Original citation:Banaji, Shakuntala (2008) The trouble with civic: a snapshot of young people's civic and political engagements in twenty-first-century democracies. Journal of youth studies, 11 (5). pp. 543-560.

This paper investigates how schools are supporting parents' involvement with their children's education through the use of 'Learning Platform'technologies -i.e. the integrated use of virtual learning environments, management information systems, communications, and other information and resource-sharing technologies. Based on in-depth case studies of six primary and six secondary schools across England, the paper explores the various ways that schools are implementing, adopting, and using Learning Platforms to engage with parents. The paper also considers how these technologies are being received and used by parents. A number of underlying issues and tensions behind parents' engagement with school Learning Platform technologies are considered, and the potential of digital technologies to reconfigure pre-existing school/ parent relationships is examined.

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This paper explores the interconnections of Hindutva fascist repertoires in India and quasiorientalist discourses. History and common sense are re-written through audiovisual communications to appeal to one section of a dangerously split Indian public and a neoliberal-touristic sensibility elsewhere. Enlightenment rhetorics of progress, democracy and technological development are apparently embodied by WhatsApp groups, electronic voting machines and laws to protect cows. Voting-as a marker of democratic citizenshipbecomes a masquerade protecting a resurgent far right Hindutva (Hindu fascist) regime under the aegis of Narendra Modi and the BJP. Caste Hinduism's association of cows with deities, and the proscription on meat-eating in certain versions of religious practice, are used as pretexts for unimaginable violence against Muslims, Christians, Dalits, and working class/lower caste Hindus. Violence against those who dissent is rationalised as patriotic. Hindutva's banal and spectacular audiovisual discourse overwhelms public communication. Its consequences are a form of vigilante citizenship that is marked on the bodies of dead victims and of vigilante publics ready to be mobilised either in ethno-cultural violence or its defence and disavowal. Meanwhile, attracted to India as an enormous market, Western governments and corporations have colluded with the Hindutva regime's self-promotion as a bastion of development.

A common interpretation of the low levels of electoral turnout of young voters is that they are apathetic and part of a generation which does not care about political issues -indeed, a selfish and materialistic generation. In this article, we question this common perception and test this claim against an important alternative: that the limitations to youth participation in Europe is not due to a lack of interest in the public good, but rather to a combination of contextual and psychosocial factors, including the real as well as perceived inadequacy of the existing political offer. We assessed young people's attitudes towards democratic life in the UK, France, Spain, Austria, Finland, and Hungary. We used a mixture of comparative mass survey, stakeholder interviews, an experiment, and focus groups. Our data suggests that young people are willing to engage politically but are turned off by the focus and nature of existing mainstream political discourse and practice which many believe excludes them and ignores their needs and interests. Contrary to the assumptions of the disaffected and apathetic citizen approach, there is a strong desire amongst many young Europeans to participate in democratic life but this desire is not met by existing democratic institutions and discourses.