Globalisation, cosmopolitanism and diaspora: what are the implications for understanding citizenship?

Abstract

Contemporary global flows of people, ideas and capital have led to profound changes in transnational interactions, affinities, forms of sociality and understandings of citizenship. Traditional vocabularies of citizenship struggle to cope with this rescaling of dimensions of citizenship in an increasingly globalised world. In addition, educational policies and practices remain primarily focused on normative, national conceptions of citizens, thus overlooking the multiple, diverse and plural conceptualisations of diverse young citizens in classrooms today. Arguing for a fresh approach that applies ‘cosmopolitan sociologies’ of education, in this paper, we propose a framework for understanding citizenship that centres on spatial, relational and affective dimensions of citizenship. We review recent research with young people highlighting the multiple ways in which young people are constituted as citizens through a range of social, affective and spatial affinities. The paper concludes by examining the implications of this framework for educational policies and practices.