This afternoon my colleague Dr Ella Taylor-Smith will be delivering a presentation entitled ‘Non-public eparticipation in social media spaces’ at Social Media and Society 2016, which takes place in London this week. Ella co-authored the full paper on which the presentation is based with her PhD supervisor Dr Colin Smith.

The full paper is concerned with non-public social media spaces in contemporary democratic participation at the grassroots level. Its findings are based on case studies of citizen-led community and activist groups. In this work the authors explore online and offline ‘participation spaces’ – such as social media presences, web sites, blogs, email, paper media, and physical spaces – as boundary objects, arguing that these have a strong role to play in democracy.