Participatory Politics: Next-Generation Tactics to Remake Public Spheres

Introduction

In 2012, 24-year-old Pendarvis Harshaw was finishing up some college courses and working as a mentor for the local school district. Over spring break, he set off on a road trip to visit his father, whom he hadn’t seen in 18 years. It was through his uncle on Facebook that Pen had tracked down his dad. Pen flew from Oakland to Chicago and then joined a friend with a car for the 12-hour drive to the Alabama prison where his father was incarcerated. Pen tweeted the whole way, regularly updating his growing community of 2,250-plus followers.

A couple of months later, he wrote a story about the experience. An emerging journalist who had spent his teen years at Youth Radio, a youth-driven production company in Oakland, Pen set out to get the story distributed. The week before Father’s Day, he published the story online, hoping a big outlet would pick it up. There were no takers. So when Father’s Day arrived, he posted the piece on his own Tumblr, OG Told Me, a photo-rich oral history site chronicling his encounters with black male elders and their advice to young men.

Soon after, Pen wrote on Facebook, “After pitching my piece about my journey to meet my father to multiple outlets that report on ‘Black news’—and getting no response . . . I decided to post it on my personal blog. In turn, the response from my circle of friends has been amazing.” Pen’s friends had commented on the article and spread the link, urging others to do the same. They reflected on how the story touched them personally and connected it to issues such as mass incarceration, drug policies, the role of journalism in public affairs, race and masculinity, and fatherhood.

What really got to Pen, though, were the in-person responses. When he was jogging around Lake Merritt one day, an acquaintance stopped him to say, “I didn’t want to react online, but I wanted to tell you in person how much I appreciated your being so transparent and open.” On Facebook, Pen wrote, “Conversations, texts, emails, tweets, facebook shares & likes . . . all from a lil sumn I decided to write . . . that’s love. Thanks.”

Pen did not overturn a government, get an official hired or fired, or change a policy by producing, sharing, and stoking conversation through his story about his father. He did, however, engage in some of the key activities that drive youth involvement in civic life today. This emerging set of activities fuels what my colleagues and I are calling participatory politics.

In the United States, around 2012, there were several epic examples of participatory politics, in which young people used digital and social media to exercise voice and agency on issues of public concern (Cohen, Kahne, Bowyer, Middaugh, and Rogowski 2012; see also Kahne, Middaugh, and Allen, forthcoming). The Occupy movement live-streamed massive public demonstrations against economic inequality from encampments across the country. A controversial call to action originating in Southern California against a Ugandan war criminal became the most popular upload in YouTube’s history. Young people lit up their social networks to express opposition to federal legislation they believed would limit Internet freedom.

I will discuss these events and many others in the course of this report. Pen’s example offers a less sensational but equally revealing case of the everyday ways in which young people are merging the cultural and the political to understand, express, and reshape public affairs.

Though sometimes disavowing “politics” as an apt description of what they’re doing, civically engaged young people are using every means and medium at their disposal to carry out the core tasks of citizenship. Through a mix of face-to-face and digital encounters and interventions, they deliberate on key issues, debate with peers and powerbrokers, and in some cases change the structures of joint decision making and the course of history (Allen and Light, forthcoming). Like Pen, many young people who are coming into their political selves today both distrust public institutions and want in. They get excited about alternative ways to make a difference, and they seek access to traditional channels to power. They may appear to act alone but are always operating in interconnected networks that allow for and inhibit specific modes of civic engagement. Through their interactions with peers and elites, they are redefining some key dynamics that govern civic life.

This report delves into these shifting dynamics to ask the following: What specific tactics are young people experimenting with to exercise agency and intervene in public affairs? How can these activities grow in quality? What work is required to ensure that opportunities to engage in participatory politics are equitably distributed among youth, including youth who are marginalized from digital access and other forms of privilege? I will draw from insights in the existing literature as well as in a set of interconnected though independent studies that are still ongoing, as part of the Youth and Participatory Politics (YPP) Research Network, an initiative supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. YPP research includes the following:

• Ethan Zuckerman’s collection of case studies designed to explore the dynamics of activism in the age of digital communications.

• Danielle Allen’s cross-site, interdisciplinary series of studies of the public spheres of the contemporary United States and other nations and the role of the Internet in them.

• An interview-based national study from Howard Gardner, Carrie James, and colleagues centered on young people’s civic and political participation in the digital age.

• A set of qualitative case studies of exemplary youth organizations and networks that encourage productive forms of participation in public spheres, from a team headed up by Henry Jenkins and Mimi Ito.

• Cathy Cohen and Joe Kahne’s national survey of young people tracking the quantity, quality, and equality of their new media practices and civic attitudes and behaviors.

• Jennifer Earl’s multimethod examination of youth-related protest from both the youths’ and the targets’ perspectives.

• Elyse Eidman-Aadahl’s work engaging education practitioners, inside and outside school, to theorize new practices in support of youth civic engagement and participation in networked public spheres.

• My own participatory research investigating the production and digital afterlife of youth-made media and mobile technology development aimed to advance the public good.

My participation in this network of researchers bridges the role of scholar and practitioner. Since 1991 I have researched youth learning and civic engagement in community organizations and peer-based activities in which young people create media projects aimed to engage, inform, and move the public. Starting in 2000, I added a second set of responsibilities to that effort when I began actively collaborating with youth and adult colleagues as a hands-on media producer and educator. Together we have cocreated radio stories, videos, photo essays, online posts, spoken word poetry projects, and mobile apps, sometimes reaching audiences in the tens of millions, all the while documenting our joint process using ethnographic and participatory research techniques (see, e.g., Soep 2005, 2012; Soep and Chávez 2010).

The frameworks emerging from the YPP Research Network are designed to be more than abstract concepts; they must advance the work at hand. Alongside other action-oriented colleagues, I am always asking: How effectively do these frameworks capture the range of activities young people carry out on a day-to-day basis as they develop civic practices, products, and theories of change? How useful are these frameworks for educators, producers, advocates, and organizers working in diverse online and offline settings to support young people’s agency in public spheres?

The list of tactics identified here is meant to spark discussion and debate about what is covered, what is missing, and what further work is required to understand and support the highest quality and most equitably distributed forms of participatory politics. The tactics are derived from a systematic research agenda and from sustained, direct collaboration with youth. My aim is for these tactics to resonate with and advance the efforts of young people and their allies who are doing the work of participatory politics on shifting ground, where the crucial matter of young people’s role in democracy is in question and at stake.

The five tactics emerging out of this combination of research and practice are as follows:

1. Pivot your public

2. Create content worlds

3. Forage for information

4. Code up

5. Hide and seek

After reading a detailed explanation of these tactics as they manifest in a sweeping range of youth-driven activities across the United States, you will find a discussion of concrete ideas for cultivating the new literacies we’d better invest in if we want young people in various life circumstances to have a voice in and a shot at shaping public affairs. If the tactics suggest how civically engaged young people are exercising agency in public life, literacies tell us something important about the know-how they rely on to do that work effectively. Participatory politics don’t come automatically, even for young people raised on mobile devices and digital media. Nor do individuals act alone when they deliberate and pursue justice, and in this sense it’s best to frame literacies as activities that communities can organize themselves around through interconnected efforts, rather than as skills possessed by or lacking in this or that young person or segment of the youth population.

In Pendarvis’s case, it took a strategy for him to maintain robust and receptive networks of peers over time so they were there for him when he needed them, and he relied on platforms that allow for disparate communities to act, when necessary, in concert. For Pen to understand how his story was spreading through his blog and social networking sites, he consulted with a geek who lived one floor up in his apartment building who taught him how to run the numbers on various analytics programs. Pen regularly boosted friends’ projects rather than only promoting his own, and he updated frequently and then periodically dropped off for 72 hours so people would notice his absence and say so in tweets like “Where’s Pen? Are you lost in Oakland?” Knowing how to monitor and interpret complex data sets, including those generated by one’s own moment-to-moment activities, and knowing how to stoke the engagement of peers without being too obvious about it are, it turns out, key literacies associated with civic engagement in the digital age.

After a discussion of literacies is a section on risk. While opening new opportunities, the tactics associated with participatory politics also raise a series of concerns and critiques that merit serious attention, including simplification, sensationalization, slippage, unsustainability, and saviorism.

Finally, the paper addresses shifting dynamics that underlie youth-driven politics in the age of digital communications, and it concludes with implications for future research and on-the-ground activity.