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

Project Information

ImagiDem

Grant agreement ID: 804024

DOI

10.3030/804024

Project closed

EC signature date 29 March 2019

Start date 1 May 2019

End date 31 October 2024

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 474 594,00

EU contribution

€ 1 474 594,00

Coordinated by

HELSINGIN YLIOPISTO
Finland

Periodic Reporting for period 4 - ImagiDem (Imagi(ni)ng Democracy: European youth becoming citizens by visual participation)

Reporting period: 2023-01-01 to 2024-10-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

What is the problem/issue being addressed?
The ImagiDem-project has addressed how increasing visuality has changed participation, and in particular political and protest action, and what new tools and barriers it has brought about. The project proposes several methodological and conceptual innovations to address this large phenomenon and its consequences to mundane democratic practices and the public sphere.

Why is it important for society?
Visuality is, today more than ever, the fuel of politics and public debate, democratically crucial in its power to communicate, mediate, suggest and question power. In current societies, images are present in everyday life and politics in an unforeseen scale, in quantity and in significance. It is of crucial importance for social scientists to be able to adequately analyze the functions and meanings of visuality methodologically, and to provide societies substantial analyses of the consequences and effects of visuality to democracy.

What are the overall objectives?
The project’s objectives have been to empirically map and theoretically conceptualize visual political action and politicization especially among young people in four European countries (Finland, France, Germany, Portugal) to understand change in political practices and the patterns of democracy. In addition, the project has aimed at developing adequate methodological tools to address the phenomenon of visual politics in social sciences.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

ImagiDem has carried out extensive theoretical work to develop the theory of visual politics. Based on work developing further and combining recent pragmatist theorizing and cultural sociological concepts, we have coined the concept of fame democracy as well as that of visual politicization. We have explored and theorized the political potential of being visible and invisible, the new forms of power in crafting and organizing visibility, and the historical trajectories that undergird these.

The project has carried out ten separate entities of ethnographic fieldwork, five in Finland, two in France, two in Portugal, and one in Germany, among, partly respectively, partly intertwined, groups of actively engaged youth in activist settings, and marginalized youth in proto-political settings. The project has developed a new method to study activism ethnographically in the social media era: the snap-along ethnography. This method has been used and further enhanced in fieldwork during the project. The ethnographic works have provided numerous analyses of means of visual politicization and the consequences of increasing visuality to democratic practices.

The project has developed an ethnography-aided AI program that provides a method to investigate large masses of images, finding out the prevalence of different categories of visual political action they portray. The program is in development to become an application, distributed for wide use among scholars and eg. journalists.

The project has collected a large image archive data from Finland, France, Portugal and Germany between late 19th and early 21st century, and analyzed it to map the changes in visual politics before the emergence of online visuality.

ImagiDem has provided research training to five doctoral researchers – Vasilis Malthezos, Jenni Kettunen, Maija Jokela, Heini Salminen, and Juulia Heikkinen (with one PhD gained in 2024, one expected this year, and two expected within the next two years) and three trainees, Juulia Heikkinen, Minja Sormunen, and Alina Faizy. The project has provided the career ascension of two researchers, Taina Meriluoto and Carla Malafaia from early post-doctoral level to, respectively, senior researcher and tenure track positions. Both have since the project secured funding of their own and began building their own research teams.

The study results have been disseminated through teaching in several universities in Finland, US, Norway, France and Portugal.

The project’s findings have been disseminated to both the academic community and the general public, the former through over 80 conference presentations in more than ten countries as well as publications (see below), the latter through general public events, social media publications, media appearances, a podcast series (https://csd.fi/demokratian-paikat-podcast/) as well as a video presentation of the project’s aims and findings (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdhNG_RqpEM).

The project has produced altogether 42 publications, in addition to 8 articles and a book manuscript (about 80% accomplished) pending.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

ImagiDem has shown that today’s youth use new tools, and thus enact their citizenship differently from former generations. In particular, future citizens will increasingly engage in processes of politicization, of solving conflicts, and of deliberating by using partly, and even primarily, visual forms. As a result, understanding visual forms of political action is key in grasping both the cultural toolkits of democracy among today’s youth, and the future landscape of democracy created through them. In this chapter, we put forward the concept of visual politicization to describe and make sense of the visual practices of politicization the youth employ. In addition, and to understand how youth political engagement is changing, the conceptual proposal is followed by two innovative methodological approaches designed to capture visual politicization. First, we have introduced the method of ‘snap-along ethnography’ as an application of the ethnographic method that is particularly attuned to apprehending visual political action. Second, we have illustrated how an abductive alliance between ethnography and supervised machine learning can enable grasping the big picture of visual politicization.

Imagi(ni)ng Democracy: European youth becoming citizens by visual participation has investigated youth visual political action across four European countries (Finland, France, Germany and Portugal), and around different topics – from global climate protests to local mental health activism. The visual culture of young people, whether political activists or not, is inherently transnational, because the tools used to produce the culture (Instagram, Snapchat, BeReal, TikTok…) are global. These digital tools and their affordances shape the culture of doing visual politics. Based on empirical examples from our research, we show how new methodological combinations are key to achieving radically new understanding of the ways in which young people engage in politics, and, ultimately, to creating reflexive, resilient future democracies.

The main achievements of the project, all outlined in the project plan, are:
1) development of the theory of visual political action and politicization with contributions to several fields of inquiry, including but not exclusively social theory, political, cultural and visual sociology, ethnography, and computational social science.
2) creation of rich ethnographic data on visual political action
3) development of a new ethnographic method particularly adapted for the analysis of visual political action
4) development of a neural network capable of identifying different characteristics of visual political action and classifying images accordingly
5) dissemination of the project’s findings to academic and general audiences.

ImagiDem team