Discourses Of Citizenship Research Articles

Toxicity or Prosociality?: Civic Value and Gaming Citizenship in Competitive Video Game Communities

Background Online multiplayer video games are characterized by competitiveness and collaboration: the former resonates with toxicity and the latter with civic values. While it is urgent to consider efficient ways to cope with toxicity, it is worth interrogating how gamers shift between toxic competitiveness and gaming citizenship. Aim Drawing on feminist game studies, gaming citizenship, and ludic ethics approaches, this study examined how gamers embrace and resist toxic behaviors simultaneously in community contexts. Method We conducted in-depth interviews with twenty-two Overwatch players from June 2021 to May 2023 to elaborate the players experiences of toxic behaviors, their coping mechanisms, and the roles of gaming communities. Purposive and snowball samplings were used to recruit participants who regularly played competitive modes in Overwatch. Results From the interviews, two types of toxicity (tolerable, intolerable) were identified. Of the anti-toxic measures, ignoring was addressed as a common but problematic measure, while intervention as most effective measure. Gamers’ involvement in communities was discussed within three common frameworks: prosociality, gamer education, and gamer transformation. Overall, the interviewees showed ambivalence toward usage of anti-toxic measures. With limitations, we found that game communities can serve a venue for gaming citizenship to provide institutional supports for gamers. Conclusion This study contributes to scholarship on gaming toxicity and gaming citizenship. Our study illustrated that gaming communities are battlegrounds between prosociality and toxicity. We do not see vilification of toxicity as a panacea for toxic gaming problems. In that sense, gaming citizenship discourses helps to rekindle debate about stigmatized assumptions about toxicity.

Economic inclusion and ethnonational exclusion of Arabs in Israeli higher education: two tales of one policy

ABSTRACT Higher education systems worldwide strive for diversity, equity, and inclusion. However, policies meant to support these values often – intentionally or not – construct new forms of labeling, discrimination, and exclusion. This study examines this dynamic through the case of access and participation plans for Arabs in Israeli higher education. An analysis of citizenship discourses used throughout the policy narrative is applied to state policy documents and interviews with policymakers and implementors. The analysis reveals two narratives describing a single policy: a ‘shared interests’ narrative focused on economic development and growth, and a ‘balancing tradeoffs’ narrative balancing economy and security. These narratives help identify the policy as a ‘multiple diversity regime’ with social, economic, civic, and ethnonational dimensions. Diversity, equity, and inclusion values are promoted through social, economic, and civic convergence, while labeling, discrimination, and exclusion arise through economic and ethnonational convergence. This study contributes to higher education research by accounting for the complex and multi-dimensional dynamic of diversity policies, especially in deeply divided societies. It calls for higher education systems and institutions to take on a more comprehensive approach, going beyond the social and economic dimensions of diversity, to pursue substantial ethnic and national equity and inclusion.

Critical Review of Citizenship Discourse and Service Learning: Focusing on the ‘Active Citizenship’ of the Third Way policy and Critical Discussions about it

Critical Review of Citizenship Discourse and Service Learning: Focusing on the ‘Active Citizenship’ of the Third Way policy and Critical Discussions about it

Collective Unbelonging: Late Arrival Chinese Migrant Youths’ Civic Identities and Their Social Studies Learning

The ongoing US-China geopolitical tension occupies news headlines in both states. In the US, suspicion and hostility against China have become a bipartisan agreement. The historically-rooted ostracization against Chinese Americans means that US-China relationship has deep implications on Chinese Americans’ lives, but research into how they negotiate this geopolitical tension is scant. Meanwhile, teaching transnational citizenship through social studies education can challenge the normative discourses of citizenship that often sustain nationalism and neglect migrants’ affiliation with multiple states, but how transnational citizenship is affected by geopolitical tension is an underexplored topic. Using Asian Critical Theory and transnational citizenship, this study interviewed Chinese migrant youths who received social studies education in both China and the US. While the youths reconstructed “Chineseness” and “Americanness” based on their lived experiences across borders, they also shared a pessimistically optimistic outlook toward the prospect of the US-China relationship. The youths developed a transnational citizenship that is characterized by their collective unbelonging in neither the US nor China. Their social studies curriculum failed to challenge the normative discourses of citizenship and failed to provide a critical space for them to discuss migration. This study also discusses the theoretical and pedagogical implications of the youths’ experiences.

Reorientation of Pancasila and Citizenship Education in Elementary Schools in the Discourse of Smart and Good Citizenship

The purpose of writing this article is to reorient Pancasila and Citizenship Education in Elementary Schools in the discourse of smart and good citizenship, examining the discourse of citizenship. The method used in this article is library research. The data collection technique is carried out by coding data. The data analysis carried out in this research was inductive, namely with two stages in the form of data reduction and presentation of document data. The results of the analysis show that the reorientation of Pancasila and Citizenship Education in Elementary Schools in the citizenship discourse is an affirmation that Pancasila and Citizenship Education is part of character education. Through this article, the researcher recommends that future researchers conduct extensive and in-depth studies regarding Pancasila and Citizenship Education in Elementary Schools.

Mizrahi Politics, Religion, and Ethnic Thinking

In recent decades two major approaches sought to explain the intersection of Mizrahi ethnicity and citizenship in Israel. Since the early 1990s, Yoav Peled’s Multiple Citizenship paradigm has become dominant in explaining the differential, hierarchical and fragmented incorporation regime. Accordingly, affiliation to Jewish religion was part of an ethno-national discourse of citizenship which confined Mizrahim (Jews emanating from Muslim countries) to be trapped between the hegemonic Ashkenazim (Jews of European descent) and the Palestinian citizens. Recently, a counter explanation was offered, based on the interpretive repertoires that shape the political behavior of Ashkenazim and Mizrahim. Contrary to the liberal presuppositions of the Multiple Citizenship paradigm, this explanation places greater emphasis on cultural rather than material factors shaping political behaviours and even broader worldviews, while identifying each ethnic group with opposing cultural repertoires. By proposing the idea of “ethnic thinking” this article focuses on the entanglements of religiosity in Mizrahi politics in two case studies – the Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow (the Keshet) and New Mizrahim. Rejecting the tendency to identify Mizrahim as predisposed to traditionalism, this article challenges both approaches that arguably fail to account for the performative aspects of Mizrahi citizenship.

Citizenship and Political Identities of Children in Transnational Migration

Abstract This article expounds on the relationship between children's rights and asylum discourse as pertaining to the figure of the non-citizen child. Key for the understanding of the political identity of the asylum-seeking child, who is depicted as trapped between paternalistic concepts of childhood and restrictive asylum law on the one hand, and empowering children's rights discourse on the other, is an antagonism in the logic underlying human rights and citizenship discourse. Ethnographic findings with accompanied asylum-seeking children in Germany substantiate the argument, from the perspective of ‘new’ childhood sociology. The concept of citizenship is elucidated as practice lived in the everyday in children's action against exclusionary effects in refugee centres.

Troubling transracialism: a transnational perspective

What kinds of feminist projects are made possible by (dis)analogising race and gender and/or transing them? The article asserts that an arbitrary separation is enacted when the transgender-transracial question is pulled apart such that an examination of the conceptual prefix that connects the two, i.e. trans, is discarded for an examination of the elements that allow for their separation – race and gender. Rather than affirm a (dis)analogy between race and gender, the article offers two correctives to the feminist discourse around transracialism / the possibility of reading race as malleable. First, I contest the shock value of transracialism by suggesting that a modality of transracial crossing has existed in the feminist imagination in the form of transnational, diasporic crossings that are separate, though not disparate, from transgender crossings. Second, through a glimpse into the history of racial prerequisite cases in early twentieth-century USA, I suggest the necessity of deploying trans analytics to understand the ways in which race has been made unevenly malleable in highly regulated and contested ways for different populations in different historical contexts. Race operated as fluid, flexible terrain accessed and claimed through discourses of citizenship and diaspora with mixed success. Hence, the article offers diaspora and citizenship, rather than the cultural and biological, as key analytics that enable the mapping of trans formations through patterns of migration and movement.

Frontline Citizens: Liberation Movements, Transnational Solidarity, and the Making of Anti-Imperialist Citizenship in Tanzania

AbstractThis article explores the intricate relationship between transnational solidarity and citizenship in socialist Tanzania, renowned for its extensive and enduring support of liberation movements from the 1960s to the 1980s. Termed “frontline citizenship”, this unique political subjectivity, evolving in the 1960s, was shaped not only by Tanzania's geopolitical location, nationalist struggles against colonialism, and government efforts to instil attitudes of anti-colonial solidarity in the population, but also by initiatives of hosted liberation movements, Tanzanians’ embrace of global anti-imperialist currents from Cuba to China and Vietnam, and critiques of politicians in exile. The article highlights the gendered and generational aspects of the solidarity regime, scrutinizes contested material solidarities, and discusses the partial decline of the frontline citizenship discourse. It does so by investigating the role of media, the impact of the paramilitary National Service, and the dynamics of material support practices. Drawing on multi-archival research, interviews, memoirs, and secondary literature, with a focus on South Africa's African National Congress (ANC), the analysis challenges conventional views of state-sponsored solidarity, emphasizing the dynamic interplay between state initiatives and grassroots participation as well as “external” and “internal” actors. Conceiving socialist Tanzania's solidarity regime in this way contributes to a broader understanding of the intersection between anti-imperialist world-making, nationalist state-building, and everyday performances of citizenship.

Philip Huynh’s The Forbidden Purple City: New Canadian Refugee Narratives and the Borders of the Socio-Political Community

This paper examines Philip Huynh’s short story collection The Forbidden Purple City in relation to its engagement with the nativity–territory–citizenship triad on which Western socio-political communities found the principles of affiliation of their members. First, the Canadian reaffirmation of a discourse of national benevolence is contextualised to later draw on how the collection is nurtured by boundary-crossing ethics that interrogates any sequential relation between past and present, Vietnam and Canada, which usually structures refugee narratives. It is argued then that disruptive and productive time/space interconnections delegitimate any simplistic representations of easily assimilated grateful refugees, fracturing the convenient narration of Canada as a benefactor concerned with old and new international humanitarian causes. The newness of Huynh’s stories relies on their mobilisation of the discourse of state citizenship through exceptional migrancy and its disruptive border nature. In contrast to premises of birth and geographical territory, which lose ground as backbones of any affiliation, citizenship appears incomplete and processual. The stories use the precarious performativity of collective homogeneity expected of a former settler colony, like Canada, to launch agency and resistance to state homogenisation, and de-institutionalise the refugee subject to critically intervene sovereignty and political subjectivity. Finally, the stories evince that Canada’s social spectrum is ideal to explore the threshold opened by the adjacency of sameness and otherness embodied by Huynh’s protagonists. Their condition as diasporic refugee subjects augments the transformative potential of new refugee narratives, in which literal and metaphorical polymorphous borders unveil the bases of the contemporary Canadian socio-political community.

Between Appeal to Citizenship and Biopolitical Fracture: Islamophobia and the New Politics of Muslim Citizenship in India

This article aims to analyze the Islamophobic politics at the heart of citizenship denial in the context of India’s CAA-NRC legislation in December 2019 by the Indian Parliament under the leadership of the BJP. The politics of citizenship denial in India thus emerges in appearance as a legal tussle between the Muslim minority citizenship rights and Hindu nationalism in India. However, the biopolitical fracture of the Indian nation-state makes the legal ideal of citizenship further complicated for Muslim minority citizens in India. Tracing the logic of the paradoxical position of Muslim citizenship discourse in India by following its contradictory existence in law, state, and nationalism, this article reveals the limitations of appeal to citizenship, and the necessity need for the question questioning of the biopolitical fracture, wherein the distinction between citizen and non-citizen translates into those with rights and without rights. This article further proposes that rather than sticking to the idealism of citizenship, a critical analysis of Islamophobia and its political correlates must attend to the negative position of the Muslim subject in with respect to the biopolitical fracture at the core of Indian nationalism and the modern nation-state.

Political Deliberation vs. Social Media Branding in Crisis-Prone Capitalist Democracies

This review essay discusses Jürgen Habermas’s recent reflections on the threats to deliberative politics by a new structural transformation of the public sphere. Renewing his 1962 concept, he analyzes “crisis-prone capitalist democracies” as the necessary condition for transforming the public discourse of self-determined citizens into political branding that seeks to manipulate the citizen as a consumer.Habermas then identifies social media’s blurring of the private and the public realms lready in the perception of democratic deliberation as the sufficient condition for today’s commodified discourse in a new political public sphere that has been colonized by the digital marketplace.

Conceptualizing diversity in ECEC policy: implications for the role of diverse preschool in Sweden

ABSTRACT The aim of this article is to examine contemporary conceptualizations of cultural and linguistic diversity in the Swedish policy for early childhood education and care (ECEC). The analysis draws on in-depth interviews with high-level policy actors and the analysis of documentary material. Using the concepts of interculturality and hybridity as theoretical tools, the study explores understandings of diversity at preschool and connects these with the role of preschool in culturally and linguistically diverse settings. The findings suggest that the concept of diversity is (a) embedded in dynamic notions of culture, (b) articulated within discourses of democratic citizenship, and, (c) its enactment is promoted in time and space where negotiation and dialogue emerge. Within the context of increased population diversity, there is consensus over the core functions of the Swedish language in preschool, while discourses of multilingualism are characterised by positive yet complex and sometimes diversified constructions. These are reflected in the multiple roles assigned to preschool based on preparing, preventing, and promoting educational and welfare values to children from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds.

Interweaving nationalism and cosmopolitanism in the cultivation of Confucian citizens through classics reading in contemporary China

Focusing on nationalism and cosmopolitanism as elements influencing the discourse and practice of citizenship and citizenship education, this study discusses how they are construed and implemented by contemporary Confucian educational practitioners. By analysing the theoretical discourses of Confucian classical education and the pedagogical practices of a specific Confucian school, this study reveals the interweaving of nationalism and cosmopolitanism and the pedagogical practices involved in cultivating students as Confucian cosmopolitan citizens with a Chinese national identity. These findings contribute from an Indigenous perspective to the understanding of the shaping of civic subjectivity embedded in the Chinese Confucian context, in line with the ongoing intellectual shift towards post-orientalist citizenship. The study concludes that Confucian education has the potential to inspire citizenship and citizenship education studies by contributing ideas regarding the complexities of the relationship between national identity and global awareness emerging from Chinese politico-cultural circumstances to the internationally recognized rhetoric on citizenship.

Framing the global: Assessing the purpose of global citizenship education in primary geography

Global citizenship education (GCE) plays an important role in preparing citizens with the competencies to tackle existing and emerging challenges brought on by globalization. Yet, determining the desired purposes of GCE is contested as it is shaped by different perspectives on globalization, and conceptualized through different discourses in different contexts. This article uses Biesta’s three purposes of education – qualification, socialization and subjectification as a theoretical framework to examine the purposes that the K-6 geography curriculum in the Australian Curriculum serves in relation to developing global citizenship competencies through an analysis of the curriculum policy. Our analysis shows that without a clear purpose for global citizenship in the curriculum policy, global understanding is consistently related to Australia as a nation state when represented at all, limiting learning opportunities to develop global thinking that supports a critical democratic discourse of global citizenship through the subjectification purpose of GCE. Instead, the K-6 geography curriculum is largely invested in socialization towards neo-liberal ends and a passing qualification function that prepares students to be ‘knowledgeable’ as they enter the world.

Introduction: reconsidering Chinese citizenship: cultural roots and cultural reach

ABSTRACT The study of citizenship in China has become popular not only as a research topic but also as a praxis that seeks to influence citizenship-related policies and address structural injustice. Analysis of the trajectory of developing citizenship research over the decades indicates that scholarship focusing on socioeconomic injustice has affected various policy actions, and the struggle associated with the cultural dimension of citizenship seems to have intensified. This special issue deconstructs the state’s monolithic interpretation of culture and examines the cultural underpinnings of citizenship discourse and practice in China. We take a broad view of cultural traditions, which have been deeply rooted throughout history and have shaped the underlying relationships between the state, society, and citizens in modern China. The articles in this special issue reveal the culture-informed citizenship practices enacted by various actors, including the government forces, cultural minorities, and grassroots activists. They suggest that spirituality is a site of experiencing and negotiating citizenship in the Chinese context.

Household Gods on the Altar of Freedom

In the nineteenth century, the American West was imagined as a place brimming with opportunity and prosperity. While many found material success in places like Gold Rush era California, the relationship that Black Americans had to the region and to what they hoped would be afforded to them in the West was marked by racial exclusion. Drawing upon primary sources that include newspaper clippings and Colored California Convention reports, this article considers the various strategies of resistance that Black western arrivants waged to not only attain material wealth but also agitate for their civil rights. “Household Gods” argues that Black western arrivants used religion and religious rhetoric as an adaptive and subversive strategy to shape conceptions of citizenship discourse, which contributed to how Black westerners sought to make space for themselves within a multiethnic society. This article is part of a special issue of Pacific Historical Review, “Religion in the Nineteenth-Century American West.”

Sexual violence in the discourse of digital citizens: Strengthening the concept of digital citizenship as online civic engagement

Cases of sexual violence frequently exposed on social media have sparked intense discussions among digital citizens. This phenomenon has given rise to new patterns of participation in the digital public sphere, indicating progress in efficiently and effectively expressing public aspirations through online civic engagement. Thus, online citizen engagement further strengthens the concept of digital citizenship as an active participation form in the digital world. In this study, the topic modeling method is utilized as a machine learning approach with statistical methods to identify topics within large, unstructured document collections. The applied topic modeling method is Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), using data collected from Twitter through crawling big data using the Twitter API. The results of this research reveal the discourse on sexual violence discussed by citizens with seven topics, namely: 1) Indonesia's sexual violence emergency; 2) Support for the enactment of the Draft Law on the Prevention of Sexual Violence, opposing parties against the Draft Law on the Prevention of Sexual Violence; 3) Pros and cons of Minister of Education and Culture and Research and Technology Regulation No. 30 of 2021 concerning the Prevention and Handling of Sexual Violence in Higher Education; 4) Sexual violence as sadistic behavior; 5) Sexual violence on campuses and in Islamic boarding schools; 6) Support for Minister of Education and Culture and Research and Technology Regulation No. 30 of 2021 for the prevention and handling of sexual violence on campuses; and 7) Stop sexual violence against children and women. From the analysis of the topic modeling results, it is evident that with a good understanding of citizen engagement facilitated by technology, the younger generation can develop digital citizenship in the practice of online civic engagement.

On (national) citizenship and (de)politicised nations: Everyday discourses about the Catalan secessionist movement

This paper examines the Catalan independentist movement understood as a paradigmatic case of secessionist politics in a European context. Drawing on recent rhetorical-psychological studies on citizenship and nationhood, we explore how constructions of citizenship and national identity interweave to shape, warrant, and contest opposing arguments about Catalan independence and Spanish sovereignty. We conducted a discursive-rhetorical analysis of thirty open-ended interviews and one focus group with Catalan residents that held different positions towards independence. The analysis shows that arguments for independence construct secession demands as a citizenship right that, in turn, assumes different versions of the Catalan national community. Arguments against independence reify the Spanish national identity by constructing it as a political community where all citizens have the same rights. Both argumentative poles position “the nation” as a core element in political citizenship discourses. Specifically, we argue that a diversity of citizenship formulations stressing democratic rights, practices, and political traditions, rhetorically work both to support and to challenge otherwise explicitly ethnic, cultural, and civic understandings of nationhood. The article advances a historically situated approach of citizenship and national categories attending to their specific rhetorical mobilisations in current independentist conflicts.

Russia in public discourse and public opinion of citizens of the Italian Republic

The authors examine the social grounds for the formation of a positive image of Russia in the public opinion of Italy. The purpose of the study is to measure how the attitude of the Italians towards Russia has changed after 2022. The research is based on a secondary analysis of the representative results of sociological surveys of EU citizens and also on the authors’ analysis of political public discourse, where the source was the Italian media and the statements of political actors. The stability of the positive image of Russia in Italian public opinion is determined by the stable economic, political and cultural ties between Italy and Russia. The results of the discourse analysis of an extensive database of documents - election programs, materials from the leading social and political media in Italy and statements by Italian politicians - demonstrated a high level of interest of members of the Italian political elite in maintaining stable relations with Russia in various fields. They are representatives of the Italian populist parties among opinion makers and leaders, who influence the formation of a positive image of Russia. The attitude towards the Russian Federation in Italian public opinion has remained positive for a long period of time. The special military operation has significantly changed the perception of Russia, but the Italians still remain its sympathizers compared to citizens of other EU countries.