Fostering Adolescents’ Civic Imagination. A Digital Visual Participatory Approach to Education

Abstract

In the network society, adolescents and young adults are exposed daily to the action of the machines of dis-imagination that populate the infosphere: devices serving market logics and generating dependency and social disintegration. In this scenario, promoting digital and visual literacy oriented toward civic imagination represents a central educational challenge. The aim is to expand the space of adolescent agency by offering images, ideas and tools to construct alternative narratives to the market’s “public pedagogy,” which tends to direct processes of subjectivation and to limit participatory ones. The contribution presents cellphilming as a visual participatory research technique, understood as an aesthetic, educational and digital practice that restores to younger generations control over self-representation, imagination and the creative process, giving them voice through multimedia outputs shareable on the wild, wide web.