CALL FOR MANUSCRIPTs FOR SPECIAL ISSUE 9(3) 2016:
Title:
“YOUTH AND THE REINVENTION OF POLITICS. NEW FORMS OF PARTICIPATION IN THE
AGE OF INDIVIDUALIZATION AND PRESENTIFICATION”
*Editors:*
Luca Alteri, Sapienza University of Rome, email: luca.alteri@???
Carmen Leccardi, University of Milan Bicocca, email:
carmen.leccardi@???
Luca Raffini, University of Genoa, email: lucaraffini@???
<lucaraffini@???>m
ABSTRACT:
According to mainstream theory, citizens and among them young people in
particular are disenchanted and increasingly skeptical of representative
democracy and traditional political organization. After the fall of the
Berlin Wall, this diagnosis stimulated a wide “crisis debate” about the End
of Democracy, the End of Politics and the End of Sovereignty. Indeed, the
decline in conventional participation is accompanied by a process of
the *reinvention
of politics*, characterized by the spread of unconventional participation
and innovative approaches and repertoires of action. New practices
configure themselves as informal, non-institutionalized, horizontal,
increasingly divorced from traditional collective social cleavages, but
personally meaningful and individually oriented. Finally, politics also
divorced from long terms projects, as the future folds back into the
present, it is absorbed within it and it is consumed before it can really
be conceived. The present appears as the only dimension available for the
definition of choices, a fully-fledged existential horizon which includes
and substitutes the future and the past. The acceleration of social life
and its various times renders these two dimensions ever more evanescent as
reference points for political action.
Yet despite all of this, individualization and presentification does not
equate with depoliticization.
*Collectivistic* collective action is replaced by *individual* collective
action (MacFarland and Micheletti 2003). The spread of networked
individualism is accompanied by the shift from general organizations to
single-issue movements, and finally to single-issue mobilization. Political
identities and mobilizations are less directed by social ties in the
family, neighborhood, school or workplace over time, and increasingly
guided instead “by the manner in which people participate and interact
through the social networks which they themselves have had a significant
part in constructing” (Loader et al. 2014). *Indignados* and *Occupy* movements
have been analyzed as the expression of “networked participation” based
upon “organization without organization” (Rainie and Welmann 2012), rooted
in the expression of discontent and indignation and mobilized through
“connective action” (Bennett and Segerberg 2012). Participants combine
individual and collective dimensions, post-materialist values and
materialist claims (defense of the welfare state, social justice,
employment) in an innovative way. In a context shaped by the privatization
of social and political experience and by a presentification of
life-projects, these forms of mobilization can be analyzed as the search
for a collective project by means of articulating and integrating
diversity. As Melucci wrote in *Challenging codes*, “heterogeneity of
condition and non-homogeneity of action shatter the unitary nature of young
people’s mobilizations but give greater specificity to their individual
identities. Mobilization is not based on totalizing principles or values,
which today cannot provide a sustainable youth identity; it is instead
framed by the conjunction of global concerns and the ever narrower horizons
close to individual everyday experience”. Melucci’s approach is more
relevant today than ever, as it shifts the focus from “how” to “why” people
participate.
We invite scholars from different theoretical perspectives and fields of
study to critically analyze the reinvention of participation in the age of
individualization and presentification, to reflect on the rationales, goals
and outcomes of participation with a particular, albeit not exclusive,
reference to youth.
Key elements are the reconfiguration of the relation between the individual
and collective dimensions, the reconnection of contingent individual needs
and concerns in long-term general projects, and the collective and
individual outcomes of mobilization. An individualized approach to
participation “may lead to hedonist actions lacking in general significance
or dissipating in sporadic activism”, but also succeed in connecting
personal concerns and global challenges in new ways (Pleyers 2010). It can
lead to unstable unions made by “individualized wishers” (Formenti 2011),
but also represents a challenge to the individualization of the “liquid
society” (della Porta 2015), promoting a reconnection of particularities.
How do new forms of participation connect individual needs to collective
identities? What is the effective outcome of new forms of participation,
both on the individual and the collective level? May we compare new
mobilizations to “swarms” (Bauman 2008), where both input and output are
individualized? Is participation suffering a “neoliberal” transformation,
merely becoming an *individual tool* to express *individual concerns* and
to pursue *individual interest*? Or does networked individualism,
challenging old structures and interaction modalities, allow people’s
uniqueness to converge in building a collective long-term project of
political and social change?
Both empirical contributions and theoretical articles, proposing new
analytical tools, are welcomed.
Submission procedure:
Articles, written in English, should be submitted to the editors according
to the following schedule:
- Submission of long abstracts (about 1,000 words): *15 NOVEMBER 2015*
- Selection of long abstracts: *01 DECEMBER 2015*
- Submission of articles: *15 MAY 2016*
- Provision of peer review feedback: 30 JUNE 2016
- Submission of revised drafts: 31 AUGUST 2016
- Publication of the issue: 15 NOVEMBER 2016
Articles should be no longer than 10,000 words, including notes and
references. A maximum of 10 articles will be published.
Please refer to the editorial guidelines available at
http://siba-ese.unisalento.it/index.php/paco/about/submissions#onlineSubmissions
<
http://siba-ese.unile.it/index.php/paco/about/submissions#onlineSubmissions>
Please address any queries to the Editors – Proposals and papers have to be
sent to the guest editors
--
Luca Raffini
https://sites.google.com/site/lucaraffini/
3332003616
skype: luca.raffini
luca.raffini@???
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