The “Voices of the voiceless: New challenges of mobilization and citizen engagement” international conference is the 7th edition of the Understanding Transition conferences held byFJSC (University of Bucharest) and the Lumière University Lyon 2.
Participating, sharing, mobilizing and interactivity have become essential strategies to shaping citizen engagement and a collaborative construction of knowledge. Digital platforms allow citizens to turn into the new power-holders through online empowerment, thus becoming active prosumers of knowledge production. Sharing knowledge is important in digital citizenship and the various forms of transmitting knowledge depend on the affordances of online channels. Organizations have been trying to reduce the communication and/or democratic deficit by using e-platforms as communicative spaces where a dialogue-based public engagement prevail by involving citizens in the process of decision-making of social, cultural, economic, or political issues (Phillips, Carvalho, Doyle, 2012).
Besides this co-production of meaning where a collaborative perspective is dominant, people use organizational and civil society online outlets as sites of cyber-activism. The “netizens” (Franklin, 2010) have become important members of a civic engagement community by having a collective identity, a common bond, and the same grievances concerning a political, social, educational or cultural issue.
This international conference is an ideal opportunity for experienced researchers, young researchers and PhD students to share their scientific work in an interdisciplinary context and to take part in the debates over various approaches and case studies related to dialogic turn, participatory democracy, and the latest forms of citizen engagement and mobilization.
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The space for people to speak out, organize and take action against poverty, inequality and injustice is shrinking on a global scale. People in many countries around the world face serious restrictions and repression when exercising their basic rights. This includes citizens who raise their voices against corruption and political dysfunction, organizations that save lives and provide basic services to people in need, communities that defend their sustainable livelihoods and demand a fair share of natural resources, and activists who fight for gender justice.