Simon Magnusson försvarar sin avhandling Boosting young citizens’ deontic status
Interactional allocation of rights-to-decide in participatory democracy meetings.

Ämne: Svenska

Forskarutbildningsområde: Utbildningsvetenskapliga studier

Opponent: Camilla Lindholm, Professor of Nordic languages, Tampere University, Tampere,
Finland

Adolescents today are often invited to participatory democracy meetings with the overt purpose exercising their rights as citizens, being a part of decisions that affect them, revitalizing democracy and fostering capable young citizens. In fact, authorities argue that inclusion through social interaction in this sense is paramount for nurturing a healthy democracy. Since participatory democracy meetings are deemed so important for citizen-inclusion, especially for adolescents, a question arises regarding how inclusion for the invited adolescents is achieved in these meetings. From a conversation analysis perspective, this dissertation investigates how adolescents are included in decision-making processes in participatory democracy meetings. The question of how adolescents are included in decision-making that affects them guides the dissertation’s overarching focus, and cases from participatory democracy meetings, where adolescents have been invited to participate in shaping the world of tomorrow, are therefore analyzed using the concepts of the social and deontic order of interaction. By applying a framework of social deontics – a nano-level approach to human power play – this dissertation reveals that even though the adolescents were encouraged to participate in decision-making, participation was mostly about complying with the adults’ views on who the adolescents were and how they were expected to contribute. The dissertation further shows how asymmetries of power, knowledge, and emotions are (re)established through the adults' initiatives of inclusion, and that true jointness and inclusion were only achieved once the adolescents were left to manage themselves.