Online digital environments (educational platforms, writers’ blogs and official websites, social networking sites, YouTube) constitute a highly creative as well as political public space that can both appeal to civic imagination and serve as a vehicle for addressing social concerns. The digital turn in literary studies has demanded that scholars re-evaluate the way we receive, perceive and redistribute literary works.

The participatory potential of our digital culture has initiated further investigations of contemporary forms of cultural participation and creative engagement with art and literariness. This time digital cultural texts can serve as avenues for active engagement in social matters, and in educational contexts, they can assist in building networks between academic practice and school communities. 

In Greek social and educational contexts at this particular moment of time, it is of primary importance to highlight the role that Greek Educational Institutions are playing as cultural “superhighways” as they aim at the education and sensitization of pupils against social inequalities while fostering the development of their social responsibility and decision-making skills in addition to setting common goals and organizing collective performance. 

“Active Learners Active Citizens” investigates Anglophone and, more particularly, North American writers’ social media presence in close connection to their writing practice with the aim of drawing valuable conclusions about their emergent activist role and their ability to inspire and transform educational practice. 

“Active Learners Active Citizens” brings to the spotlight the latest online digital endeavors of both experimental and popular writers in their effort to shape a new educational and cultural “third” space that can generate new experiences for twenty-first century learner communities. 

“Active Learners Active Citizens” shows particular interest in highlighting the subversive potential of online writing space and how this is informing twenty-first century Anglophone writing (fiction and poetry) when narratives outgrow writing space and reach out to the community.