This panel explores the role of communication and culture in participatory processes emerging within liminal urban and digital contexts, understood as spaces shaped by marginality, vulnerability, socio-spatial transition and deep transformations of contemporary media ecosystems. Drawing on sociological perspectives at the intersection of cultural sociology, communication studies and critical urban studies, the panel aims to analyse how participatory practices are produced, negotiated and contested in contexts marked by structural inequalities and asymmetric power relations.

Liminal contexts—such as urban peripheries, stigmatized neighbourhoods, informal or transitional territories, and hybrid digital environments—are conceptualised here not merely as spaces of exclusion, but as arenas of symbolic production and social refiguration. These spaces are characterised by heightened uncertainty, fragile institutional presence and overlapping vulnerabilities, yet they also host forms of creativity, collective action and cultural innovation. Participation within such contexts is inherently ambivalent: it can function as a vehicle for inclusion, empowerment and civic engagement, but it can also be absorbed into neoliberal narratives of “collaborative governance” that promote responsibility without redistribution, visibility without recognition, and participation without political agency.

The panel focuses on communication as a constitutive dimension of participation, rather than a neutral tool or technical support. Media practices, narratives, and symbolic forms are central to the ways communities articulate their identities, make sense of their marginal positions, and negotiate access to the public sphere. In deeply mediatised societies, participation is increasingly shaped by platform logics, algorithmic visibility and infrastructural dependencies that redefine the conditions under which voices can be heard, recognised or silenced. At the same time, liminal contexts often generate situated, improvised and hybrid communicative practices that creatively combine face-to-face interaction, informal networks and digital platforms.

A key concern of the panel is the analysis of hybrid participatory configurations, in which online and offline practices are tightly interwoven. Rather than treating digital participation as detached from material and territorial conditions, the panel emphasises the embeddedness of media practices within specific social, cultural and spatial contexts.

Another central dimension addressed by the panel is the emotional and affective dynamics of participation. Participation in liminal contexts is deeply entangled with emotions such as anger, frustration, hope, pride and belonging, which shape motivations, narratives and modes of engagement. Emotions are not treated as individual psychological states, but as socially and culturally mediated processes that influence collective identities and political subjectivities. Communicative practices—storytelling, visual narratives, shared rituals and mediated encounters—often function as spaces where emotions are articulated, negotiated and transformed into resources for action and resistance.

Empirically, the panel draws inspiration from qualitative and comparative research conducted in different European contexts, including Southern and Central-Eastern Europe, based on ethnographic approaches, participatory observation and action research. Case studies include community-led urban regeneration initiatives, cultural and media projects developed in marginalised neighbourhoods, and hybrid participatory platforms that seek to counter socio-spatial exclusion. These experiences highlight how participation from the margins often takes the form of symbolic struggle, producing counter-narratives that challenge dominant representations of places and populations.

Overall, the panel proposes a critical rethinking of participation as a cultural and communicative process, embedded in power relations and shaped by conflict, negotiation and meaning-making. By foregrounding liminality as an analytical lens, the session contributes to ongoing debates within sociology of culture and communication on democracy, participation and media, offering insights into how democratic practices are reconfigured when observed from marginal and transitional contexts. The panel ultimately seeks to foster dialogue across disciplinary boundaries, bringing together scholars interested in understanding participation not as a consensual or managerial process, but as a contested and culturally situated practice emerging from the margins of contemporary societies.

Paper 1

Observe, React, Join: Collective Resistance to Fascism and Racism

Carolina Escudero, University of Missouri, USA

This study examines contemporary anti-fascist/racist mobilizations as communicative practices of collective resistance emerging in liminal urban and digital contexts. Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives from communication studies, cultural sociology, political communication, media activism, and media psychology, the study conceptualizes resistance not merely as political opposition but as a socially embedded process of meaning-making, emotional alignment, and solidarity building.

The analysis is grounded in Couldry’s notion of human solidarity, understood as the capacity to recognize others as co-inhabitants of a shared world whose voices matter and whose lives are mutually implicated. From this perspective, resistance becomes an ethical and communicative practice through which marginalized communities reclaim visibility and reconstruct collective agency under conditions of democratic erosion. This framework is complemented by Waisbord’s work on contentious communication, Treré’s insights on media activism and hybrid participation, Bennett and Segerberg’s notion of connective action, and Boal’s conception of street performance as a space of collective representation, where public space becomes a stage for political subjectivity. Empirically, the study focuses on transnational anti-racist and anti-fascist initiatives such as World Against Racism, which exemplify how decentralized movements mobilize communicative strategies to observe patterns of discrimination, analyze structural inequalities, and react through coordinated symbolic and material actions. These mobilizations operate across hybrid configurations that intertwine digital platforms with embodied protest, transforming streets and online environments into interconnected arenas of resistance.

Methodologically, the study adopts a qualitative, critical, and interdisciplinary research design. The empirical corpus comprises movement-produced digital materials (including manifestos, visual artifacts, and social media narratives), selected media coverage, and public statements associated with recent global mobilizations. These data are examined through critical discourse analysis combined with thematic qualitative coding across three analytical dimensions: (1) narrative framing and communicative practices; (2) affective dynamics, including anger, fear, hope, and belonging; and (3) forms of collective solidarity enacted across online and offline spaces. Rather than seeking statistical representativeness, the study prioritizes analytical depth and contextual sensitivity, recognizing that resistance practices are situated within specific socio-cultural and political environments. Analytically, the mobilization process is conceptualized through a three-stage communicative trajectory observe (recognizing threats to rights, democracy, and social justice), react (engaging through digital practices such as sharing, commenting, and peer discussion), and join (participating in hybrid forms of collective action that bridge online engagement with embodied street-level mobilization). This framework enables a relational understanding of resistance as a dynamic process of awareness, emotional alignment, and collective enactment.

Findings suggest that vulnerability operates as a transformative resource in liminal contexts, where communities organize mutual aid networks, participatory assemblies, and symbolic actions that challenge neoliberal rationalities and exclusionary narratives. From a media psychology perspective, emotions are shown to play a central role in mobilization, functioning as collective forces that sustain engagement and reinforce shared identities. These affective dynamics are mediated through storytelling, visual performances, and ritualized protest practices, converting individual experiences into collective political subjectivities.

The study argues that contemporary resistance movements exemplify a shift from traditional community formations toward communities of resistance, characterized by connective action, distributed leadership, and hybrid participation. In line with Treré, these practices demonstrate how digital infrastructures can simultaneously reproduce inequalities and enable new forms of collective agency when appropriated through activist strategies. At the same time, following Waisbord, participation remains deeply contested, shaped by asymmetries of visibility and power.

By positioning communication as constitutive, rather than merely instrumental, to resistance practices, this study contributes to critical debates on participation within liminal spaces. It develops a relational understanding of collective action, rejecting reductionist interpretations and articulating how symbolic struggle, affective infrastructures and material-discursive conditions are mutually constituted in practices of solidarity.

The analysis shows how marginalised actors create counter-publics through communicative labour that contests hegemonic formations and prefigure alternative political visions.. Ultimately, the study reaffirms the constitutive role of communication in sustaining democratic horizons and emancipatory potential, particularly when authoritarian rationalities threaten to foreclose collective possibilities on a global scale.

Paper 2

Social Networks and Youth Subjectivity in Residential Care: Negotiating Autonomy and Vulnerability in the Onlife Space

Thomas André Prola, Universidad Europea del Atlántico (UNEAT)
Elira Turdubaeva, University of Bremen
Fritz Cropp, University of Missouri

This paper is part of an ethnographic study conducted on the impact of digital social networks on the subjectivity of young people living in administrative residential care within the child and adolescent protection system in Spain. It aims to analyse how these young people produce narratives in the onlife space (Floridi, 2015, Bárcenas y Preza, 2019), understood as a hybrid dimension in which the digital and the face-to-face intertwine, configuring a continuous experience of socialization, identity, and belonging.

The research is grounded in a central question that has gained particular relevance in the contemporary context marked by public and legal scrutiny of major digital platforms: Can digital social networks still be considered spaces of autonomy and democratization, or do they, by definition, constitute environments that reproduce and amplify structural vulnerabilities? The analysis focuses on the production of the self that young people deploy on social networks, attending to two complementary dimensions: (1) “being,” associated with the desire for authenticity, recognition, and visibility; and (2) “being-with,” linked to belonging, relational bonds, and the construction of community.

These dimensions are not presented as oppositional, but rather as dynamic tensions that organize digital practices and are articulated through subjective mechanisms such as the search for identity coherence, profile performativity, the management of intimacy, and self-care.

The findings show that digital social networks offer these young people the possibility of experimenting with shifting identities that are co-constructed and shaped through interaction with others, allowing them to partially step outside the institutional framework and access a symbolic territory of their own where they can relate beyond the label of vulnerability. In some cases, a predominantly digital form of socialization is observed, explained both by difficulties in engaging within physical environments and by the attraction of the “economy of followers,” in which the presence of a broad audience fuels the pursuit of recognition and consolidates a narrative oriented toward “being.” In these scenarios, intimate exposure may lead to risk situations, giving rise to what is conceptualized as “media vulnerability,” understood as the amplification of pre-existing social fragilities through digital visibility. However, the study also shows that networks function as spaces of meaningful connection where the production of the self is oriented toward “being-with others,” fostering the creation of community-based digital niches linked to educational, social, cultural, relational, or activist interests, and strengthening belonging to communities rooted in the physical world. In such cases, the positive reinforcement received in digital environments contributes to the development of a more secure subjectivity that is conscious of its areas of growth, which appears to positively influence processes of autonomy and emotional well-being among young people whose life trajectories are marked by institutional dependence. Digital social networks thus become instruments for weaving bonds, sustaining relationships, and projecting possible futures, expanding the space of educational containment toward community-based supports beyond the family or professional sphere.

The paper concludes that digital social networks cannot be unambiguously defined either as spaces of emancipation or as inherently dangerous environments, but rather as complex scenarios in which autonomy and vulnerability coexist and are shaped by structural conditions linked to individual practices and the quality of established relationships. The digital thus emerges as a strategic field for socio-educational intervention and for the contemporary understanding of youth subjectivation processes in contexts of protection.

Paper 3

Solidarity in Crisis: Emergency Networks, Liminal Participation and the Communicative Reconfiguration of Social Cohesion. Insights from the SEE Project

Fabiana Battisti, University of Rome “Tor Vergata”
Andrea Volterrani, University of Rome “Tor Vergata”

Contemporary emergency networks — civil protection organisations, volunteer-based first response systems, and humanitarian coordination structures — represent one of the most institutionally consolidated expressions of social solidarity. Yet these organisations are today confronted with a compound crisis that exceeds the well-documented decline of volunteerism: they face a deeper fracture in the fabric of social solidarity itself, one that arrests collective action and neutralises participatory impulses at their root. The [redacted for peer review] project engages directly with this paradox, investigating how organisations historically entrusted with the care of communities have become increasingly disconnected from the very territories and vulnerabilities they are called to address. This disconnection is not merely operational but deeply cultural and communicative, reflecting broader transformations in how contemporary societies produce, sustain, and transmit solidary bonds across generations and institutional forms.

Drawing on two years of participatory action research conducted across five European countries — Italy, Germany, Slovakia, France, and Greece — this paper critically examines the structural contradictions embedded in emergency organisations operating within late-modern, deeply mediatised societies. These institutions are caught in a peculiar temporal bind: they must anticipate and plan for future crises while remaining anchored in operational presents shaped by bureaucratic inertia, resource scarcity, and monolithic organisational cultures resistant to horizontal transformation. Their relationship with local communities is marked by a profound communicative gap: institutional silence toward citizens and fragile local actors coexists with an internal reproduction of neoliberal action schemas that prioritise efficiency over relational depth, visibility over recognition, and service delivery over genuine civic engagement. This tension reflects a structural inability to inhabit the present and the future simultaneously — to be responsive to immediate emergencies while building the participatory infrastructures needed for long-term social resistance.

The paper draws on ethnographic observation and action research methodologies to surface the contradictions structuring these dynamics, foregrounding participation as the critical axis around which processes of knowledge exchange and territorial embedding must be reconstructed. Rather than treating participation as a procedural mechanism or managerial tool, the analysis frames it as a culturally and communicatively situated practice that is inherently contested and power-laden. Emergency organisations, despite their non-profit and civic character, are not exempt from the absorption of collaborative governance logics that promote responsibilisation without redistribution and engagement without political subjectivity. The research across the five national contexts reveals significant variation in how these tensions manifest, yet points to a common pattern: the more organisations operate monolithically and in isolation from local knowledge, the more their participatory potential is foreclosed, both externally toward communities and internally among their own members and volunteers.

Central to the [redacted for peer review] framework is the conceptualisation of solidarity as a liminal space — generative, ambivalent, and emotionally charged. Emotions of belonging, connection, anger and hope are not peripheral to organisational life but constitute its affective infrastructure, shaping how volunteers and communities co-produce meaning, negotiate trust, and sustain or abandon collective commitments. The crisis of volunteerism, in this reading, is inseparable from a broader affective crisis: the erosion of shared emotional grammars through which solidarity is felt, expressed and acted upon. Communicative practices — storytelling, hybrid media use, shared ritual — emerge in the research as irreplaceable sites where these emotional dynamics are articulated and potentially transformed into renewed solidarity. Hybrid participatory configurations, combining face-to-face interaction with digital platforms and informal networks, are shown to offer creative pathways for re-embedding emergency organisations within their local contexts, provided that such tools are appropriated through community-centred rather than top-down logics.

The paper ultimately argues that restoring solidarity as a generative social force for tomorrow's societies requires a radical rethinking of how emergency institutions communicate, listen, and participate — not only outwardly toward communities, but inwardly, restructuring their organisational cultures from within. Solidarity, reclaimed as a liminal and communicative space, becomes both the object of inquiry and the horizon of transformation that the [redacted for peer review] project seeks to contribute to ongoing European debates on democratic participation, social cohesion and the future of civic institutions.

Paper 4

Between silence and resistance: the Italian peace movement between mediatisation and the politics of war discourse

Michele Sorice, Sapienza University of Rome
Mattia Zunino, Luiss University, Rome

In an era of intensifying geopolitical conflict and the accelerating militarisation of European political discourse, peace movements occupy a paradoxical position: they are structurally marginalised within mainstream media representation yet are symbolically central to the reproduction of counter-hegemonic imaginaries. This paper presents the findings of an ongoing research project examining the Italian peace movement as a space of cultural and political resistance against dominant narratives that legitimise military escalation and which have pervaded Italian public discourse since the outbreak of the Russo-Ukrainian War and the renewed crisis in the Middle East.

Drawing on Gramsci's concept of hegemony and Habermas's theory of the public sphere, the research conceptualises the peace movement as a communicative practice — a form of collective enunciation that seeks to reclaim discursive legitimacy within a media system increasingly colonised by geopolitical and institutional actors with vested interests in normalising war rhetoric. The theoretical framework integrates critical discourse analysis (CDA) with mediatisation theory (Hjarvard, Couldry, and Hepp) to examine how peace activism is shaped by, and resists, the logics of contemporary media platforms.

Methodologically, the research combines two complementary approaches. The first is participatory action research (PAR), which was conducted with activists, organisers and participants of the Italian peace movement in several metropolitan areas, including Rome, Milan and Naples. PAR is conceived as an epistemological and ethical commitment here, recognising that knowledge about resistance must be co-produced with those who enact it. Through sustained engagement with movement participants, the research explores how peace activists perceive, develop, and express their political identity; how they navigate the tension between visibility and co-optation within digital media environments; and how they create alternative meanings in opposition to the dominant consensus on war.

The second methodological approach is a systematic discourse analysis of political speech acts produced by Italian parliamentary representatives and government officials concerning peace, war, and military support, ranging from official parliamentary debates to media appearances and social media communication. This corpus-based analysis maps the rhetorical and ideological structures through which war is legitimised, dissent is delegitimised, and the figure of the peace activist is constructed as either naïve or complicit. Particular attention is given to the discursive mechanisms of securitisation, emotional framing and the strategic mobilisation of memory, notably anti-fascist and Cold War references, in contemporary political communication.

Comparing movement and institutional discourse reveals a profound asymmetry of symbolic power but also highlights significant contradictions and fissures within the hegemonic bloc. While political discourse portrays peace advocacy as irresponsible or apolitical, movement actors develop nuanced counter-narratives that link pacifism to critiques of NATO militarisation, arms industry interests, and the democratic deficit in foreign policy decision-making. However, these narratives struggle to achieve systemic media visibility beyond episodic coverage, raising broader questions about the structural conditions of democratic deliberation in contemporary Italy.

The paper contributes to ongoing debates in critical media studies by arguing that the Italian peace movement functions as a liminal space of resistance — a site where alternative political subjectivities are constructed precisely at the margins of mainstream discursive power. Understanding this marginality and the communicative practices through which it is contested is essential for any serious engagement with the crisis of democracy in contemporary Europe.