This panel proposes to open a space for critical reflection on the various ways in which communication, from the standpoint of the Social Sciences, participates in the construction, contestation and transformation of citizenship in contexts marked by inequality, violence, conflicting memories and technological reconfigurations. Rather than understanding citizenship solely as a legal or institutional category, this panel conceives it as a social, political, cultural and communicative practice produced in everyday life, in territories, in digital networks, in community media, in struggles over memory, and in collective ways of imagining fairer futures. From this perspective, we are interested in thinking of communication not only as the transmission of information, but as a field of power, mediation, symbolic dispute and collective action.
The panel calls for papers analyzing processes of cyberactivism, digital citizenship, communication on social and digital networks, community media, social and community artivism, journalism, power and citizenship, as well as experiences linked to memory, peace and human rights. It seeks to bring together research that helps understand how different social actors produce narratives, occupy public and digital spaces, challenge hegemonic discourses, denounce violence, and create forms of counter-power through words, images, bodies, technology and collective organization. In this sense, communication appears as a situated practice that makes it possible to render visible historically silenced experiences, build community, sustain living memories, and contest the meanings of the public sphere amid scenarios of precarity, surveillance, disinformation, polarization and media concentration.
We invite reflection on digital environments as complex territories where possibilities for participation, denunciation and organization are articulated, but also new forms of control, algorithmic exclusion and communicative survival. We seek to problematize how algorithms, platforms and digital networks reconfigure forms of citizenship, activism, journalism and community action, as well as the strategies that individuals and collectives build to resist, narrate themselves and exist amid these conditions.
In this sense, we invite the sharing of experiences that defend information as a fundamental right of citizenship, one that circulates both digitally and in other analog formats, understood as a pillar of democracy. Under these premises, the panel calls for questioning the inappropriate use of information and its impact on society, as well as sharing reflections and experiences from spaces of resistance that showcase other ways of narrating, other views and perspectives that account for diverse realities, through which citizens exercise communication and information as a fundamental right of democracy.
