[ecrea] CFP: RETHINK Participatory Cultural Citizenship

Call for Papers for the Interdisciplinary Conference
RETHINK Participatory Cultural Citizenship
When is citizen participation socially transformative?
Aarhus University (AU), Denmark, 14.11.-16.11.2013


Keynote speakers: Leah Lievrouw (US), Femen (Ukraine), Chris Kelty (US),
David Graeber (UK) (tbc), Cathy Lang Ho (US)


In recent years studies of aesthetic, urban and digital culture have 
focused on and praised the political potential of user-driven production 
often referred to by means of concepts such as DIY urbanism and 
participatory culture, co-creation, produsage, creative 
place-appropriation, everyday creativity, participatory planning, social 
production and social entrepreneurship. And while the first generation 
of promoting the creative city was based in the ambition of supporting 
(and capitalizing on) individual creativity, we now see a growing 
interest in collective creation of cultural content. But how do we 
understand and support collective creation, and what new challenges does 
this change bring forth?

The found city, opportunistic tactics, spontaneous interventions, and 
the emergent process of the everyday are being broadly celebrated in 
studies of urban space (Cuff and Sherman 2011, Stickels 2011, Lang Ho 
2012, Chase, Crawford and Kaliski 2008). And for more than a decade the 
internet has been invested with high hopes in terms of democratic 
activation and empowerment of non-institutional voices (Jenkins 2006, 
Fenton 2008, Bruns 2008, Gauntlett 2011, Lievrouw 2011), but also over 
time with concerns regarding the type of democratic interaction and 
citizen voicing enabled by the internet (Hess 2009, Couldry 2010). Since 
the 1990s with the rise of relational art (Bourriaud 1998) we have also 
seen a strong artistic interest in participation and collaboration as a 
politicised working process with artists such as Francis Alÿs, Walid 
Raad and the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist as its front figures. Claire 
Bishop has recently named this art movement ëparticipatory artí (Bishop 
2012). In these artistic practices, the artist is less a producer of 
objects and more a co-producer of situations and relational or 
dialogical art practices (Kester 2004, 2011), often in active 
collaboration with what was previously known as the passive 
audience/spectator.

This participatory turn of contemporary cultural analysis and theory has 
nevertheless not always clearly addressed what "positive political 
change" might mean and how to evaluate the political potentials and/or 
impacts of a certain cultural activity including non-professional or 
vernacular production. Therefore the conference RETHINK Participatory 
Cultural Citizenship wants to address, explore and discuss the effects 
of projects where citizens act as agents of change in e.g. urban, 
digital and aesthetic spaces.

The conference focuses on a range of urgent challenges to the 
understanding and future development of urban, digital and aesthetic 
participatory civic cultures. These include:

1. How do we develop frameworks to evaluate the potentials of 
participation, and how do we design/enable participatory processes, 
which have this potential to a satisfying degree?

2. How can we use participatory cultural processes as an effective 
critical practice? And what does "effective" mean?

3. To what extent can participation in itself be of political value in 
terms of enabling active citizenship, and is it meaningful to suggest 
that the amount of participation motivated by a certain event 
constitutes a measure of its success? Or could the increasing sum of 
citizen voices, for instance online, in itself threaten genuine 
political interaction?

4. What is the trade-off between present and future participations? How 
can bottom-up cultural initiatives e.g. become anchored within the 
long-term planning of spaces, cities and institutions, and should proper 
political participation even result in lasting changes of spaces, 
discourses, policies or institutions? And if so, how should future 
participatory projects relate to these lasting results of previous projects

5. How and to what extent is political or cultural participation 
threatened by institutional and/or economic strategies trying to profit 
from the work of users? Or could the intertwinement of fundamentally 
diverse agencies and agendas really be perceived as an opportunity for 
profound citizen empowerment?

When submitting your abstract please point out which of the above 
mentioned five challenges your paper is addressing. To collectively 
investigate them we invite papers from across the fields of e.g. 
cultural studies, architecture, geography, entrepreneurship, experience 
economy, media studies, political science, philosophy, art studies and 
sociology. We also invite practitioners to explore and present viable 
methods for individual citizens to become proactive in their involvement 
with their city, their neighborhood, and the surrounding world. The 
exploration can take place during and/or the results can be presented at 
the conference.

Thematically papers could deal with a range of issues and actual 
projects related to e.g: the formation of social movements, protest 
movements, creative online/offline activism, mobilization, social 
inclusion, artivism, urban planning, critical urban interventions, 
digital democracy and inclusion, the politics of aesthetic experience, 
relational aesthetics, contested spaces related to culture driven urban 
regeneration, DIY urbanism, the concept "participatory culture".

After the submission deadline the organizers will, together with local 
organizations, creative activists and invited international researchers 
experiment with different ways of integrating the presentations and 
sessions in different political and cultural settings in Aarhus (e.g. by 
inviting a relevant audience of decision-makers or possible 
collaborators, by formulating a common task to be solved or discussed). 
In other words sessions will be staged in a way that increases their 
ability to affect both the academic community and the actual 
surroundings of the conference.

Please submit your abstract proposals (max 300 words) to 
(norcs /at/ hum.au.dk). Deadline for submission of abstracts: June 20, 2013.

The conference is funded by RETHINK 2017 and is the first in a series of 
conferences leading to Aarhus being European Capital of Culture in 2017: 
http://www.aarhus2017.dk/english


Main organizers: Louise Fabian, Department of Culture and Society, AU; 
Carsten Stage, Department of Aesthetics and Communication, AU; Jan 
Löhmann Stephensen, AU IDEAS Pilot Centre The Democratic Public Sphere, 
AU; Birgit Eriksson, Department of Aesthetics and Communication, AU; 
Dorthe Refslund Christensen, Department of Aesthetics and Communication, AU.

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