IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cog/meanco/v4y2016i4p1-7.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Political Agency at the Digital Crossroads?

Author

Listed:
  • Anne Kaun

    (Media and Communication Studies, School for Culture and Education, Södertörn University, Sweden)

  • Maria Kyriakidou

    (School of Politics, Philosophy, Language and Communication Studies, University of East Anglia, UK)

  • Julie Uldam

    (Department of Communication and Arts, Roskilde University, Denmark)

Abstract

This thematic issue presents the outcome of the 2015 ECREA Communication and Democracy Section Conference “Political Agency in the Digital Age” that was held at the Copenhagen Business School in Denmark. It problematizes changes in the configurations of political agency in the context of digital media. The articles represent a shift from an exclusive focus on political elites to the interrelation between institutionalised politics and political processes in other societal spheres in the field of media and politics research. Political agency as the main notion of the thematic issue draws attention at the (media) practices through which social actors reproduce, reorganise and challenge politics. At the same time, the issue poses questions about the structures—economic, political and social—that allow for, define and also limit these practices. The contributions gathered here suggest an understanding of agency as constituted through the use of knowledge and resources, themselves embedded within structural contexts; at the same time, agency is transformative of the structures within which it is embedded by making use of knowledge and resources in creative and often radical ways. In that context the development of digital media marks a rupture or critical juncture that allows and requires a rethinking of conditions of political agency. Accordingly the contributions critically scrutinize the role of digital media moving beyond celebratory accounts of democratizing potential of digital media. The rethinking of the grammar of political agency is at the heart of this thematic issue.

Suggested Citation

  • Anne Kaun & Maria Kyriakidou & Julie Uldam, 2016. "Political Agency at the Digital Crossroads?," Media and Communication, Cogitatio Press, vol. 4(4), pages 1-7.
    • Handle: RePEc:cog:meanco:v:4:y:2016:i:4:p:1-7
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cogitatiopress.com/mediaandcommunication/article/view/690
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Anastasia Kavada, 2016. "Social Movements and Political Agency in the Digital Age: A Communication Approach," Media and Communication, Cogitatio Press, vol. 4(4), pages 8-12.
    2. Kerry McCallum & Lisa Waller & Tanja Dreher, 2016. "Mediatisation, Marginalisation and Disruption in Australian Indigenous Affairs," Media and Communication, Cogitatio Press, vol. 4(4), pages 30-42.
    3. Julia Velkova, 2016. "Free Software Beyond Radical Politics: Negotiations of Creative and Craft Autonomy in Digital Visual Media Production," Media and Communication, Cogitatio Press, vol. 4(4), pages 43-52.
    4. Jonas Kaiser & Markus Rhomberg & Axel Maireder & Stephan Schlögl, 2016. "Energiewende’s Lone Warriors: A Hyperlink Network Analysis of the German Energy Transition Discourse," Media and Communication, Cogitatio Press, vol. 4(4), pages 18-29.
    5. Guobin Yang, 2016. "Narrative Agency in Hashtag Activism: The Case of #BlackLivesMatter," Media and Communication, Cogitatio Press, vol. 4(4), pages 13-17.
    6. Linus Andersson, 2016. "No Digital “Castles in the Air”: Online Non-Participation and the Radical Left," Media and Communication, Cogitatio Press, vol. 4(4), pages 53-62.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Nathan Edward Sanders, 2019. "AMEND: Open Source and Data-Driven Oversight of Water Quality in New England," Media and Communication, Cogitatio Press, vol. 7(3), pages 91-103.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Herr, Benjamin & Schörpf, Philip & Flecker, Jörg, 2021. "Virtuelle Kommunikationsräume als Ausgangspunkt für Interessenartikulation in der Onlineplattformarbeit [Virtual communication rooms as a launching area for the articulation of interests in remot," Industrielle Beziehungen. Zeitschrift für Arbeit, Organisation und Management, Verlag Barbara Budrich, vol. 28(2), pages 172-193.
    2. Stephanie L. Chan, 2021. "The Social Value of Public Information When Not Everyone is Privately Informed," Working Papers 2021-09-18, Wang Yanan Institute for Studies in Economics (WISE), Xiamen University.
    3. Rille Raaper, 2021. "Students as ‘Animal Laborans’? Tracing Student Politics in a Marketised Higher Education Setting," Sociological Research Online, , vol. 26(1), pages 130-146, March.
    4. Imatitikua D. Aiyanyo & Hamman Samuel & Heuiseok Lim, 2021. "Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Classrooms: A Case Study on Foreigners in South Korea Using Applied Machine Learning," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(9), pages 1-15, April.
    5. Anna Maaranen & Janne Tienari, 2020. "Social media and hyper‐masculine work cultures," Gender, Work and Organization, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 27(6), pages 1127-1144, November.
    6. Wen Shi & Haohuan Fu & Peinan Wang & Changfeng Chen & Jie Xiong, 2020. "#Climatechange vs. #Globalwarming: Characterizing Two Competing Climate Discourses on Twitter with Semantic Network and Temporal Analyses," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 17(3), pages 1-22, February.
    7. Yue Han & Theodoros Lappas & Gaurav Sabnis, 2020. "The Importance of Interactions Between Content Characteristics and Creator Characteristics for Studying Virality in Social Media," Information Systems Research, INFORMS, vol. 31(2), pages 576-588, June.
    8. Nathan Edward Sanders, 2019. "AMEND: Open Source and Data-Driven Oversight of Water Quality in New England," Media and Communication, Cogitatio Press, vol. 7(3), pages 91-103.
    9. Yunhwan Kim & Donghwi Song & Yeon Ju Lee, 2020. "#Antivaccination on Instagram: A Computational Analysis of Hashtag Activism through Photos and Public Responses," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 17(20), pages 1-20, October.
    10. Monideepa Tarafdar & Deepa Kajal Ray, 2021. "Role of Social Media in Social Protest Cycles: A Sociomaterial Examination," Information Systems Research, INFORMS, vol. 32(3), pages 1066-1090, September.
    11. Nadejda Komendantova & Sonata Neumueller, 2020. "Discourses about energy transition in Austrian climate and energy model regions: Turning awareness into action," Energy & Environment, , vol. 31(8), pages 1473-1497, December.
    12. Iago S. Muraro & Kjerstin Thorson & Patricia T. Huddleston, 2023. "Spurring and sustaining online consumer activism: the role of cause support and brand relationship in microlevel action frames," Journal of Brand Management, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 30(5), pages 461-477, September.
    13. Nuccio Ludovico & Marc Esteve Del Valle & Franco Ruzzenenti, 2020. "Mapping the Dutch Energy Transition Hyperlink Network," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 12(18), pages 1-24, September.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cog:meanco:v:4:y:2016:i:4:p:1-7. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: António Vieira (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cogitatiopress.com/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.