01-09-2019
30-06-2023
Focus on the visual
The public sphere of today's youth is increasingly dominated by visual content. Therefore, the current youth's understanding of political action – building arguments, mobilizing, and participating – is also likely to be and increasingly become anchored in repertoires of visual participation.
The research on democratic practices and political participation has thus far concentrated heavily on words. Now, perhaps more than ever, understanding political participation on non-verbal levels has become equally crucial in order to build conceptual understanding of the requirements of democratic inclusion of all citizens and find remedies to the crises in democratic governance.
Future demands for European democracy will be voiced by European youth of the 2010s and 2020s. This generation builds its democratic imagination and views of political participation in a polarized and turbulent political climate. What kind of citizens will they be? How will they shape the political culture and institutions of European democracy? What are the means of participation they rely on, and how will they engage in processes of politicization? What is – and what will be – the meaning of politics and the value of democracy for them?
How ImagiDem works?
In ImagiDem, we study visual participation both online and offline. We analyse images and memes posted on social media, and follow young people's visual ways of participation as part of their everyday actions. The project combines visual ethnography with computational big data minining and analysis, and deploys this combination to a comparative research setting in four European countries: Finland, France, Germany, and Portugal.
ImagiDem studies young Europeans' visual forms of political participation online and offline in four different countries: Finland, France, Germany and Portugal.
European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme
(Grant agreement No. 804024)
Academy of Finland
Kone Foundation
University of Helsinki