Voice, Citizenship, and Civic Action: Challenges to Participatory Communication

In recent years the world has experienced a resurgence in practices of bottom-up communication for social change, a plethora of agency in which claims for voice and citizenship through massive civic action have conquered center stage in the public debate. This resurgence has sparked a series of questions about how these new calls for social change and their principles and communicative practices are influencing and informing the way participatory communication is conceptualized and practiced by governments, civil society, or other social actors. What underlying notions of participation, civic action, and social change inform the agents of change, be they the new generation of social movements on the one hand, or the established and institutionalized field of communication for social change on the other? These are the questions that drive this chapter.