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The purpose of this paper is to explore the epistemological tensions embedded within big data and data-driven technologies to advance a socio-political reconsideration of the public dimension in the assessment of their implementation.

This paper builds upon (and revisits) the European Union’s (EU) normative understanding of artificial intelligence (AI) and data-driven technologies, blending reflections rooted in philosophy of technology with issues of democratic participation in tech-related matters.

This paper proposes the conceptual design of sectorial and/or local-level e-participation platforms to ignite an ongoing discussion – involving experts, private actors, as well as cognizant citizens – over the implementation of data-driven technologies, to avoid siloed, tech-solutionist decisions.

This paper inscribes the EU’s normative approach to AI and data-driven technologies, as well as critical work on the governance of these technologies, into a broader political dimension, suggesting a way to democratically and epistocratically opening up the decisional processes over the development and implementation of these technologies and turn such processes into a systemic civic involvement.

In recent years, there has been a growth in research aimed at understanding the foundations of modern activist communication in media-rich and multi-platform environments. For example, Chon and Park's analysis of the American Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement built on Kim and Grunig's STOPS model. Yet, social and political injustice can exist for extended periods of time without successful movements emerging, so what leads people to demand social and political change through activism? This paper posits that crisis is trigger that motivates people to activism and evaluates that within the context of the Scottish independence movement.

The study is based on in-depth interviews with 26 advocates for Scottish independence, which yielded more than 32 h of data. Data were analysed using Strauss and Corbin's (1990) constant comparative method approach using open coding, axial coding and selective coding finding thematic saturation after only 10 interviews.

The study provides a clear extension of Chon and Park's model of activism by finding that crises are critical triggers for activism. Moreover, these findings also provide insights into not only the Scottish independence movement but more broadly the extension of traditional public relations and communication theory in multi-platform and multi-actor environments.

There are several contributions this piece makes. First, this paper extends activist, crisis and strategic communication research to more systematically consider the role that crisis plays in social and political advocacy. Second, this paper affords the opportunity to consider the challenges of communication, democracy and activism in the social media age. Finally, this paper supports an international view that discrimination and affective injustice experiences cut across many different kinds of identities and experiences instead of the traditionally considered ethnic, religious and gender-based experiences traditionally addressed.

Following the traditions of stakeholder salience theory, this paper aims to contend that some institutional investor activists and tactics have more power, legitimacy and urgency than others.

The author undertakes an empirical test of a saliency table looking at the effects of institutional investor heterogeneity on portfolio firm responses using ordinal logistic regression.

This study found heterogeneity for institutional investor type to drive firm responses but not tactic type raising the importance of the attributes of each type of investor activist. The author found a rank ordering of public pension plans, hedge funds and then private multiemployer funds in saliency to portfolio firms. In addition, the use of proxy-based tactics did not help or hurt each investor type. Both findings challenge prior empirical work.

The rank ordering based upon the heterogeneity of institutional investor activists and their tactical interactions are tested providing empirical evidence of the most influential activist investors and tactics in one study, which is rare in the literature.

Young people in rural areas often face barriers when accessing participation opportunities in their municipalities. This affects their voices being heard and their ability to create change. Even though almost half the world’s population lives in rural areas, rural young people’s activism is often overlooked in the literature. In addition, when young people’s activism is explored in empirical research, conceptualisations of activism and methods are often not tailored to rural areas. This chapter, thus, adds to our understanding of young people’s activism in rural municipalities by drawing on a mixed methods case study including thirteen focus groups (FGs; n = 35) and a questionnaire (n = 106) with young people aged 13–17, and semi-structured interviews (n = 11) with teachers from one secondary school in a rural municipality in Germany. Five of the FGs were conducted and analysed by Year 10 students, adding unique insights into participants’ experience of activism. In this chapter, activism is conceptualised as one of the multiple dimensions of citizenship. Activism includes demanding systemic change, individually or collectively, which may include refusing to do things, aiming to prevent laws, raising awareness, and making consumer choices. Rather than being full-time activists, the young people in this study were engaged in only a few forms of activism, often carried out ad-hoc, part-time and in connection with other citizenship activities such as volunteering. Spaces for activism included online, the local municipality, everyday spaces such as the supermarket, and school. Participants experienced multiple barriers when engaging in activism including narratives of non-activist young people, age restrictions, power imbalances and few opportunities for creating change, particularly at participants’ school and in their municipalities.

This chapter explores how coming into contact with the narratives of environmental victims helps to develop different forms of reflexivity useful for imagining and confronting environmental crises. The generation and sharing of environmental data and of visual and narrative experiences of lived environmental harms by ‘ordinary people’ amounts to more than merely supplying robust data to fellow citizens, scientists and decision-makers. It is also a proactive claim for social and environmental justice, especially when these people are silenced or even criminalised. While forms of civic monitoring can be regarded as a contribution to environmental governance, they have instead often been labelled as ‘subversive’ or illegal practices. In this contribution, the authors explore how ‘green’ activist criminology may help in the challenge to have these voices enabled and listened. The challenge has to be taken up by developing an active listening attitude towards the voices of people (‘folk voices’) affected by/exposed to environmental harms, enhancing visual imagination and complexity about the contested notion of the environmental victim, together with new ways of taking care and a new paradigm of the ‘active victim’. In the conclusion, the authors acknowledge the potential of an art-based inquiry that is inclusive of civic imaginaries and knowledge. However, they also stress that cultural barriers and ideologies may hamper this potential. Critical attitude and integrity of any scientific approach should be sought and preserved.

Academic literature and news media on young people’s activism predominantly champions young people who align with liberal or progressive values, evident most recently in the youth-led climate strikes around the world. Research is often undertaken by scholars who see their work as advocacy for children and young people, countering deficit-based depictions of politically disengaged or ill-informed youth. Yet, this scholarship rarely includes young people whose forms of political activism align with conservative, right-wing, or even alt-right politics. Such ‘selective advocacy’ reinforces a limited picture of the who and what of young people’s political participation. In this chapter, I explore what it might mean for the field of youth studies to provide a more complex picture of young people’s activism and the necessary discomfort that emerges when the desire to advocate for young research participants conflicts with a researcher’s own political and moral concerns. Through a feminist post-structural frame, I examine media and public discourses surrounding instances of young people’s activism in conservative, right-wing, and alt-right spaces. I present the case of a conservative protest organised by a group of university students and targeting a drag queen hosted children’s story time at a library in Brisbane, Australia. This case highlights the importance of maintaining ‘epistemic uncertainty’ when it comes to the complexity of youth and activism. If we are to provide a fuller picture of youth activism, I argue that it is important not to overlook less ‘comfortable’ forms that do not neatly align with the progressive advocacy that dominates the field of youth studies.