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Informal Civic Learning

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Civic Participation in Contentious Politics

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Abstract

A prominent indictment levelled at the protest wave that transpired at the turn of this decade engulfing many parts of the world has centred on the documented insistence on participatory inclusiveness at the expense of actionable policy goals. According to such accounts, the use of social media compounded this problem. In this final substantive chapter, I adopt a more sanguine perspective as I interrogate the possibility that instead of being primarily an occasion for flippant chatter, the networked communication of contentious politics constitutes an opportunity to consolidate the collective knowledge and critique of political institutions and mainstream media. The two are keystones to the intellectual justification of contention.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    On social movements as producers of radical knowledge that informs social change see Cox and Flesher Fominaya (2009).

  2. 2.

    See my overview of Tarrow and Tilly’s definition of social movements in the introduction.

  3. 3.

    The analysed corpus comprised a total of 3170 tweets and 767 Facebook posts from the first two and the final day of the research period (see Figs. 7.1 and 7.2).

  4. 4.

    If results of this textual research are inevitably partial (Phillipov 2012), they may nevertheless be an informing starting point for both ethnographic or survey studies bringing user views, experiences and circumstances to bear on patterns of informal civic learning encountered in contentious collective action.

  5. 5.

    Both the provision and requests for civic information were designated as code occurrences because the two types of actions were viewed as complementary sides of informal learning. As in the case of the content analyses presented in Chaps. 5 and 6, all message were amenable to multiple coding.

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  1. City University London, London, UK

    Dan Mercea

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  1. Dan Mercea
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Mercea, D. (2016). Informal Civic Learning. In: Civic Participation in Contentious Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50869-0_7

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