Achieving Citizenship and Recognition through Blogging about Homelessness
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18533/journal.v3i8.466Keywords:
blogging, homelessness, citizenship, recognitionAbstract
This article describes a blog written by four men who were homeless in a western Canadian city in 2010. The blog was an attempt to promote communication between homeless people and the domiciled public, to assert the agency of homeless people, and to promote social integration through their participation in public discourse about homelessness. The bloggers explicitly set out to engage in civic action. In doing this they positioned themselves as advocates and therefore citizens—people with the right and responsibility to describe the “realities” of homelessness, critique existing social structures, take part in public dialogue about homelessness, advocate for change, and stand up for homeless people. This was a subject position that was not previously available to them. The blog project is an example of “lived citizenship,” citizenship as active participatory practice, and a way to achieve what Nancy Fraser calls a politics of recognition.References
Beresford, P. & Croft, S. (1995). “It’s our problem too.” Critical Social Policy, 15(2/3), 75-95.
Berghman, J. (1995). Social exclusion in Europe. In G. Room (Ed.), Beyond the threshold. Bristol: Polity Press.
Corbella, L. (2010). Personal Communication.
Dahlberg, L. (2001). The internet and democratic discourse: Exploring the prospects of online deliberative forums extending the public sphere. Information, Communication & Society, 4(4), 615-633.
Franklin, U. (2006). The Ursula Franklin reader: Pacifism as a map. Toronto: Between the Lines.
Fraser, N. (2000). Rethinking recognition. New Left Review, 3, May/June, 107-120.
Habermas, J. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a category of Bourgeois Society. Trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991.
Herring, S. C., Scheidt, L. A., Bonus, S., & Wright, E. (2004, January). Bridging the gap: A genre analysis of weblogs. In Proceedings of the Thirty-seventh Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-37). Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Press.
Lasica, J. D. (2003). What is Participatory Journalism? Online Journalism Review, August 7, 2003.
Lister, R. ((2002). A politics of recognition and respect: Involving people with experience of poverty in decision making that affects their lives. Social Policy and Society, 1(1), 37-46.
Lister, R. (2007). Inclusive citizenship: Realizing the potential. Citizenship Studies, 11(1), 49-61.
Maurer, E. (2009). “Working consensus” and the rhetorical situation: The homeless blog’s negotiation of public meta-genre. In J. Giltrow & D. Stein (Eds.), Genres in the internet. pp. 113-142. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
McNeill, L. (2009). Brave new genre or generic colonialism?: Debates over ancestry in internet diaries. In J. Giltrow & D. Stein (Eds.), Genres in the internet. pp. 143-161. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Nielsen, G. (2009). Framing dialogue in immigration in the New York Times. Aether: The Journal of Media Geography, 4, 37-57.
Nielsen, G. (2008). Conditional hospitality: Framing dialogue on poverty on Montreal newspapers. Canadian Journal of Communication, 23, 605-619.
Papacharissi, Z. (2007). Audiences as media producers: Content analysis of 260 blogs. In M. Tremayne, (Ed.), Blogging, citizenship, and the future of Media. New York: Routledge.
Poster, M. (2001). What’s the matter with the internet? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Rosen, J. (2006). The People Formerly Known as the Audience. PressThink, June 27, 2006.
Silverstone, R. (2007). Media and morality: On the rise of the mediapolis. Cambridge: Polity.
Taylor, C. (1997). The politics of recognition. In A. Heble, P. Pennee & J. R. Struthers (Eds.), New contexts of Canadian criticism. Broadview Press.
Thompson, S. (2006). The political theory of recognition: A critical introduction. Cambridge: Polity.
Tremayne, M. (Ed.), (2007). Blogging, citizenship, and the future of Media. New York: Routledge.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).