Discourses Of Citizenship Research Articles

Educating European citizenship: Elucidating assumptions about teaching civic competence

In recent years, the idea of the contribution of education to citizenship has been reinitiated. The purpose of this paper is to investigate constructions of citizenship as they are articulated in European policy documents on teacher education. It is indicated that the normative form of active citizenship is put into play through the individual and her or his actions, which is centred on learning. Drawing on Foucault’s analytic approach to problematization and Foucauldian methods of analysing policy problematizations of a certain problem, this study draws attention to the discourse of active citizenship and technologies of accountability that are utilized to shape teaching civic learning. It is suggested that citizenship is constructed as a learning problem, which motivates young people in school to reflect on their skills and competences. It is also from these capacities that their attitudes towards cultural diversity are assumed to be developed. Thus, in the formation of citizenship, emphasis is laid on the individual’s capacity for learning, which is also mobilized in narratives of the construction of Europe.

Encouraging Citizenship in Science Education: Continuing Questions and Hopeful Possibilities

AbstractThis special issue of the Canadian Journal of Science, Mathematics and Technology Education invokes questions intended to further the discourse of citizenship in science and mathematics education, such as, How do we define citizen and democracy? Is our call for student action hypocritical? Does positioning school science through the work of Ranciere present a “straw man” argument for change? To what extent does the ghost of John Dewey animate and inform a “wild pedagogy” in science education? Challenging the view of the science and mathematics curriculum as a barrier to overcome, this article argues that possibilities for developing citizenship and critical thinking can be found and developed in existing curriculum formations and practices of school science and mathematics education.

‘Jew Age’ among Israeli celebs: Jewish spirituality as discourse of citizenship

During the past few decades, the decline in citizenship solidarity and legitimacy within democracies has been under debate. This crisis has been brought about by empowered separatist identity-politics. With a unique approach in mind, using narrative discourse analysis of 12 interviews with Israeli celebrities, this study reveals a new model of inclusive discourse of citizenship. By publicly sharing their personal stories and political ideas, and using their public images as role models in the national consensus, the celebrities act as agents of political discursive change. They express disappointment in celebrity life and separatist, Israeli, identity-politics, and, in reaction, formulate an alternative construction of the concept of citizenship, one that is based upon their personal, spiritual story and ‘Jew Age’ identity. By redefining Israeli-ness on a common, spiritual basis, the celebrities are forging an inclusive, democratic discourse of citizenship, which combines both primordial-local, Jewish, communal traditions, and global, western-orientated, New Age culture. This article thus offers a new perspective on the relations between celebrity politics, contemporary spirituality, and citizenship studies, by re-examining the ability of contemporary democracies to create a reliable and inclusive concept of citizenship, under post-secular, identity politics, through celebrity action in civil society as discourse agents.

Citizenship, Rights and Political Subjectivity in Eritrea

A growing non-legal scholarship is engaging Eritrea’s contemporary. There is scant legal literature that interrogates the contemporary beyond formal discourses of law and legality, however. This article argues that formalistic and descriptive discourses, without doubting their validity, obscure Eritrea’s contemporary and limits issues that can be debated by collapsing the paradigm into binary good and bad absolutes. Eritrea contemporary, we argue, is more complex than it seems, and it has to be engaged within the existing political and legal processes that define it in order to develop coherent analytic and critique of the social and political relations they produce. Using this analytical framework, we analyze the discourse of citizenship and rights in Eritrea, which we claim is a product of a live politico-legal dynamic and explains significant part of Eritrea’s contemporary. We claim that the normative space of citizenship has been a site of ideological struggle between the state and the individual. The state constantly draws the political subjectivity of the individual by systematically mapping sphere of rights using formal and informal processes. The citizen, as such, is not a typical metaphysical subject endowed of rights but an entity that resides in an intensively contested and asymmetric ideological cosmos. The paper likewise engages in conversation with the dialect of ‘social citizenship’ – state narrative that refers to a collective and socially oriented project. We problematize the narrative on two accounts: First, the individualization of state-individual struggle that characterize the discourse contradicts the existence of a collective as a socio-juridical entity. Second, the formal and informal processes that we analyze in the paper establish highly differentiated and individualistic regime – creating tension between an individualistic and/or collectivist project. We likewise critically engage the value basis of the state’s project and highlight multiplicity of values and how these values fare towards social groups - the peasant citizenry for example. Our intention, in general, is two fold: first, to highlight methodological problems in legal scholarship related to Eritrea and second, to provoke broader debate on what discourses of citizenship, and rights might mean in the broader discourses of subjectivities across temporal and jurisdictional spaces within Eritrea and hopefully beyond.

(Net)roots of Belonging: Contemporary Discourses of (In)valuability and Post-Racial Citizenship in the United States

Neoliberalism has gained a foothold in U.S. policy and practice, and maintains the advantages of those already privileged within the global community. In this essay, I argue that national discourses of (in)valuability, informed by and in the service of neoliberalism and post-racial citizenship, (1) establish cultural understandings that invest the (white) U.S. nation with increasing levels of worth, (2) demonstrate migrants' value as investors and protectors of such privilege, and (3) devalue U.S. minorities. Ultimately, many migrants' personal stories about their value participate in national narratives assigning worth to some bodies and burden to others in ways that reinforce existing social hierarchies.

Death-squads contemplating queers as citizens: what Colombian paramilitaries are saying

Colombian right-wing paramilitary forces aligned with the state and leftist guerrilla groups are associated with homophobic and transphobic attacks. However, the most extreme accounts of violence are attributed to the former group. Sexual and gender minorities are victimized in the ongoing internal conflict in which armed actors use attacks as a form of communicative violence meant to discipline the civilian population. At the same time, Colombian lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) communities are making significant advances in gaining recognition of their human rights. This article explores the space where the advance of LGBT rights confounds reactionary homophobic beliefs of illegal right-wing armed groups. I consider how concepts such as ‘nation’ and ‘citizen’ shape the discourse of paramilitary forces in their account of their group's homophobic violence. Special attention is paid to the logic provided by two informants, former paramilitary members themselves, regarding the conditions under which right-wing paramilitary groups would be obliged to recognize the rights of sexual and gender minorities as citizens. The article concludes with a discussion of how the development of a sexual citizenship discourse, in place, may serve to disrupt extreme violence against sexual and gender minorities in the context of militarization and armed conflict.

INTRODUCTION TO THE SPECIAL TOPIC "INDIGENOUS IDENTITIES AND ETHNIC COEXISTENCE IN AFRICA"

In recent decades, discourses of citizenship, minority, and indigenous rights have ranked high on the agenda of the international development establishment (Niezen, 2003). They have also made their way into national and domestic politics in many parts of Africa. Among these, the concept of indigenous peoples has raised debates, both in political and academic circles, particularly in the African context (Kuper, 2003). At the same time, this and related notions have been adopted by many minority groups in their struggles for recognition, resources, and rights, yet with varied outcomes. In September 2007 the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Among its most significant assertions are indigenous peoples’ rights to self-determination to lands, territories, and natural resources, and to free, prior, and informed consent. Activists and organizations concerned with human and minority rights saw the adoption of the declaration as an important step toward the improvement of the precarious situation of minority groups. Today, seven years later, many peoples are still involved in struggles over citizenship, belonging, and identity. In this volume, we wish to reassess in this light the current and historic situation of selected minority groups in different parts of Africa. Among them are the prehistoric pastoralist groups in northeastern Chad (Lenssen-Erz), the Sandawe and Hadza in Tanzania (Yatsuka), the Mbororo in Cameroon, and the San in Botswana (Pelican and Maruyama). In Africa, the situation of minority groups or indigenous peoples cannot be understood without factoring in their varied and multi-faceted relationships with neighbouring ethnic groups. The contributions in this volume take into consideration that African peoples do not live in isolation, but coexist with other population groups, and that they are a part of overarching regional and national societies. In some cases, issues may arise from a problematic relationship with the state; in others, they emerge over conflicted relationships with neighbour ing groups. The contributions in this volume thus focus on both the contentious and collaborative relations with neighbouring population groups as well as on processes of inclusion and exclusion against the background of national and international politics. Furthermore, the papers critically engage with the achievements and failures of the indigenous rights movement in Africa. More specifically, they discuss the numerous ways in which discourses of citizenship and indigeneity have been translated locally — or vernacularized in Merry’s (2006) terminology — and have been put into use. As the papers suggest, different groups may pursue quite different

Categories, Citizenship, Erotic Agency, and the Problem of Freedom

This essay, in discussion of Citizenship From Below: Erotic Agency and Caribbean Freedom by Mimi Sheller, underscores the need to historicize Caribbean sociocultures as complex ensembles of heterogeneous practices. It lauds efforts to sustain the investigation of the gendered agential capacities of Caribbean working people in their relation with various manifestations of modern cultures of power. The essay questions the liberatory potential of erotic agency or power, arguing for it to be theorized beyond sexually active bodies, particularistic identities and the social and hegemonic landscapes of sexual politics. Erotic agency, it posits, should be situated and historicized in a broader web of social relations, especially given the potentially contradictory effects of its exercise.

O ciberespaço e o <i>ethos</i> de Marina Silva

The communication practices in the cyberspace are inserted in the everyday and they are changing the way that people interact with the others (and with the world). However, they are challenging to the reflections, mainly, about their effects. Based on this view, the article aims to identify and to analyze the discoursive ethos of Marina Silva considering her discursive strategies on interface with the discourses of citizens and of the media. The theoretical framework is anchored in three categories: (i) representation and discourse, (ii) cyberspace and memory, and finally, (iii) the notion of ethos. This research is exploratory and has bibliographic and documentary focus, beyond discourse analysis. The corpus consists of the membership speech given by Marina Silva on Youtube, the comments of the news at the post in the blog “Minha Marina”, and matters disclosed in the pages of Estadao and Folha Online. From the corpus analysis is possible seen that although the ethos of credibility has been negatively impacted, but the ethos of identification, related to the character, intelligence and humanity is predominant. Keywords: ethos, cyberspace, Marina Silva.

Reconsidering Media Economics: From Orthodoxies to Heterodoxies

This paper argues the case for closer attention to media economics on the part of media, communications, and cultural studies researchers. It points to a plurality of approaches to media economics, including the mainstream neoclassical school and critical political economy, but also new insights derived from perspectives that are less well known outside of the economics discipline, such as new institutional economics and evolutionary economics. It applies these frameworks to current debates about the future of public service media, noting limitations to both market failure and citizenship discourses and identifying challenges relating to institutional governance, public policy, and innovation as public service media worldwide adapt to a digitally convergent media environment.

Migrant Women and Social Reproduction under Austerity

Since coming to power in 2010, the UK Coalition government has enacted a series of cuts to public spending, under the auspices of austerity. Underpinning these cuts is a neo-liberal model of citizenship, in which citizens are expected to be autonomous, independent and economically productive, and in which the responsibilities of citizenship outweigh the rights. This model of citizenship is characterised by a paradoxical approach to social reproduction. The Coalition government has taken a significant interest in social reproduction as a means of creating the next generation of ‘good’ neo-liberal citizens; yet, the current austerity measures involve the withdrawal of state support for social reproduction activities. Drawing on participant observation carried out with migrant women's groups in Sheffield and Manchester, as well as interviews with group members, this article demonstrates how the government's paradoxical approach to social reproduction, combined with gendered and racialised discourses of citizenship and ‘Britishness’, have led to policies that place ethnic minority migrant women in an untenable situation. The social reproduction activities of ethnic minority migrant women are the subject of intense government interest, because of the concern that they will be unable to produce ‘good’ neo-liberal citizens. In some cases, this has led to government policies clearly intended to dissuade ‘undesirable’ migrants from having children. In other cases, migrant women are expected to show their commitment to integration, both for themselves and their children, specifically by learning English, even as the government has drastically cut funding for English as a Second or Other Language (ESOL) classes. While seemingly paradoxical, this is in keeping with a racialised neo-liberal model of citizenship under which the ‘responsible’ migrant mother should be able to parent and learn English without government assistance. Nonetheless, these policies are actually self-defeating, as they prevent migrant women from exhibiting the very characteristics of neo-liberal citizenship that they are ostensibly trying to encourage.

Sex, sport and justice: reframing the ‘who’ of citizenship and the ‘what’ of justice in European and UK sport policy

Universalist claims are often made about sport which is, as a consequence, increasingly written into national and international policy as an entitlement of citizenship or even human right. Further, in most countries physical education (PE) is a compulsory component of children's education, and sport is seen as central to this. Consequently, in the interests of justice sport must aspire to be egalitarian, that is, relevant to and meaningful for boys and men, and girls and women. In this context three fundamental questions are asked in relation to sport: (1) Do all citizens want to participate? (2) Who counts as a citizen? and (3) What are justice and equality? Feminist political and citizenship theory particularly the work of Pateman, Lister and Fraser is used to explore these questions and interrogate the ‘who’ of citizenship and the ‘what’ of justice in relation to framing sport policy in Europe and the UK. It is argued that notwithstanding the extensive use of the Council of Europe definition of sport,1 and despite or even because of the widespread adoption of the language of gender equality and gender mainstreaming, although formal sport citizenship rights might be accorded to all individuals and regarded as gender neutral, this masks a discourse of androcentric sport citizenship. This has captured European and UK sport policy and provision and is hindering further progress towards gender justice in sport and therefore PE. Given the universal and compulsory aspirations of sport particularly within PE, gender justice should be conceptualised not only as cultural recognition, political representation and economic redistribution within the normalised frame of competitive performance sport or ‘sport for sports sake’; but also as a critical meta-political remapping and reframing of sport as sport and physical recreation or ‘sport for all’.

Citizenship in South Africa today. Some insights from Christian ecclesiology

This essay reflects upon the notion of citizenship in the context of post-apartheid South Africa. Citizenship discourse in South Africa takes place in the context of the movement away from apartheid, and in the context of the processes of Africanisation and globalisation. An attempt is made to make a contribution to citizenship discourse in South Africa by drawing from theological insights, specifically from the classic formulation of the four marks of the church, namely catholicity, unity, holiness and apostolicity. Based on these ecclesiological marks the following four sets of features of citizenship are identified: apostolic and inclusive citizenship; united and justice-seeking citizenship; holy and virtuous citizenship, and apostolic and responsible citizenship.

Corporate Citizenship and Social Spaces in Sub-Saharan Africa: The Missing Link of Ethnicity

This paper assesses the corporate citizenship (CC) discourse against critical political geography to deconstruct the representations of space in the corporate rhetoric on community development in postcolonial African societies. It is argued that the spaces of representation of the protagonists concerned with the development projects are rather predicated on the missing link of ethnicity which the mainstream CC discourse neglects. The findings confirm that the plant- community conflictive relation in a Ghanaian mine, owned by a North American company, stems from the disconnect between the corporate representation of space in the so-called Community Development Effort and the representations of the space by local actors from the local community under ancestral jurisdiction, the plant under corporate jurisdiction, and the district assembly under decentralized government jurisdiction. The paper concludes that ethnicity remains the structuring principle of spaces of citizenship in this typical African working ...

Practices of Participation and Voluntarism among Older People in Rural Wales: Choice, Obligation and Constraints to Active Ageing

AbstractRural ageing is a significant issue for policy makers and academics, with the increasing proportion of older residents in rural areas placing heightened demands on service provision at a time of economic austerity. In this context, participation and volunteering in older age has been drawn into policy focus. Alongside broader discourses of social capital and active citizenship, the prospect of active ageing has emerged as a key component in the delivery of community‐based services under neoliberal welfare agendas. However, moves to formalise participation among the elderly are at risk of undermining everyday practices of voluntarism. Furthermore, the diversity of the older population means that the willingness and capacity of rural communities and individuals to undertake forms of voluntarism will vary considerably. These issues arise in rural Wales, where notions of participation have become intertwined with Welsh Government initiatives for community regeneration. Through empirical research, this article considers the different motivations of older people for engaging in forms of community participation, as well as constraints to these activities. In concluding, we reflect on the implications for local civil society in Wales.

Citizenship and Voluntarism: A Meaningful Combination or the Basis for Exploitative Relationships?

The author starts from the observation that citizenship and voluntarism are contested terms with diverse meanings. They have also been appropriated by politicians of various persuasions and imbued with meanings associated with ‘feel good’ factors that emphasize serving in a community. Therefore, voluntarism has the potential to continue the exclusion of minority groups, marginalized individuals and collective groupings at the expense of their citizenship rights, particularly those identified by Hannah Arendt as the ‘right to have rights’ that have been endorsed through public policy but today are being undermined by the ‘age of austerity’ in publicly funded welfare states. Against the background of the political context of UK, and the public rhetoric on the ‘Big Society’, the author examines whether citizenship discourses allied with voluntarism support a meaningful endorsement of altruistic solidarity or whether they endorse exploitative relationships under the guise of meeting the public needs.

Queer Kinship, Queer Eugenics: Edith Lees Ellis, Reproductive Futurity, and Sexual Citizenship

Edith Lees Ellis, now remembered most for her marriage to sexologist Havelock Ellis, produced a suite of political essays and fiction at the turn of the twentieth century that explored questions of racial citizenship, reproductive politics, and women’s rights through the discourse of eugenics. Reading Ellis’s 1906 My Cornish Neighbours in relation to current debates surrounding queer theory reveals an important relationship between the history of eugenics and current queer theories of futurity and abjection. By examining early twentieth-century discourses of reproduction, kinship, and citizenship through the lenses of feminist geopolitics and queer temporality, the article illustrates how Ellis’s articulations of alternative kinships and queer eugenics might move current work in queer theory to consider the embedded structure of racial hierarchies in discussions of futurity, and the relationship of normative and oppositional kinship structures to the geopolitical.

The Challenge of Ethnic Democracy: The State and Minority Groups in Israel, by Yoav Peled

Yoav Peled The Challenge of Ethnic Democracy: The State and Minority Groups in Israel, Poland and Northern Ireland London: Routledge, 2014. 188pp., $145.00 (cloth) ISBN: 978-0-415-66421-9The model of was originally developed by Israeli sociologist Sammy Smooha. It describes a particular arrangement of power distribution within states with a substantial ethnic minority, where the state is conceived as belonging solely to the ethnic majority but provides the minority with a suite of liberal individual freedoms and rights. In Yoav Peled's phrasing, these states attempt to balance two conflicting of (13)-an inclusive liberal-democratic one and an exclusive ethno-nationalist one-in a single constitutional structure. Ethnic democracies are therefore diminished democracies that rely on majoritarian concepts of democracy together with a strong conviction about the essential inassimilability of their ethnic minorities to ensure continued dominance by the majority.The titular Challenge of Ethnic Democracy, as proposed by Yoav Peled, associate professor of political science at Tel Aviv University, is twofold: the very applicability of the model to states outside the archetypical case of Israel; and the question of the model's long-term stability. The applicability of the ethnic-democratic model to other states has been questioned ever since the model was originally developed in the 1990s. Smooha himself suggested a number of possible cases-Northern Ireland until 1972, interwar Poland, and Canada until the Quiet Revolution-and argued that as more countries face growing ethnic minorities, we may see new cases of this method of mitigating ethnic conflict in a quasi-democratic framework. The model has been successfully applied to some states in the post-communist bloc (e.g. Estonia and Latvia), but little has been done so far to study older cases. Peled argues that it is exactly those older cases that must be examined to reach any conclusions about the second question, that of stability. By examining 1921-1972 Northern Ireland and interwar Poland, two ethnic democracies that collapsed, he attempts to explain the dynamics that preserve or undermine the stability of the model.While Smooha published several lists of conditions for the success of ethnic democracy, Peled offers a more parsimonious model: the balance between the two conflicting discourses of citizenship can be kept only by the introduction of a third discourse of citizenship that can generate solidarity among the majority without an explicit ethnic component, thus appearing realistically inclusive to members of the minority but effectively excluding them nonetheless. Furthermore, this third principle cannot exist merely as a cultural construct; it must have a material basis (153). This requirement explains the dynamics in the three cases examined. In Poland, where the Allied Powers imposed minority rights by the Versailles Minorities Treaty, democracy was tenuous at best to begin with, but it is the lack of any third principle to curb the strength of Polish nationalism that explains its inability to effectively deploy ethnic democracy. In the second case, the subsidies granted by the British government allowed Northern Ireland for a time to sustain a populist discourse that applied primarily to Protestants, but the fear that those subsidies would decline led to the deterioration of ethnic democracy into the chaos of The Troubles of the 1970s and the abolition of self-rule. In contrast, the republican-civic ethos in Israel, based on its socialdemocratic roots and structured around its chief labour organization, the Histadrut, allowed Israel to sustain its own ethnic democracy; it is the deterioration of this ethos in light of the introduction of neo-liberal policies that has caused the destabilization of ethnic democracy evident since 2000. …

Bisexual citizenship in the Netherlands: On homo-emancipation and bisexual representations in national emancipation policies

Studies in sexual citizenship have been successful in revealing heteronormative assumptions that underlie most mainstream models on sexual citizenship and contemporary sexual politics. Discussions about sexual citizenship, however, focus on heterosexuals and homosexuals, and less on bisexual citizenship. This article aims to discuss the in/exclusion of bisexuals in Dutch sexual citizenship as described in Dutch national LGBT emancipation policies (known as ‘homo-emancipation’). The analysis of policy documents shows that bisexuality is rendered invisible in multiple ways. Based on this analysis I argue that bisexual representation within sexual citizenship discourses and public policy documents is important to realize claims of self-identification, self-expression, and self-realization for bisexual citizens.

Binders full of LOLitics: Political humour, internet memes, and play in the 2012 US Presidential Election (and beyond)

This paper examines the phenomenon of humorous Internet memes within the context of news and political culture, sometimes referred to as LOLitics. LOLitics are a category of digital texts created by ordinary individuals that, like most political humour, are usually responses to news events or gaffes committed by political figures. The analysis situates LOLitics as popular culture products that exist within the intersection between pleasure-driven ‘play’ and (arguably) genuine political discourse. LOLitics are prominent due to their spreadability and replicability, and the amount of texts being produced has visibly risen over the last election cycle. Internet memes have become one of the default ways to respond to particular situations online, and this certainly reflects the reaction towards news and political culture. The 2012 US Presidential election is applied as a case study in examining the significance of these Internet memes to everyday citizen discourse, and the relationships between ordinary citizens, the mainstream media, and politics. The results argue that humorous viral texts, both visual and verbal, reveal the potential power that ordinary people have in setting the agenda for newsmakers, and to communicate political criticism through popular culture.