Imagi(ni)ng Democracy: European youth becoming citizens by visual participation

Descripción del proyecto

La juventud europea y sus formas visuales de participación política

Los jóvenes de hoy en día crecen en un mundo visual, por lo que es más probable que su comprensión de la acción política se base en repertorios de participación visual. El proyecto ImagiDem, financiado con fondos europeos, investigará y conceptualizará la participación visual de los jóvenes ciudadanos europeos, tanto dentro como fuera de internet, para formular un modelo de prácticas democráticas de los años veinte de este siglo. El proyecto estudiará imágenes y memes publicados en las redes sociales y seguirá las formas visuales de participación de los jóvenes como parte de sus acciones cotidianas. El trabajo se basará en la etnografía visual con extracción de datos masivos y análisis computacionales.

Objetivo

The current political and institutional crises render the future of European democracy uncertain. To gain deeper insights into what the current discontent may lead to, and how to address it for the good of an equal and inclusive democracy, we have to study future political actors, today’s young citizens, and examine what are the means of political action prevalent to them. The public sphere of today’s youth is increasingly dominated by visual content, and therefore the visual dimension of political participation is to be a key concern in research thereof. The current youth’s understanding of political action – building arguments, mobilizing, and participating – is likely to become firmly anchored in repertoires of visual participation. ImagiDem will explore, analyze, and conceptualize visual participation of young European citizens in order to formulate a model of democratic practices in the 2020s.
ImagiDem addresses visual political participation and democratic practices among young citizens in the European context using a radical triple-strategy: it combines visual ethnography with computational big data minining and analysis, and deploys this combination to a comparative research setting. The project design includes four countries of comparison – Finland, France, Germany, and Portugal – with both an ethnographic and a computational subproject realized in each of them. Both methodological approaches – comparative online ethnography, and computational, machine learning based analysis of large sets of social media image data – are risky and hitherto scarcely explored.
The theoretical challenge ImagiDem takes is to develop pragmatist theorizing of visual justification and engagements on the one hand, and visual cultural toolkits and frames, on the other. With this methodologico-theoretical toolkit, ImagiDem provides overarching analysis of the future of European democracy.