks to map the relation between civic practices, materiality, and discursive features. Using this framework, the article analyses Fight For The Future’s use of Facebook to facilitate political participation. The study finds that user participation on the Facebook page is ‘double conditioned’ by the material structure of the social network site on the one hand and by the discourses articulated by the organisation and users on the other. Finally, the paper discusses the findings and raises a number of problems and obstacles facing participatory grassroots organisations, such as Fight For The Future, when using Facebook.</abstract>

Master’s student at the IT University of Copenhagen

(PhD) is an Associate Professor at IT University of Copenhagen, involved in the Culture & Communication Research Group

The Double Conditioning of Political Participation

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">As the tenth anniversary of New Orleans’ and arguably the United States’ greatest disaster came and went on August 29th this year, it is important to look critically at steps taken towards recovery in order to understand whether the massive efforts undertaken within and outside our community have led to sustainability and resilience, and to inform ongoing and future recovery and revitalization efforts. Our investigation draws from critical urban theory as defined by Brenner: “grounded on an antagonistic relationship not only to inherited urban knowledges, but more generally, to existing urban formations. It insists that another, more democratic, socially just, and sustainable form of urbanization is possible, even if such possibilities are being suppressed through dominant institutional arrangements, practices and ideologies” (Brenner 2012).The anniversary served as a celebration of resilience for local officials anxious to focus on the city’s bright future and to let talk of a recovery-based economy lay behind us. On the ground, however, commemoration provided a pivot point in the thinking of local citizens, neighborhood groups, non-profit organizations, and those that serve them. It serves as well as a locus for counter-narratives of inequity and removal, for anger at hospitals closed, schools reordered, and a hundred thousand residents permanently displaced. These challenges are not new or unique to New Orleans, but the crucible of ten years of collaborative recovery work at the level of individuals, blocks, and neighborhoods allows us to organize and practice self-critique in the face of a changing economy, re-invented school system, upended healthcare structure, and other challenges.Our perspective is shaped by witnessing a decade of top-down planning efforts, and by participating in official attempts at community engagement in recovery; some effective, some wildly ineffectual. While this work continues, now is a chance to refocus efforts towards building strong communities with equitable access to economic opportunity. It is a moment to recognize the successes and failures in the means of creating recovery to this point, with a focus on social justice and implementing changes and improvements meant to address broader and deeper problems facing our neighborhoods and the city at large.</abstract>

Recovery to Resilience

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">The article presents a yet unexplored framework for analysing the multidimensionality and dis/connections of participatory processes and their outcomes by using the concept of the ‘assemblage’ (DeLanda, 2006). The case is an eight-month collaboration between a task force initiated by Central Denmark Region, the socio-economic company Sager der Samler, and citizens. The collaboration is aimed at bringing together and working across various institutional and user perspectives to act on a societal challenge. The analysis is theoretically based on a review of existing theories of participation and typologies for analysing and evaluating participation. In particular, the analysis focuses on the assemblage approach as a way of acknowledging the institutional, affective, material and power-related complexity of participatory processes. The assemblage approach helps to analytically stress that the process under investigation should be evaluated both with a more traditional focus on decision-making or power allocation, as well as taking into account the social, personal-affective and material benefits produced, and the potential for change in the relationship between public administration and citizens.</abstract>

associate professor in the Department of Aesthetics and Communication

Participation as assemblage

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">In this article we examine meanings and uses of the concept of patient involvement, using a psychosocial cancer rehabilitation intervention in Denmark as an example. Drawing on Scandinavian sociological institutionalism, we analyse the translation process of the concept and how it is understood, shaped and practised in four interrelated contexts: patients’ experience of cancer care; a call for research bids to improve cancer care; a research project of psychosocial cancer rehabilitation; and the implementation of the project’s intervention in clinical practice. Our analysis reveals distinct understandings and practices of patient involvement informed by the various actors’ perspectives and the structures of the healthcare system. The meaning of patient involvement changed from patients seeking to engage in healthcare on their terms, to patients being expected by researchers and healthcare professionals to be ‘active patients’ in particular ways. Our analysis highlights the importance of critically examining the phenomenon of patient involvement in local contexts.</abstract>

Translating Patient Experiences into Clinical Practice

Towards a Digital Materialism

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">Participation has regained a remarkable presence in academic debates within Communication and Media Studies, amongst other fields and disciplines. At the same time, the concept of participation has remained vague because of its frequent and diverse usages and its intrinsically political nature, which renders it difficult to use in an academic context. Conceptual clarity is generated through a combination of negative-relationist and interdisciplinary strategies. The former means that an argument is made in favour of a more focussed meaning of participation, on the basis of a comparison with two other concepts, access and interaction. The interdisciplinary strategy consists of a broad theoretical re-reading that focuses on the academic literature in which these distinctions are made, or where the independent nature of one of the three concepts is particularly emphasized. At the end of this text, the different meanings of access, interaction and participation are structured and integrated in a model, which is labelled the AIP model.</abstract>

Differentiating between access, interaction and participation

AHEAD OF PRINT

Volume 11 (2024): Issue 1 (March 2024)

Volume 10 (2023): Issue 1 (October 2023)

Volume 9 (2022): Issue 2 (October 2022)

Volume 9 (2022): Issue 1 (June 2022)

Volume 8 (2021): Issue 1 (January 2021) Health, Media and Participation

Volume 7 (2020): Issue 2 (October 2020) Failures in Cultural Participation

Volume 7 (2020): Issue 1 (July 2020) Feminism, Gender, Social Movements and Everyday Resistance

Volume 6 (2019): Issue 1 (December 2019) Cultural Participation, Social Media Affect and Art

Volume 5 (2018): Issue 1 (May 2018) Community and Creative Research. Developing Participatory Methodologies

Volume 4 (2017): Issue 1 (December 2017) Playful Participation II

Volume 3 (2016): Issue 1 (June 2016) Playful Participation

Volume 2 (2015): Issue 2 (December 2015) Participation across Institutional and Disciplinary Boundaries

Volume 2 (2015): Issue 1 (October 2015) Mediatized Cultural Activism

Volume 1 (2014): Issue 1 (November 2014) Participatory Cultural Citizenship

Conjunctions

Conjunctions seeks to create an international and transdisciplinary forum for the investigation of user-generated cultural production, user-driven cultural participation and citizen involvement across a variety of social fields, contexts and practices, e.g. urban spaces, (digital) media, social media platforms, education and teaching, the cultural sector and creative industries, aesthetic productions and museums, health institutions, activism and design.  The overall focus of the journal is to explore the socially transformative and democratic potential of cultural participation processes, to qualify the academic understanding of what ‘participation’ is and what it involves, and to discuss the complex relations created between user-generated processes and established institutions and discourses.  We take an interest in critical analyses of participatory practices, rhetoric and involvement strategies, in affirmative investigations of participation, in explorations of explicit or conscious and implicit or non-conscious forms of participation.  Submitted articles can be focused on theoretical development or on empirical analysis (of e.g. case studies). We also welcome work that use innovative or creative methods as well as more traditional methods.  The journal invites submissions from a variety of disciplinary fields such as media and communication studies, cultural studies, interaction and participatory design, cultural geography, education, aesthetics, science and technology studies, health care, health communication, information science, sociology, anthropology, development studies and gender studies.  The journal is published twice every year.  Archiving  Sciendo archives the contents of this journal in Portico - digital long-term preservation service of scholarly books, journals and collections.  Plagiarism Policy  The editorial board is participating in a growing community of Similarity Check System's users in order to ensure that the content published is original and trustworthy. Similarity Check is a medium that allows for comprehensive manuscripts screening, aimed to eliminate plagiarism and provide a high standard and quality peer-review process. 

Volume 2 (2015): Issue 2 (December 2015) - Participation across Institutional and Disciplinary Boundaries