Participatory Politics: Next-Generation Tactics to Remake Public Spheres

Concluding Thoughts

In this report, I have drawn from the Youth and Participatory Politics Research Network and other sources to identify a set of emerging tactics young people are using to engage with and remake public spheres, often deploying digital and social media tools in intriguing ways. I have linked those tactics to a series of literacies that young people will increasingly rely on as they exercise civic agency. I have also highlighted some concerns related to participatory politics—vulnerabilities in the model that can cause even well-intentioned efforts to do inadvertent harm.

Table 1 shows how the various dimensions of participatory politics can work together.

The configuration in table 1 is just one snapshot of how the features, tactics, literacies, and risks of participatory politics can correspond to one another. For example, in the first row I’ve posited a scenario in which young people create content worlds primarily to circulate civic media; to do so they utilize an ability to collaborate in making stories that engage audiences in strategic ways, and they need to be very intentional about not sacrificing complexity and understanding for the sake of dissemination.

Although the tactic of creating content worlds has been paired with circulation in the table, it can relate to the other features as well. It is extremely relevant to production, it (one hopes) invites substantive dialogue and feedback, it can require investigation to get the story straight, and it can be a part of a larger campaign designed to mobilize a particular form of collective action.

Likewise, young people seeking to create content worlds for civic ends would need to look out for all the risks associated with participatory politics, not just simplification. Content worlds can feed sensationalization; they can ultimately be unsustainable and thus set up the participants for disappointment, resentment, cynicism, and missed opportunity; they can reveal a kind of saviorism that denies agency to those with direct knowledge and the most to lose; and they can invite slippage to the extent that participants eager to connect with the widest possible audience sometimes obscure the specificity of particular struggles.

The fluidity in how these features, tactics, literacies, and risks connect helps explain the potential power of participatory politics at its most fully realized. There are multiple possible points of entry that tap a range of capacities within individuals and communities to create positive change. The flexibility within the model also highlights the challenges involved: all the other risks are always hovering and require vigilance if the people involved are, at minimum, to do no harm.

I’d like to end with some final ruminations on the underlying social dynamics that participatory politics help bring to light. We’re seeing a strengthening of ties between politics and everyday creativity, lowered barriers to entering civic efforts, greater recognition for young people as producers of media and culture, and evidence that they’re utilizing traditional organizations in new ways, sometimes bypassing or installing new gatekeepers. We’re seeing a shift in how information and individuals accrue trust, credibility, and influence, not so much through official certification but more and more by way of association with valued networks and searchable track records of activity.

A defining feature of participatory politics is its center of gravity in peer relationships. Young people can find civic resources within their own communities, and not all their efforts necessarily aim at the usual targets. With widespread distrust of the formal institutions of government and conventional mechanisms for creating change, young people are experimenting with bottom-up tactics to challenge the social order. That said, face-to-face, sustained adult mentoring is still key in young people’s stories of political becoming. Allies who have injected equal doses of time, expertise, and humility into collaborative civic work with youth are indispensable (Gardner et al. 2012). We live together, after all, in these public spheres.