Political Agency at the Digital Crossroads?

Abstract

This thematic issue presents the outcome of the 2015 ECREA Communication and Democracy Section Conference "Political Agency in the Digital Age" that was held at the Copenhagen Business School in Denmark. It problematizes changes in the configurations of political agency in the context of digital media. The articles represent a shift from an exclusive focus on political elites to the interrelation between institutionalised politics and political processes in other societal spheres in the field of media and politics research. Political agency as the main notion of the thematic issue draws attention at the (media) practices through which social actors reproduce, reorganise and challenge politics. At the same time, the issue poses questions about the structures-economic, political and social-that allow for, define and also limit these practices. The contributions gathered here suggest an understanding of agency as constituted through the use of knowledge and resources, themselves embedded within structural contexts; at the same time, agency is transformative of the structures within which it is embedded by making use of knowledge and resources in creative and often radical ways. In that context the development of digital media marks a rupture or critical juncture that allows and requires a rethinking of conditions of political agency. Accordingly the contributions critically scrutinize the role of digital media moving beyond celebratory accounts of democratizing potential of digital media. The rethinking of the grammar of political agency is at the heart of this thematic issue.

Subversive Commemoration: Mapping the Assemblage of Counter-Memory on Twitter

“…This undermines the privileged position of formal history and allows informal communicative structures like Twitter to participate in memory construction. When the assemblage of counter-memory is mobilized, it is rendered the political agency (Kaun, Kyriakidou & Uldam, 2016) to resist attempts to revise history for the interests of a few and negotiate for whom history should be written. Public commemoration mediated by networked technologies of memory manifests as digital assemblages of non-institutional actors, affective discourses, and informal commemorative practices.…”

Introduction: The Aesthetics of Global Protest : Visual Culture and Communication

“…That is why political voice is a form of agency that communicates ideas of solidarity -fundamental for protest movements in order for individuals and groups to coalesce and intersect. Though not insignificant, the lines between individual and collective mobilization are increasingly blurred (Kaun et al 2016). Digital media extends the parameters of who can participate by opening up new paths for communication and mobilization whilst creating 'more decentralized, dispersed, temporary and individualized forms of political action which then subvert the notion of the collective as singular, unified, homogeneous, coherent and mass' (Kavada 2016: 8).…”

AMEND: Open Source and Data-Driven Oversight of Water Quality in New England

“…Ultimately, resources like AMEND that seek to increase access to public data and its importance in informing the public policymaking process serve to change the configuration of political agency (Kaun, Kyriakidou, & Uldam, 2016) in the states where they are deployed. By extending the decentralization of political discourse and action to information about policymaking contexts and outcomes and providing new forums for communication about this information, public data repositories and open source analysis platforms can play a role in a communications-oriented perspective on defining politi-cal agency in the digital age (Kavada, 2016) and promote the practices of active citizenship (Hammett, 2014) and proactive data activism (Milan & Van Der Velden, 2016).…”