This Open Access book explains the philosophy, design principles, and community organization of Decidim and provides essential insights into how the platform works. Decidim is the world leading digital infrastructure for participatory democracy, built entirely and collaboratively as free software, and used by more than 500 institutions with over three million users worldwide. The platform allows any organization (government, association, university, NGO, neighbourhood, or cooperative) to support multitudinous processes of participatory democracy. In a context dominated by corporate-owned digital platforms, in the era of increasing social structuring via Artificial Intelligence, Decidim stands as a public or community owned platform for collective human intelligence. Yet, the project is much more than its technological features. Decidim is in itself a crossroad of the various dimensions of the networked society, a detailed practical map of its complexities and conflicts. The authors distinguish three general dimensions of the project: (1) the political - shedding light on the democratic model that Decidim promotes and its impact on public policies and organizations, (2) the technopolitical - explaining how this technology is democratically designed and managed to produce and protect certain political effects, and (3) the technical - presenting the conditions of production, operation, and success of the project. This book systematically covers those three levels in an academically sound, technologically consistent, and politically innovative manner. Serving as a useful resource and handbook for the use of Decidim, it will not only appeal to students and scholars interested in participatory and digital democracy but also to professionals, policy-makers, and a wider audience interested in learning more about the Decidim platform. This is an open access book.

This edited collection presents original and compelling research about contemporary experiences of Latin American movements and politics in several countries. The book proposes a theoretical framework that conceptualises different mediation processes that emerge between cyberdemocracy and the emancipation practices of new social movements. Additionally, this volume presents some Latin American practices and experiences that are autonomously and by using self-management–creating other identities and social spaces on the margins of and against the neoliberal system through the use of digital technology. This book will be of great interest to scholars of media and social movements studies as well as of contemporary politics.

Women Mobilizing Memory, a transnational exploration of the intersection of feminism, history, and memory, shows how the recollection of violent histories can generate possibilities for progressive futures. Questioning the politics of memory-making in relation to experiences of vulnerability and violence, this wide-ranging collection asks: How can memories of violence and its afterlives be mobilized for change? What strategies can disrupt and counter public forgetting? What role do the arts play in addressing the erasure of past violence from current memory and in creating new visions for future generations? Women Mobilizing Memory emerges from a multiyear feminist collaboration bringing together an interdisciplinary group of scholars, artists, and activists from Chile, Turkey, and the United States. The essays in this book assemble and discuss a deep archive of works that activate memory across a variety of protest cultures, ranging from seemingly minor acts of defiance to broader resistance movements. The memory practices it highlights constitute acts of repair that demand justice but do not aim at restitution. They invite the creation of alternative histories that can reconfigure painful pasts and presents. Giving voice to silenced memories and reclaiming collective memories that have been misrepresented in official narratives, Women Mobilizing Memory offers an alternative to more monumental commemorative practices. It models a new direction for memory studies and testifies to a continuing hope for an alternative future.

Drawing on a range of theoretical and empirical perspectives, this volume examines the roles strategic communications play in creating social media messaging campaigns designed to engage in digital activism. As social activism and engagement continue to rise, individuals have an opportunity to use their agency as creators and consumers to explore issues of identity, diversity, justice, and action through digital activism. This edited volume situates activism and social justice historically and draws parallels to the work of activists in today’s social movements such as modern-day feminism, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, Missing Murdered Indigenous Women, and We Are All Khaled Said. Each chapter adds an additional filter of nuance, building a complete account of mounting issues through social media movements and at the same time scaffolding the complicated nature of digital collective action. The book will be a useful supplement to courses in public relations, journalism, social media, sociology, political science, diversity, digital activism, and mass communication at both the undergraduate and graduate level.

This book focuses on the rise of sharing and collaboration practices among peers in Spanish digital cultures and social movements in the wake of Spain’s financial meltdown of 2008.

¿Es posible hablar de insurrecciones 2.0?, ¿de nuevas formas de acuerpamiento social?, ¿de nuevas formas de protesta y organización colectiva? ¿Qué desafíos plantea la ola de insurrecciones que han irrumpido en la escena del siglo XXI? Este libro busca repensar las preguntas que nos hacemos en torno a las culturas políticas de los jóvenes y su acción colectiva. También reflexiona sobre la idea de sujeto y sus formas de expresión. Un sujeto que busca deslindarse de los determinismos, que sale a campo abierto, en plena tempestad sin certezas. Un sujeto que se arriesga no para decretar, sino para comprender, para asir lo inasible “garantizando su estatuto de inasible”, como quería Levinas. La autora habla acerca, de, sobre y especialmente con quienes han construido una inmensa red de conversaciones colectivas, de acciones, de estéticas y de lenguajes. Estos movimientos sociales surgidos en la red y trasladados a la calle, han logrado interrumpir el monólogo de los poderes propietarios.