I have thought about which method I should use for the final project. Since I belong to EFI, I wanted to find something creative, though I couldn’t have connected it with my awareness of the problem for a long time. However, once the core problem I wanted to tackle became clear, I finally had an image of using it. Furthermore, at the same time, I came up with an idea that I would use the Open Prototype which I experienced in Building Near Future.

What is the Open Prototype?

“OP is presented as conceptual and methodological framework for artistic practice and public participation that bridges the space between technology and society, and contributes to city and technology innovation (Hemment, 2020).”

“OP is an approach to developing and testing ideas, making ideas tangible, and allowing play to drive the exploration, so new possibilities can emerge untutored to specific constraints of production (Hemment, 2020).”

“OP is a means of testing and developing a concept or thing with various contributors and communities given agency at various stages of the process (Hemment, 2015).”

The reasons why young people in Japan have assumed “there is no point of getting engaged” or “they will make no change” toward society and politics, may be based on the interdisciplinary issues, such as the election system, the content taught through compulsory education, and recognition toward society and politics as massive things that is out of control. They are also probably intertwined with each other and for which no effective solution can be found in any single field alone (It is a literally wicked problem). Although The the details of the background will be analysed from each discipline in my literature review, I will try to utilise the Open Prototype to tackle the problem, bringing together young people working in different fields and letting them think freely about solutions in an interdisciplinary way and without difficult restrictions.

Furthermore, it is what I wanted because this method itself is supposed to give the participants a sense of agency, which means they would have some hope or courage of taking action toward better society and politics after the participation!

I will summarise the literature written by Tanigawa (2005) organising Giroux’s definition of ‘criticism’.

Giroux has been trying to reconstruct the American school system, learning from Freire, who claimed to society that education should have incorporated the concepts of self-liberation and social change. He is also one of the leading exponents of ‘critical pedagogy,’ which can be seen from two perspectives: ‘Reproduction’ and ‘Resistance’.

Giroux advocates the ‘Resistance theory’, which recognises that students have the power to change the dominating systems, not only acquiring the ‘Language of Critique’ under the reproduction theory.

According to him, critical literacy enables people to critically read their personal and social world and promotes the kind of power that challenges the myths and beliefs that have structured their perception and experience.

He explains the concept of ‘criticism’ in critical literacy from the perspective of (i) the learner as an ‘action subject’, (ii) the focus on the aspect of hope through the liberation of memory, and (iii) the attention to complexity in the learning field.

Reference:
Tanigawa, T. (2005). Examining the concept of “criticism” in literacy education : H. A. Giroux’s initiative. Teaching Methods Exploring, 8, 11–19. https://doi.org/10.14989/190311

I am going to answer the second question by Huw by reading the literature. It would be appropriate to read several references for each aspect, but I aimed to make a tentative answer to the first question for now.

Political Awareness: Political interest seems to be formed differently in young people and adults.

Hata, M. (2016). Mechanisms of formation of political interest among ‘new voters’. Election research, 32(2), pp.45–55. doi:https://doi.org/10.14854/jaes.32.2_45.

Interest in politics is often described in terms of the concept of political socialisation, with young people (the scope of which is ambiguous) adapting to the concept of political and social systems in the early socialisation phase. Then, as adults, in the later socialisation phase, they become interested in politics for ‘interest democracy’ reasons (e.g. parents who are raising children try to benefit themselves by voting for politicians who seek to improve the child-rearing environment). The findings of this paper show that adults’ interest in politics increases the moment they feel that politics may benefit them.

In my previous post, I looked at the difference between political engagement and civic engagement in order to answer the following question

Question 1: Is the problem lack of political engagement or lack of civic engagement? What’s the difference?

Although there is a signal of a lack of political engagement, mainly proved by our low voting rate (I cannot explain the status only by it, though), I had no idea about the current level of civic engagement and the civic engagement stage, which is also a process of political engagement. Therefore, I read the literature “Mechanisms of formation of political interest among ‘new voters’” (Hata, 2016)

Short summary
Interest in politics is often described in terms of the concept of political socialisation. In the early socialisation phase, young people (the range of age is ambiguous) get interested in politics while adaping to the concept of political and social systems. Then after they get older, people(adults) the trigger of the interest in politics is generally individual merits (e.g. parents who seek to benefit themselves by voting for politicians who try to improve the child-rearing environment). This paper shows that interest in politics among adults definitely increase when they thinks something political are likely to benefit them.

Thoughts after reading
The level of civic engagement/involvement needs to be re-examined(I could not find the clue from this article), but I found that adults and young people have different backgrounds of interest in politics. Today, I had a chat with my Japanese friends and talked about our mental distance between politics and us. All of us have been struggling with thinking politics as our important and daily topic/event. Assuming that this is the general perception, the problem in our country nowadays may be that we don’t feel like politics strongly connects with us.

Reference

I shared the revisited project plan with Huw, who gave me a beautiful series of critical questions to refine it further. There are 12 questions, so I will try to answer to them in this blog (hopefully) this week.

Question 1: Is the problem lack of political engagement or lack of civic engagement? What’s the difference?

Before answering this question, it is important to clarify the definitions of political engagement and civic engagement, using Ekman and Amnå’s literature (2012) that appears to point out the history and problems with these definitions.

Short summary

There is no clear definition of civic engagement and a number of limited or broad definitions exist, including from volunteering in the local communities to electoral activities such as voting. On the other hand, the definition of political participation refers to actions that can directly influence the behaviour of political actors. The difference between civic and political participation could be said to be whether the object of influence is clear or not.

Ekman and Amnå are aware of the ambiguity of the definition of civic engagement, and the narrow definition of political participation. They say that the degree of civic participation in society is too difficult to measure, and that political participation is too narrowly defined and there are behaviours that are overlooked.

They say that civic engagement can be a necessary condition for political participation(but not sufficient). For example, recycling does not directly influence the political actors, but it could foster citizens’ environmental awareness, which could lead them to vote for the politicians who say they respect addressing environmental issues, or to participate in protests for environmental protection.

It is also argued that there is an ‘involvement’ that precedes action. Citing Martín and van Deth (2007), they say involvement is defined as an interest in political and social issues and a recognition that politics is important.

They conclude the literature by stating that the authentic question is how civic involvement and engagement can lead to the political participation. They also claim that current mass-research often focuses only on manifest political participation, it means whether citizens are really disengaged from politics is not properly assessed.

Thoughts after reading
– In Japan, many medias have alerted that our political engagement is in crisis, considering the results, such as the declining voter turnout or the survey showing that “young people are not interested in politics”.
– What is the current situation in my country really like? Generally, many Japanese people are said to be “not interested in politics” or “have an aversion to politics”, but if I actually go and look at the potential indicators, isn’t the situation actually not as bad as it is reported in the media?
– Can I find hope for society by focusing on those who are participating in politics, or the other activities called as “civic engagement” ? Or should I still focus on investigating the actual situation because no one have investigated the authentic situation in the first place?
– I will find out if there is any literature or research that dig into the level of potential political participation in Japan and write the next blog post.

Reference

Recap of previous edition

Theme: Re-imagining higher education for the Pacific good in Japan, engaging with futures and wicked problems
Research question: ‘What are the problems in post-compulsory education in Japan to reach ideal futures?

Ideal Futures: A society where fulfilled citizens continue to learn, actively participate, and work together to create better futures.

Method:
– Literature Review to examine the ideal futures
– Visualise and Structurelise current problems to reach the ideal futures

After meeting with Huw last month, I set up the final project, which is as I wrote the above. However, after reading the related literature and receiving inspiration from classes and others, I would like to change the general framework of the project as follows.

Theme: Re-imagining civic education in Japan, engaging with futures and wicked problems
Research question: In everyday life (informal settings), how do those who embody the ideal citizen live? What do they experience and learn from?
Ideal Futures: People have inclusive commitment as democratic citizens to conscious social reproduction, the self-conscious shaping of the structures of society.

Method:
– Literature Review to examine wicked problems and the ideal futures
– Action-oriented research 
– Life story Interview
– Observe things that reveal the subjects’ lives (asking to see photos of their houses, mapping their friends and family relationships, mining their texts on their posts on social media, etc.)

The rough outline of the Final Project paper is summarised on this Miro (right side of the board), if you have the time to look.

Background to change

– I was very sympathetic to Gutmann and Gutmann’s argument for the ideal state of society, where citizens are doing critical thinking about the reproduction of society (Crittenden and Levine, 2007).

– I want to quit problem-focused research.
– In the literature on research on indigenous peoples that I came across during the group work on Educating for a challenging future, I learnt that research on them affects their social image and self-consciousness (Tuck, 2009). I do not want to negatively affect the subjects and audiences of my research. Instead of that, I would like to focus on hopes.

– Research methods
– No matter how careful I am, my questions would influence on the subjects’ answers
– It seems that no one (at least not many people) has yet conducted action-oriented research of social engagement of young people in Japan (I will have to research more though)

Next steps / Questions
– I would like to get feedback on the overall direction of the project.
– If I go in this direction, Who should be my subjects?
– Along with the selection of the subjects, it would give me ideas of the angles from which I should observe people’s lives.

Reference