Vol. 1 No. 1 (2014): Participatory Cultural Citizenship

The recent participatory turn of contemporary cultural analysis and theory has high hopes in terms of democratic activation and empowerment of non-institutional voices (Jenkins 2006, Fenton 2008, Bruns 2008, Gauntlett 2011, Lievrouw 2011) and it has given rise to notions of the end of what was previously known as the passive audience/spectator, emergent collaborative working processes and to concepts such as participatory culture, DIY-culture, DIY urbanism, co-creation, produsage, creative place-appropriation, everyday creativity, participatory planning, social production and social entrepreneurship. Yet it has also, over time, raised concerns regarding the type of democratic interaction and citizen voicing enabled (Hess 2009, Couldry 2010, Fuchs 2013). From these perspectives the articles in this special issue address questions of Participatory Cultural Citizenship and investigate the opportunities, limits and challenges of collective creation and citizen empowerment and evaluate the political potentials or impacts of cultural participation.