Abstract
In this interview, Henry Jenkins critically reviews his theorization of the logical and practical connection between participatory culture and participatory politics, which is enabled and facilitated by the civic imagination of various social groups strategically and affectively deploying popular culture resources for different political purposes. Henry Jenkins emphatically discusses the democratic potential of participatory culture in autocratic societies and the mechanisms to promote the progressiveness of participatory politics, and carefully yet enthusiastically defends the significance of fandom’s affective and appropriative practices for bridging participatory culture and participatory politics. In the end of this interview, Henry Jenkins also reflects on the genealogical relations of his thinking on participatory democracy with John Fiske’s political understanding of popular culture and evaluates his own theoretical contributions to the political philosophy of participatory democracy.
Henry Jenkins is Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts, and Education at the Annenberg School for Communication and Jour-nalism of the University of Southern California. A global towering figure in the field of media and cultural studies, he is the author, co-author, and editor of more than 20 books, including such highly acclaimed works as Textual Poachers, Convergence Culture, and Spreadable Media. In 2023, he received a B. Aubrey Fisher Mentorship Award from the International Communication Association. As widely recognized as the pioneer of fandom studies, he has made his central academic and public concern understanding how ordinary people participate—increasingly digitally—in everyday cultural production and dissemination. While his earlier works paid more attention to the personal, educational, and cultural significance of fandom’s engagement with popular texts, in the last decade, he has been more consciously elaborating on the formerly less examined public dimension of participatory culture. This interview thus seeks to explore more fully Jenkins’ recent theorizing of the connection linking participatory culture, civic imagination, and democratic politics, which shall serve to shed critical light upon the theoretical nuances, practical feasibilities, and operational applications of the efforts to promote participatory politics through participatory culture.
At least starting from Textual Poachers, the dynamic connection between or the route from participatory culture and/to participatory politics has been a theme explored to various degrees in your theorizing of popular culture in general and fandom in particular. However, in the recent decade, this theme seems to have taken a more prominent and urgent status within your research agenda, with the publication of By Any Media Necessary (2016) and Popular Culture and Civic Imagination (2020), and your deep invol-vement in the Civic Path program at USC. Do you see this shift in focus of your research on fan cultures as a reflection of an intensifying political turn within fandom or cultural studies, or as being compelled by the political turmoil of radical conservatism in US politics due to Donald Trump’s presidency?
Several things are happening at once here and are hard to disentangle. The first was my shift 14 years ago to USC from MIT and thus the opportunity to reconsider my research agenda accordingly. While being at MIT pushed issues of new media to the forefront, the shift to USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Jour-nalism has led to a renewed interest, long-simmering, in social and political issues. Second was a shift around that same time in the agenda of my primary funding agency, the MacArthur Foundation, from a focus on New Media Literacy and education toward the political lives of American youth and now, the development of community-building media and strategies. Third is, as you suggest, the growing intensity of political conflict in American life, from the hopefulness of the Obama years to the divisiveness of the Trump years and the “build back better” normalcy of the Biden years (always with the potential threat that he-who-must-not-be-named could gain power again and bring about the end of American democratic culture). And in keeping with that shift in society at large, there has been a shift toward the integration between fandom and activism, which I first recognized in the case of the Harry Potter Alliance and which now shapes many different forms of “narrative change” movements that end up using the mechanisms of fandom even when they do not always involve fans per se. This use of expressive means and cultural myths to mobilize youth seems to be a global phenomenon and not simply an American one. Young people raised within various forms of participatory culture want to exercise their voice, want to form meaningful connections, dem-and a seat at the table, and reject the rule of political elites, all signs of a larger turn toward participatory politics.
There indeed is such an emerging phenomenon of youth activism around the world and I think that may somehow explain why most of your research (and your cohort researchers’) on the path leading participatory culture to participatory politics is mostly done based on various case studies involving youth and minority groups. Can you synthesize findings from typical case studies and elaborate on what necessary preconditions (emotional, communal, social, legal, institutional, strategic, economic, etc.) must be present, especially for socially, culturally, or religiously marginal groups, so as to achieve the fruitful transition from or convergence between participatory culture to/and participatory politics?
Yes, by this point, we have amassed enough case studies to be able to think comparatively across them and start to build a larger theory. At the most basic level, I would start with the concept of the civic (or community) imagination. Before we can build a better world, we have to be able to imagine what a better world looks like. We need to see ourselves as agents capable of collectively changing the world. We have to have a projected model of change. We have to have a sense of the collective or the community—what Benedict Anderson (2006) calls an imagined community and what we put in a more active form as the imagining community putting our stress on the ongoing process that links people together rather than a fixed and inherited sense of belonging. We may need to feel empathy or solidarity with groups whose experience is fundamentally different than our own. And drawing on the black radical imagination, for those who are most marginalized and dispossessed, we need to imagine freedom, equality, democracy, and so forth before we directly experience them. These goals require a fusion of rational models that allow us to imagine otherwise, to use an important contemporary change, but also an affective sense that a better world is possible. The various social movements that we study create such opportunities for imagination for their members and we have been developing through our workshop our own appro-aches for fostering the community imagination even in contexts of deep political polarization. For us, this is the starting point for changing the world. Of course, it has to be translated into pragmatic tactics and political leadership, but before you have these core components of the collective imagination, the first steps toward changing the world are impossible. Often, to move beyond the imagination requires familiarity with the basic mechanisms of participation—how to form, educate, and mobilize a community with a shared agenda—and that’s where fandom offers a useful model. So consider the Hermoine Granger Leader-ship Academy, run by Fandom Forward, which brings young people to-gether from across a range of social movements so that they can share best practices and get a taste for what social change feels like. Beyond specific mechanisms for collective action, fandom brings with it a sense of joy or playfulness, self-care, and other affective resources which make the struggle to change the world sustainable. Consider the example of the K-pop fans who aligned themselves with the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020. They represented shared generational experiences of pop cosmopolitanism—the ability to connect socially and culturally beyond national boundaries. They brought technical expertise on how to manipulate algorithmic registration systems such as those used in reality show competitions among pop idols but also by the police in trying to identify the protestors. They brought the ability to make their agenda trend on social media. They brought a critical consciousness that had emerged as Black Americans called out cultural appropriation by K-pop artists and thus were able to educate their fellow fans on core issues concerning race in America. And they brought with them a degree of emotional energy which fueled their protest. They knew how to appropriate and re-signify elements borrowed from popular culture in ways that were instantly meaningful to those inside the fandom and cryptic to those outside much as subcultures have long been described as doing in the cultural studies literature. Put all of that together and you have a pretty good foundation for a struggle against racist police practices.
Your stress on the requirement of familiarity with mechanisms of participation so as for people to move beyond the imagination into the arena of real-world action touches on the crucial question of how to steer imagination away from escapism. Knowledge of the mechanism of participation, for which fandom surely provides valuable models, is of course very important, but don’t you think a necessary social precondition for people to move beyond mere imagination—indeed to have the daring consciousness in the first place to do so—is an enabling institutional structure like the constitutional protection of individual rights to freedom of speech and assembly? I think this also leads to the question of the applicability of your general conceptualization of civic engagement via participatory culture in non-American/Western cultural and/or political context, especially in those countries which tolerate or even embrace cultural cosmopolitanism and push wide adoption of digital networks (thus supporting a productive space for participatory culture), but restrict public expression of and access to unorthodox or critical opinions and prohibit any form of spontaneous grassroots collective action(thus no safe space for participatory politics). How do you imagine the feasibility from participatory culture to participat-ory politics under those circumstances?
Yes, interesting points. Let us get clearer about what we mean by escapism. Richard Dyer (2002) makes the point that we always escape
I am very interested in East Asian fandom as representing a space where important discussions can take place that have a degree of plausible deniability against the suppression that more overt forms of activism clearly face in some East Asian contexts. While I was in Shanghai, I met many young women who were drawn to the K-pop girls group, [G]I-DLE, and especially their song, “Tomboy,” which creates a set of questions around how gender identity is performed. The group members have been manufactured by the K-pop industry and thus are beau-tiful and sexy as defined in traditional gender norms, yet they are singing about an alternative identity that is less defined by rigid gender constraints imposed on women’s lives. Some critics have suggested that the group’s traditional femineity closes off the radi-cal possibilities contained within the song. My observation was that the contradiction encourages debate, speculation, and reflection, as it opens up a wider continuum of different ways to be female and pits them against each other as a set of options that are cultural rather than natural. And this is drawing female fans to read and engage with ideas from Korean feminism (which is where the group originates) but also various other kinds of feminist thinking from around the world. Fandom creates a space for these discussions and debates, and thus creates an opportunity for subtle, gradual, social, and cultural change which does not become overtly political and does not require approval from the state or other established institutions but may be transformative. So, we can use this case as a glimpse into the transformative role fan culture may be playing in China and explain why the Chinese government is trying to promote its own model of fandom as a source of soft power and “cultural confidence” around local cultural products. Chinese fandom is becoming a battleground as many youths are drawn to media from outside national boundaries and yet there is a growing fan following of many state-produced media properties.
Let’s turn our attention back from external applicability to the internal complexities and nuances of your thinking on participatory culture and politics. In the chapter on “What Counts as Politics” of By Any Media Necessary (Jenkins et al., 2016), you adopt a politically neutral stance and argue that “fostering a culture of participation – both cultural and political – can be valuable in and of itself, especially for youth, quite apart from the specific outcomes of their efforts,” but your discussion of participatory politics and selection of relevant cases as a whole has mostly taken or assumed a progressive trajectory (gender equality, migration rights, religious tolerance, etc.). In the meantime, you also agree with James Hay that “participatory politics may be just likely to generate reactionary as progressive politics” (Jenkins et al. 2016, p. 46). How do you reconcile the tension between your general progressive understanding of participatory politics and the real-world alternatives of reactionary political participation (sexism, racism, homophobia, anti-migration, gun-violen-ce, etc.)? What kind of social mechanism, institutional arrangement, and educational efforts do you think should be installed or made to ensure the progressiveness of participatory politics?
First, two of the case studies in By Any Media Necessary (Jenkins et al., 2016) are conservative to some degree (Students for Liberty, In-visible Children) and we have been attentive to other such movements (Q-Anon or the Tea Party). We have also been conducting our Civic Imagination workshops within conservative communities in the red states as well as more progressive communities in the blue states, as we seek ultimately mechanisms which may bring communities back together despite political polarization. But yes, the Q-Anon movement raises real ethical questions about how participatory mechanisms (including those associated with “fans, gamers, and bloggers”) can be used for antidemocratic and anti-participatory purposes. I have been having a series of public conversations with political philosopher Nico Carpentier (Jenkins & Carpentier, 2013, 2019, 2022) as we seek to work out what constitutes ethical participation. For me, the starting point is that “good” participation seeks to expand opportunities for others to participate, whereas “bad” participation seeks to shut down the voices of those with whom you disagree. The American right has no monopoly on bad participation, since the left can often be every bit as censorious (the act of “canceling” anyone you disagree with). So, participatory politics does not guarantee any specific outcome. We certainly need to fight to protect the opportunity for meaningful participation, but that is never enough in and of itself. We also need to deploy those mechanisms in order to insure inclusive and socially just outcomes. Right-wing groups rarely offer opportunities for youth leadership and expression, tending to fall back on more hierarchical structures but the right has been adapting quickly to the changed possibility offered by networked communication, playful modes of engagement, and grassroots forms of expression. In some ways, the turn toward a more participatory model has given Trump a degree of “plausible deniability” in terms of his involvement in the January 6 insurrection, for example. We can see the links between his formal political agenda, his inflammatory speech, and the decentralized action that brought multiple groups from all over the country to Washington for this aggressive mode of protest and dissent. But it is hard to find explicit links between Trump and the grassroots organizations that responded to his call. How do we combat this rise of a more participatory form of author-itarian politics—that is, grassroots forms of fascism? I am not sure I have the answers, alas. The leaders of this movement have done a good job of inoculating their followers against any institution which might help sort through misinformation or discourage the rampage and hate. The press is depicted as purveyors of false news and enemies of the people. The academy is portrayed as elitists who want to groom and corrupt youth. Govern-ment institutions such as the FBI are said to follow partisan agendas and thus to be making false claims against Trump and other political leaders. So, there is no agreed-upon standard of proof and no basis of trust by which we can prove the criminality and deceptions of the far right, and thus, Trump has been able to escape accountability for his actions. It is not hard to label some of these forms of participatory culture as anti-social, but I keep looking for a more precise distinction other than “I disagree with these movements so they are antisocial.”
How about the 11 important media literacy skills to be learned by youth both within formal school education and afterschool informal learning environment as listed in Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture (Jenkins, 2009), and the operational guidance for civic imagination practices in Practicing Futures: A Civic Imagination Action Handbook (Peters-Lazaro & Shresthova, 2020)? Aren’t at least some of them designed somehow to “insure inclusive and soci-ally just outcomes” and to “combat this rise of a more participatory form of authoritarian politics?” Or are they simply procedural process for participatory culture/politics or civic actions of any kind rather than process aiming for substantive democratic results?
Yes, again you raise an important point. Several of the skills, especially negotiation, networking, and collective intelligence, assume some desirable forms of sociality on the web. Negotiation in particular is focused on how we deal with differences (racial, gender, and national) in our everyday social interactions online. Networking comes out of an early moment in social media before we understood how toxic such interactions would become, but it does suggest some form of functional and mutual respect underlying all interactions as we draw on each other for insight and information. Collective intelligence as a theory sees diversity of input as highly desirable and determining the value of the output. This is one of the reasons I was initially drawn to it. We could argue either way: that pre-existing respect for diversity is necessary for the acquisition of these skills to be possible or that, as you argue, acquiring these skills would be a necessary step to “insure inclusive and socially just outcomes.” They are certainly strongly connected.
Your efforts to promote civic imagination capacities, which include those aforementioned media literacy skills, and civic consciousness among young people to nudge them to be more politically engaged citizens are surely very laudable endeavors, but citizenship education has long been a staple part of US K-12 school curriculum, which teaches students what political and civic rights they have and what social obligations as citizens they should fulfill. How do you situate your civic imagination promotion within this time-honored civic educational tradition? In what aspects do you think your efforts are not only valuable supplementation to this tradition, but also a necessary enhancement or even correction of some of its deficiencies, especially in the digital age?
American civic education has been severely limited. Typically, it teaches the branches of government and their relationship and offers a limited list of rights and responsibilities. There is rarely deep consideration of forms of dissent and resistance. There is increasing avoidance of any discussion of current events which might prove to be controversial as both the right and the left put pressure on teachers to teach their way. And there is almost no discussion of the roles young people might play in promoting social change.
Our work starts with a focus not on governance but on the ideal relations within a civic community, foregrounds mechanisms of change, and focuses on young people as civic agents; all of those expand and energize the current state of civic education, giving young people a reason to care and pushing them toward greater participation on their own terms. I often describe the difference between politics as a lifestyle and politics as a special event (such as an election). The bias of the civics education world is often against many forms of civic and political participation, which young people find valuable. I do not devalue the elements they have taught—we are harmed when that civic education is devalued and even abolished by schools, and I am troubled by political leaders—no names here—who have clearly never read the U.S. Constitution or the Bill of Rights and who often want to radically shift the balance of power between the different branches of government. But in terms of your options here, what we do is indeed “a necessary enhancement” and one which has been welcomed by a great many civics teachers.
I think it’s time for us to shift our focus to the issue of fandom, which not only con-stitutes the core part of your research on media and culture, but also plays the key bridging role in your theorizing of the dynamic relationship between participatory culture and participatory politics. You emphatically stress the theoretical and practical importance of the strong affective investment of fandom activities to the practice of contemporary political decision-making process. Although an increasing number of media and political scholars—Zizi Papacharissi (2014) being one of them—have started to explore and demonstrate the crucial affective or emotional dimension of democratic operations and its supplementary or even promotional effect on rational democratic deliberation, is the often excessively emotionally charged fandom practices the best or ideal model to support the affective requirement of democratic process? As you know, many contemporary media critics and political theorists have consistently argued that fans’ strong affective attachment to their favored texts often clouds their rational capabilities to engage in logical debates based on verifiable facts regarding issues involving their celebrated contents or idolized characters, especially in the post-truth era of disinformation and misinformation going viral in the cyberspace. One strong criticism on contemporary political polarization in US politics made by Renee Barnes (2022) in her newly published book Fandom and Polarization in Online Political Discussion blames the fandom mentality being deployed in online political discussions as at least one of the key culprits behind the escalating ideological conflicts in the US. Maybe indeed a less fannish mechanism for affective or emotional mobilization towards political deliberation would be a better resource to draw upon to achieve a more balanced rationality-affection structure for democratic process? More blatantly asking, do you think that fandom nowadays has been overpraised for its cultural and political democratic contributions at the price of ignoring its widely acknowledged irrational elements?
I suppose this depends on what you are defining as “excessively emotionally charged”—under whose definition, under what criteria. This distinction is related to gender, racial, national, and generational norms, and so much more. For me, passion is one of the defining characteristics of fandom which I would describe as a subculture defined by its active and passionate engagement with texts, by its desire to discuss those texts in public and to appropriate from them symbolic resources they use to express themselves, and by an attitude which is critical and creative. Part of the ethos of fandom is to ask questions—from nitpicking to imagining other outcomes, different trajectories for character arcs, and other worlds where the story might occur, all of which is expressed through fan works. I would say that fans are often more critical than the general audience in asking these questions, which makes them somewhat different from many partisans and activists I might know who rarely question their beliefs and ideological commitments. And fans are more tolerant—as an aggregate—of different interpretations than partisans are of different ideological stances. So, you could do worse in grounding a democracy than engaging with fans.
To be clear though, when I use the term, participatory culture, fandom is only one form it could take. I happen to study fans so I often turn to it for exemplars, but that does not mean I see fandom as the best or only origin point for participatory politics. My former student Samantha Close (2018) writes about yarnbombing—a form of knitted street art, often functioning like graffiti, which emerges from mostly feminists, mostly women, in the crafting world as a practice of public protest. Here, they meet most of the terms of participatory politics—especially the use of expressive means within grassroots communities with little deference to institutional authorities. I have only started reading Renee Barnes so my response is still formulating and may be premature, but my sense is she is mostly discussing fans in a very loose sense. She is using fan theory to discuss individuals who do not necessarily consider themselves fans where as in my work a self-conscious affiliation with fandom is a core defining trait. She is writing about participation in discussion boards related to the news, which is a site where there are clear partisan divides, while debates around pop culture often do not come with pre-existing partisan identities, allowing much more fluid identifications and involvement. Conser-vative participants in these news forums often start from a stance of radical indivi-dualism and rationalism, at least as they define it, whereas the fan communities I explore have a larger commitment to the social good and often have clearly articulated norms of participation. Archive of Our Own, for example, puts lots of thought on how to construct an inclusive archive, where different sets of values may coexist, and where no one has to encounter forms of content they will find disturbing or undesirable. Barnes finds a number of ways to tap fandom studies—especially the work on anti-fandom—to account for what she finds in her fieldwork, but I would be cautious about reading backward from those contentious partisan exchanges to fandom as a set of subcultural communities.
Consequently, regarding your more blatant question, no, I do not agree with this formulation. Yes, we need to be asking critical questions about fandom, and yes, there is some tendency to overpraise this community for its virtues while ignoring its vices, and also yes, there is toxicity within fandom. There has been a constant push-pull within fandom studies throughout its history, and this is indeed one fault line in the academic debates at the moment.
Fandom comes with a set of articulated and often reflected upon values that tend to value diversity and inclusion of perspective.Fandom constantly holds itself both individually and collectively responsible to those ideals, even if they are most often observed in their breaches. Fandom already had a clear and articulated set of norms and fandom as a whole is making real efforts at diversity and inclusion right now, even if it sometimes, often, falls short of those ideals. For example, after the George Floyd murder and the #blacklivesmatter protests, the Archive of Our Own community was engaged in some immediate, active, and soul searching discussions about how to address racism within fandom given the goal of preserving the greatest diversity of perspectives possible. There was active work to translate key documents in this discussion into as many international languages as possible to reduce Anglo-American bias in the discussion and there were democratic mechanisms deployed to work through the disputes and find solutions. We may or may not agree with the outcomes, but the process was exemplary in its democratic practices. For me, this is more characteristic of fandom than examples with more antidemocratic process and outcomes.
I want to bring up two concrete issues within the general reservation about fandom’s political significance to further explore your defense of fandom’s civic potential for liberal democracy. One specific issue is the possible simplification of public policy debates largely owning to fandom’s tendency towards empathy. As demonstrated by your and your Civic Path research team’s case studies, the key semiotic path linking participatory culture and participatory politics is by drawing upon popular cultural resources like marvel characters or Harry Potter storylines to inform and enrich civic imagination both individually and collectively. Although fictional figures, fantasy worlds or comics images can and do often provide seminal imaginative resour-ces for people, especially young people, to think and act politically, their empathetic potential sometimes can also simplify, or overshadow, or even nullify some of the core and complicated issues within social problems. For instance, while fans deployed Super-man as an “illegal” immigrant from another planet who nevertheless fully adopts and embodies the American mainstream values to criticize US government’s immigration policy towards undocumented “dreamers,” thorny and deep questions such as the fairness of giving undocumented youth full citizenship as opposed to other immigrants who follow all the legal requirements for US citizen status or the moral justification for national border controls are consciously or unconsciously dropped out of the discussion. Do you agree with this diagnosis? If so, how would you propose to ameliorate this situation? If not, how would you rebut?
There is no question that a certain amount of simplification occurs when pop culture is used in this way. But the best activist groups see this as a potential opening to do further education where the participants are encouraged to do their homework, read deeply to investigate real world circumstances, and engage in deep discussions on a regular basis. Neta Jenkins et al. (2016) discusses all of this deeply, in relation to Peter Dahlgren’s civic culture model, in the chapter on Nerdfighter and Harry Potter Alliance in By Any Media Necessary.
In terms of your Superman example, the use of this story makes sense to many youths who have not thought about the issues before. Again, it is seen as a starting point into the issues, not as an end point for understanding them. The Dreamers do care deeply about fixing the immigration system so that it better addresses the broken pathway toward citizenship, recognizing that many immigrants who follow all the rules experience long delays and arbitrary adjudication. They see “dreamers” as a special case where the young people did not knowingly break the law since their undocumented entran-ce was based on the decisions made, often when they were too young to know what was happening. I have spoken to many Dreamers who only found out they were undocumented when they filled out forms to go to camp or apply for a scholarship or a student loan. The Dreamers also have deep discussions about border policies—they may not agree about what the best policy is but I can vouch for the fact that these issues are discussed. The problem is that we spend so much time talking about the use of popular culture because that is what is distinctive here, but it is only one aspect of their overall political activities, and people read past our discussion of the value of learning beyond that initial cultural attractor.
Perhaps the simplification problem can indeed be at least ameliorated by further civic education, but how about the more structurally rooted issue of inequality? In a society with unequal distribution of wealth like the US, youth from underprivileged families may not be able to afford such mundane cultural activities as going to cinema, buying comic books, attending pop concerts, and cosplaying, which are routinely enjoyed by their economically better situated peers. This leads to the issue of unequal access to cultural participation, as you acknowledged in the Chapter “Democracy, Civic Engagement, and Activism” from Participatory Culture in a Networked Age (Jenkins et al., 2015). If fandom does serve as a helpful model for participatory politics, how would we square this inequality with the egalitarian foundation of modern democratic politics?
Coming back to what I said before about there being many different forms of participatory culture communities, I would say that fand-om is a good path of entry into a democratic culture for many young people but not the only possible one. For example, my colleag-ues Zoe Corwin, Neftalie Williams, Tattiya Maruco and Maria Romero-Morales (2019) have written about skateboard culture as one which requires low costs of entry (a used skateboard comes pretty cheap) and yet gives youth a sense that they belong (or that shared urban space is something they can claim some degree of ownership over and entitled access to) and that has encouraged greater reciprocity among different racial groups (still an ongoing project, but one where great progress has been made). I don’t disagree with your claims about fandom’s class biases. I would feel differently if this was the exclusive or even primary point of access—it is neither. That said, I still am a voice within fandom arguing for us to adopt more inclusive practice, and there are any number of fan conventions—Wakandacon, for example, which is specifically for fans of color—which are trying to develop policies to encourage a safe space for minority participation and which seek to offer scholarships or lower pricing for fans based on their income level. It is not the best of all possible worlds, but the ways they are trying, however imperfectly, to address such issues, is generally admirable.
I noticed that in your defense of fandom’s democratic function, and most, if not all, of your case studies on participatory politics and civic imagination, are focus-ed on how youth, especially socially marginalized youth groups, are making full use of various digital tools and the internet to spread their political messages which are enlivened or enabled by strong popular culture references. How do you think about their relevance for the political activism efforts of older generations or those citizens who do not participate in fandom practices (at least not regularly)? What is the implication of participatory culture for non-youth and non-fans groups’ political participation?
Some fans have remained active in the community as they enter the senior years. But, this is probably not the ideal way to encourage senior citizens to be more actively engaged. In America, seniors are already the age group most likely to vote and to contribute to campaigns. Their voting increased with the encouragement of vote-by-mail options during the pandemic, and this looks like it would be one good way to encourage their participation even more. They are also most likely to engage in traditional civic and political organizations, and these may be a good channel to expand their engagement. That said, almost no one ever asks Seniors to think about the future—it’s bad taste, some think, since it may force them to think about their own approaching deaths. But we have included seniors in many of the civic imagination workshops we have done across America and around the world. They bring energy and wisdom to the process, and they are often less inhibited in their creative expression than middle-aged people who are worried about professional dignity. These workshops often target existing civic organizations while creating a safe space to think and talk across partisan divides and use methods learned from fandom to encourage a longer vision of what an ideal world would look like and how we might get there. Much of this method and its underlying logics is explored in the book, Practicing Futures: A Civic Imagination Handbook (Peters-Lazaro & Shresthova, 2020).
Your defense of and elaboration on the democratic value of participatory culture constantly reminds me of the influential exploration and theorization of “micro-level resistance or semiotic democracy” by John Fiske (2010), one of your PhD supervisors, in his famous book Understanding Popular Culture. How would you reflect on the theoretical continuity and discontinuity with your late mentor’s articulation on a similar subject?
I have never been hesitant to say John Fiske has been and continues to be an important influence on my thinking, even as I know for some critical studies and political economists, these are fighting words. In my reading, Fiske only uses the term, “semiotic democracy” a few times and not in the way that many people hear and understand it. I am more drawn these days to his final book, Media Matters (Fiske, 2016), which does factor in a deeper understanding of structural obstacles to full participation in the civic and public sphere and was early in addressing issues of surveillance and more generally the questions of how we evaluate the positive and negative potentials of technology. He notes that in the Middle Ages, most humans had a larynx but not all were allowed to speak, that surveillance technology recognizes racial difference, but what we do with that information is a cultural and political decision and so forth. It is where I would go to see how Fiske might address the important issues you flag here. I am also drawn to a passage about Madonna and her fans:
“The teenage girl fan of Madonna who fantasizes her own empowerment can translate this fantasy into behavior, and can act in a more empowered way socially, thus winning more social territory for herself. When she meets others who share her fantasies and freedom there is the beginning of a sense of solidarity, of a shared resistance, that can support and encourage progressive action on the microsocial level.” (Fiske, 1989, p. 104)
First, Fiske correctly identifies the emerging current which would be labeled as riot girl feminism and which paved the way for third-wave feminist thought. He is more right than he realizes about how claiming a stance and control of space and finding solidarity with other fans can be a key step toward greater political participation. He imagines this as “micropolitics” much in the way I discussed Chinese fan women’s responses to “Tomboy” as representing first steps toward social change even if those im-pulses cannot be expressed through institutionalized politics. But our work shows that American fans are going even further, forging political organizations, and building alliances with more traditional civic groups or government institutions. They understand themselves in overtly civic terms, even if sometimes they want to avoid the term, activism. We can document what Fiske only speculated about and our research is being validated through quantitative research by established political scientists. This also forces us to engage with whether resistance or participatory politics are intrinsically progressive. They are not and have never been so, but the tactics take different forms depending on ideological logics and affiliations.
I think we shall come to the final question of this interview on your thinking on participatory culture/politics. In chapter 6 of Participatory Culture in a Networked Era, you emphasize that “the term ‘participation’ forms a bridge between work in studies on participatory culture and work in political theory and philosophy on participatory politics” (Jenkins et al., 2015, p. 156). How do you evaluate the theoretical contributions made by your research on participatory culture to the more established tradition of political philosophy on participatory democracy, which is more focused on such arenas as workplace, budgeting, and consumer responsibility?
I would say that it does several things. First, it identifies alternative paths toward political involvement. His-torically, American political science says that a young person is more apt to become politically active if their parents are politically active, if their teachers offer real-world engagements through social science classes, if they are encouraged to read newspapers at an early age, and if they participate in student organizations, especially student newspapers, student government, debate, etc. But our research shows that the participatory networks form-ed around fandom, gaming, crafting, maker culture, etc., may also offer some gateways into political participation for other young people who might otherwise fall through the cracks. Second, traditional political theory has assumed as its ideal (and often as its reality) a rational decision-maker, whereas our work allows space for fantasy, affect, and other “irrational” dimensions of political decision making—thus, our focus on the role of the imagination in fostering political change. Third, it recognizes that politics does not only occur at an institutional level but also makes connections to forms of social and cultural change which occur in our everyday life—the shifting dynamic between the genders or the races, the power struggle between youth and adults can create one’s first experience of what democracy feels like and may itself reshape the reality in which we live. The ability to speak to these kinds of micropolitical change may help us to understand how it is possible to reimagine and reinvent the world even under conditions of autocratic repression. So, think about the civic imagination that led to the registration of black voters in the American south in the 1950s and 1960s, actions which were highly risky given the hostile climate created by the white supremacists and given there was no proof that voting would change the conditions of their lives. Registering to vote was not a rational decision on one level. But they had experiences with the election of leadership within their church communities which led them to believe that democratic participation was meaningful and valuable. They knew what full representation felt like because they had seen the political power of deacons and church ladies, and so it is no accident that the political leadership for this struggle came from charismatic pastors and their congregations. The story of Moses and the Israelite’s flight from slavery in Egypt, as articulated in the Book of Exodus, gave them powerful metaphors to help communicate the stakes of these struggles and thus to produce faith in the outcome. Again, these myths were understood as a matter of faith, as a structure of feeling, and not as a matter of rational decision making. Taking this broader perspective on the civic imagination allows us to identify the elements that have led to dramatic increases of youth participation over the past four U.S. election cycles and thus offers us a way of projecting longer term social movements toward a more participatory democracy. It shifts our focus from questions of the informed citizen toward a focus on affiliation and imagination which makes grassroots political action possible. For sure, this can supplement existing political theories which do not fully capture the political repertoires of youth movements around the globe.
