To Participate or Not to Participate? Social Movements 4.0 and the Return of Dichotomies

The Covid-19 pandemic did not spare any population of the world, highlighting the advantages and disadvantages of globalization and technological development. The imposed social distancing was one of the crucial aspects of the pandemic period with consequences to deprive people of the possibility of meeting and to exercise their right to demonstrate, in those countries where it is possible as well as in democratic countries. We have seen new ways of active participation into the res publica and new forms of movements for protest or support policies and decision making. This aspect became even more evident with the second catastrophe that affected the world: the conflict in Ukraine. On the one hand, opposing representations of reality had been created by facts and narratives (West vs Eurasia, NATO vs Russian Federation, democracies vs authoritarianism, etc.), exacerbating xenophobia and raising ideological barriers, drawing our attention to the dichotomies that for time had been overcome by reflection on social complexity and global citizenship. On the other hand, we are witnessing a voice 4.0, typically from young people of the Erasmus generation (European scale) or the Tik Tok generation (global scale), transversal, digital, open and expressed symbolically, if it cannot be directed. In this framework, the session invites papers that reflect, by a socio-cultural perspective and empirical research, on the following topics: participation in decision making; social movements, in particular of young people; the role of communication, in the pandemic and / or post-pandemic contexts; authoritarian/democratic societies.