Forms Of Citizenship Research Articles

Ecological and intercultural citizenship in the primary English as a foreign language (EFL) classroom: an online project in Argentina

This article describes an online intercultural citizenship project concerning the environment in the primary English-language classroom carried out in 2013/2014 between Argentina and Denmark. It is part of a network of projects coordinated by Michael Byram that involves teachers and researchers in Europe, the US and East Asia. The project is framed within the theory of intercultural citizenship in the foreign-language classroom and it is the only study set in the primary school context. Furthermore, developments in Latin America in this field are scarce and the study intends to fill an empirical gap. Although the comparative perspective is ingrained in the project, the article describes mainly the Argentinian standpoint.At the same time, and more generally (beyond language education), it will be argued, and shown, that the project can also be framed within the notion of ecological citizenship, understood as a new form of citizenship that presents new challenges to educators. While the notion of citizenship in formal education usually assumes nationalist and patriotic mindsets, in this project ecological citizenship offers a new framework that introduces an international, transnational or global perspective. Furthermore, citizenship education tends to be reserved to secondary civics and social studies classrooms and in this sense the focus on the primary school context and on the foreign-language classroom is innovative in this project.

“I’ll Give You a Dollar If You Give Me Your Papers”: Active Citizenship and Immigrant Women’s Right to Work

In studies of intersectionality, citizenship is a category that is rarely given much attention. When it is, the care it is given is usually limited to demonstrating how the “deserving” are differentiated from the “undeserving” within regimes of rights under the nation-state model. This article works to elucidate the role played by citizenship as status and concept in everyday interactions. I present three undocumented mothers’ interactions with out-of-work males of color who are US citizens that reveal the former’s understanding of citizenship as active, as something gained through work and involvement in the community. Reading their words through their context and understanding of citizenship, I find that these mothers’ statements are not merely appropriations of dominant discourses but rather complex interplays between embodied knowledge and hegemony. While the mothers’ discourse of active citizenship sounds like that of liberal, meritocratic citizenship, these women draw upon collectively and spatially informed notions of citizenship that originate in their home countries and migrate with them. This argument complicates notions of racial naturalization as well as analyses that see interethnic conflict as simply an effect of white supremacy. By highlighting a different form of citizenship—one whose ontology is based in active participation in the community in contrast to passive notions prevalent in the US imaginary—I hope to show that citizenship interacts with the categories of race, ethnicity, gender, and class to influence how these are experienced and negotiated in the everyday lives of citizens and noncitizens alike.

Post-citizenship, the New Left and the democratic commons

This article investigates the possibilities for the emergence of more participatory forms of citizenship in the context of austerity Europe. Especially significant in this regard is the history of the post-war New Left who were critical of both social democracy and authoritarian Marxism. In this context I reconsider the radical ‘humanistic’ writing of E.P. Thompson and Raymond Williams. Not only does their work offer a critical understanding of the commons, but equally connects to the revival of humanism evident within the alter globalisation movement. Further I look at the development of different ideas for a revived Left including nostalgia for the social democratic period and the idea of cosmopolitanism. While all of this work has something to offer I seek to argue that it fails to adequately address the need to develop more ecologically sensitive and more participatory forms of citizenship. In the final section, I outline the importance of the struggle for a more democratic and autonomous society and the increasing importance of issues related to traditions of self-management and the idea of the commoner. The idea of the commoner could yet become one of the major ideological struggles of the twenty-first century, but this will depend upon its ability to excite the imaginations of Europe's increasingly frustrated citizens in the age of neoliberalism.

The Relation Between Participatory Social Practices and Social Representations of Citizenship in Young Adulthood

The concept of citizenship is used both as a synonym of social action when referencing to an active form of citizenship as well as to indicate a form of civic obligation (formal citizenship). According to these premises, citizenship can be formalized in a large number of activities that contribute to building it in different ways. The aim of the present work is to explore how the concepts of citizenship and being a citizen are co-built by Italian young adults. Two groups of young adults are considered (engaged vs. not engaged). Eighty-nine young adults participants aged 18–36 completed a self-administered mixed-method questionnaire. A content and thematic analysis was conducted and a composite representation of citizenship emerged. Results of the present work can clarify the concept of citizenship by exploring how it is cognitively and socially represented in young adults and how this representation changes in engaged and not engaged young adults.

Citizen Engagement and Public Services in the Arab World: The Potential of Social Media

Citizen Engagement and Public Services in the Arab World: The Potential of Social Media

Emerging Early Intervention Systems: An Agency-Specific Pre-Post Comparison of Formal Citizen Complaints of Use of Force

The use of Early Intervention (EI) systems among law enforcement agencies has rapidly increased in recent years. Despite being highly regarded throughout the field, there have been few evaluations of such systems. In the small number of cases where EI systems have been examined, studies have been limited to individual agencies looking at changes in behaviour at the officer level. Consequently, there has yet to be a large-scale evaluation of the effectiveness of EI systems across departments. Using data collected from the 2003 and 2007 Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS) surveys, the current study investigates patterns in rates of citizen complaints of use of force among 94 departments that implemented an EI system in the intervening years. Results show that the effectiveness of EI systems may have been overstated. Practical implications, specifically implementation issues of EI systems, and directions for future research are discussed.

Citizenship as horizon

The idea of citizenship has today emerged as a global horizon under which a proliferating range of claims and demands for recognition, visibility, care, moral dignity, and inclusion are made. Initially a legal concept tied to self-determination and national sovereignty, the global human rights agenda has made citizenship less tied to the nation-state and instead a carrier of multiple cultural and political meanings and agendas from the global level to the most localized context. But can there be meaningful forms of citizenship that are not guaranteed by a sovereign state?

Democracy and the Square: Recognizing the Democratic Value of the Recent Public Sphere Movements

The paper considers the democratic value of the recent public sphere movements—from Occupy Wall Street to Taksim Gezi Park, from Tahrir Square to Sofia. It argues that the mainstream models of democracy fail to grasp the significance of these movements and the emergent political forms within these movements due to their narrow account of politics and democracy. To fully grasp the democratic value of recent public sphere movements, we should approach them from an agonistic perspective. Once democratic politics is viewed from an agonistic perspective, it becomes possible to recognize that while expressing their critique of existing liberal democratic institutions, the recent public sphere movements contested the dominant understanding of democracy and staged an alternative vision of democracy, democratic culture, and new forms of citizenship. Essays Philos (2015)16:26-42 | DOI: 10.7710/1526-0569.1519 Published online: 27 January 2015. © Fuat Gursozlu 2015 Contact author: fgursozlu@loyola.edu

The Joined Destiny of Migration and European Citizenship

In this paper I try to unpack the nest of issues that recent waves of migrations bring to the floor and show how immigration plays a crucial role in the making or unmaking democratic citizenship in post-national Europe. Although recurrent terrorist attacks make harder and harder for many opinion-makers and ordinary citizens to associate immigration with positive opportunity for European citizenship, the paper argues that the right to free movement and of emigration is embedded in the nucleus of principles and ideals that makes for European citizenship since the Treaty of Rome. Subsequently, the paper introduces the category of statelessness and uses it to tackle the problem of the legal and political evolution furthered by the practice of rights within the horizon that is defined by the ideal of a European post-national citizenship. Refugees and immigrants are interpreted as a challenge and an opportunity in the spirit of Hannah Arendt’s intuition that citizenship brings to the floor an unsolvable paradox between the human and the political. The conclusion of the paper argues that stateless people—the migrants—personify this paradox as they can be the locus of a new political practice that signals an incipient form of citizenship, truly disconnected from the nation as the European citizenship aspires to be. The denial of many civil and political rights to undocumented immigrants and the detention of thousands of migrants in the camps located at the peripheries of Europe contrast radically with the community of rights that Europe has sought to be since its inception.

Myanmar and India

Since the 1990s, India and Myanmar have sought rapprochement through geo-economic strategies and discourses. The results, however, have been largely underwhelming. This paper offers an explanation for why this has been the case. We argue that the two geo-economic strategies deployed—sub-regionalism and diaspora-driven trade and investment—require the emergence of particular types of deterritorialised and denationalised citizenship regimes which facilitate the mobilisation of provincial capital and diasporic capital. The development of such social forces in India and Myanmar have been stifled by the persistence of older ‘regimes of citizenship’ associated with geopolitical strategies based on territoriality and pre-existing social hierarchies. In Myanmar, the emphasis on ‘Bamar’ identity has led to a hierarchical citizenship regime which marginalises people of Indian origin. While deterritorialised forms of citizenship have emerged in India as the government seeks to harness the economic power of the Indian diaspora, the target of its policies has been the more socially privileged diaspora settled in the West. Moreover, India’s Northeast has long been constructed as being culturally distinct and prone to ‘disloyalty’ which hinders sub-regionalism. Hence, transforming the relationship requires not just greater political will or technocratic policy changes, but addressing the long-held national anxieties and social hierarchies which underpin India and Myanmar’s regimes of citizenship.

Los derechos de participación de las personas extranjeras en el nuevo marco estatutario andaluz

El tránsito de España y de la Comunidad Autónoma andaluza de una sociedad de emigrantes a una receptora de inmigrantes ha puesto sobre la mesa la cuestión del estatuto ciudadano de la población extranjera residente en nuestro territorio. Este artículo defiende que la ciudadanía no se reduce a su dimensión formal, como sinónimo de nacionalidad, y reivindica más allá de ésta su contenido participativo. Defiende asimismo que éste no se reduce a la titularidad de derechos de participación política stricto sensu, definida en el artículo 13.2 CE, sino que abarca el acceso a mecanismos de participación en sentido amplio. En él se argumenta que la Constitución española y el nuevo marco estatutario andaluz respaldan una aproximación sustantiva a la ciudadanía que permite integrar a toda la población residente, nacional o extranjera, en una diversidad de provisiones participativas en sentido amplio, cuyo contenido va más allá de la expresión estricta de voluntad política de quienes son titulares de la soberanía (artículo 13.2 CE). Este artículo sostiene, en fin, que una comprensión sustantiva, participativa e incluyente de la ciudadanía es la única constitucionalmente coherente y debe prevalecer más allá de los límites que impone su definición formal.

The imperialism of race: class, rights and patronage in the Philippine city

Decisions by the US Supreme Court at the end of the Spanish American War facilitated US colonial expansionism by laying the foundations for a two-tiered system of rights in the Philippines. In tandem with establishing the legal boundaries of citizenship, politicians and media extended a race-based system of governance through speeches and graphic caricatures that racialised Filipinos as underdeveloped and threatening. Both the law and a patron-client system served to create a new Filipino elite that collaborated with the colonial authorities and entrenched cultural imperialism; the racial patterning of white American/Filipino relations was then transduced into class relations among Filipinos that continue to stratify Philippine society, with the Filipino elite replacing the colonial administrators in this two-tiered system of rights. Today, this racial categorisation and organisation of people continues to appear in popular imagery; and the replacement of race by class in a rights-based bifurcation of Philippine society shapes the ways in which penal law in metropolitan Manila is practised and administered so that the poor (some 40 to 50 per cent of the population) experience a diminished, second-class form of citizenship.

Participação em saúde: conceitos e conteúdos

Este texto pretende contribuir para uma discussão mais aprofundada sobre as diversas formas de envolvimento dos cidadãos no sistema de saúde e para uma clarificação das várias formas de interação entre os sistemas de saúde e os cidadãos, mais concretamente, a participação, a consulta e a comunicação. Apresenta também uma breve resenha histórica das estratégias de envolvimento dos utentes na saúde, as virtudes e os desafios identificados pelos estudiosos deste setor. Por último, é apresentado o ponto da situação da participação dos cidadãos em saúde em Portugal e algumas considerações finais.

Bordered penality: Precarious membership and abnormal justice

The article brings to attention, and explores, the transformations of criminal justice related to the control of unwanted mobility, looking in particular at recent Norwegian developments. It maps a gradual emergence of a differentiated, two-tier approach to criminal justice and a more exclusionary penal culture directed at non-citizens. The article suggests that the absence of formal membership is the essential factor contributing towards shifting the nature of penal intervention from reintegration into the society towards deportation and territorial exclusion, and towards the development of a particular form of penality, termed hereby bordered penality. The lack of formal citizenship status also crucially affects the procedural and substantive standards of justice afforded to non-members. While these developments are not confined to Norway alone, they cast doubt on the non-punitive image that is widely attributed to Scandinavian countries, and present a set of conceptual, epistemological and normative challenges for criminal justice in a rapidly globalizing world.

Lahra Smith. Making Citizens in Africa: Ethnicity, Gender, and National Identity in Ethiopia.Cambridge, U.K: Cambridge University Press. 2013. xxi + 252 pp. Maps and Tables. Acknowledgments. Abbreviations. Glossary. Appendixes. Bibliography. Index. $29.99. Paper.

POLITICS, INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, AND GLOBALIZATION Lahra Smith. Making Citizens in Africa: Ethnicity, Gender, and National Identity in Ethiopia. Cambridge, U.K: Cambridge University Press. 2013. xxi + 252 pp. Maps and Tables. Acknowledgments. Abbreviations. Glossary. Appendixes. Bibliography. Index. $29.99. Paper.Ethiopia's policies of ethnic federalism have generated a great deal of analysis and debate among scholars. Lahra Smith develops the concept of meaningful to make a valuable intervention in these debates. Smith argues that scholars must go beyond an analysis of formal citizenship and legal rights, and examine acts of citizenship and the exercise of rights. For Smith, citizenship is a practice, something that is done.Smith traces the roots of contemporary ethnic conflict in Ethiopia to the expansion of the Orthodox Christian Abyssinian empire in the late-nineteenth century and the modernizing and centralizing policies of Haile Selassie during the mid-twentieth century. Conquered ethnic groups were forced to acculturate in order to participate in civic life. Despite some reforms implemented under the Marxist military Derg regime, oppressed ethnic groups in southern and western Ethiopia still had very little sense of meaningful citizenship. Since the fall of the Derg in 1991, Ethiopia has been governed by a policy of ethnic federalism that is intended to provide rights to disenfranchised ethnic groups. The country is divided into regional states on the basis of ethnicity. States have a broad range of powers covering education, economic development, health, police forces, and legal courts. Regions may conduct government business and education in the language of their choice, and in theory they have the right to secede and form their own nation. Based on a thorough reading of the secondary sources, Smith offers a very clear and detailed account of the historical processes behind the development of ethnic federalism, and provides a useful rereading of Ethiopian history through the lens of citizenship.Individual chapters focus on the implications of ethnic federalism for language policy, ethnic sovereignty (the Silte and Oromo cases), and gender. In each of these chapters Smith demonstrates the complexities of implementing policies that respect ethnic identity and promote a sense of membership in the nation. In the case of language policy she demonstrates the difficulty of selecting languages for education that allow young people access to economic and political goods without compromising their sense of self and ethnic identity. The Oromo case for self-determination, discussed in chapter 5, is particularly complex, because, as Smith explains, the political oppression that Oromo people have experienced since the advent of ethnic federalism will likely prevent them from investing in any state policies aimed at citizenship expansion. …

Citizens United and the Ineluctable Question of Corporate Citizenship

As a result of the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United, corporations and individuals now enjoy the same rights to spend money on advertisements supporting or opposing candidates for office. Those concerned about the role of money in politics have much to decry about the decision. But the threat to democracy posed by allowing wealthy corporations to function as political speakers arises under the same regime that allows wealthy individuals to do so. If we are not prepared to limit individuals’ expenditures on political speech, we will have to find a way to distinguish individuals’ and corporations’ free speech rights.The prevailing strategy — marshaled in Justice Stevens’ dissent and taken up by the decision’s critics — argues that corporations are not persons; therefore they are not entitled to the constitutional rights that persons enjoy. Yet this strategy is bound to fail because there is no consensus over just what it takes to be a person, let alone whether corporations would qualify.The effort to find a compelling distinction between the free speech rights of individuals and corporations needs a new foundation, which this Article seeks to provide. To that end, the Article focuses not on personhood, but instead on something far more relevant to the matter at hand — citizenship. In particular, the Article advances a novel account of citizenship, which it calls normative citizenship. Normative citizens are formal citizens who are expected to participate in the joint project of the nation-state. The Article contends that it is only normative citizens who need robust political free speech rights. Because corporations do not count as normative citizens, corporate political speech need not receive the same level of protection as the political speech of normative citizens.While enhanced clarity on the notion of citizenship cannot itself undo the Citizens United decision, there are important reasons for pursuing this work now. First, a clearer understanding of the constitutional status of the corporation could lend support to the movement for an amendment overturning the Citizens United decision. Second, the account advanced here could serve to undermine assertions of other corporate constitutional rights. Finally, this account can forestall rhetoric about the “good corporate citizen,” which may have unwittingly helped to legitimate a conception of the corporation as a bearer of strong constitutional rights — a conception that is inaccurate and problematic, for the reasons advanced here.

Gujarati Asians in East Africa, 1880–2000: Colonization, de-colonization and complex citizenship issues

In this paper, I argue that despite the general belief to the contrary, there is a great deal of continuity in the history of the colonial and post-colonial practice of citizenship in the Indian Ocean region. This debate is usually described from the perspective of the state and its representatives. Indeed, more often than not, the position of the migrants themselves is not discussed. This paper aims to fill this gap. In the case of the South Asians in East Africa, I will demonstrate that migrants were able to negotiate their own space for identity formation and accepting and changing formal citizenship options. Indeed, they were also able to negotiate with colonial officials and, after the 1960s, Britain, Canada, India and even the United Nations about defending their rights as citizens or agreeing new regulations for international migration and citizenship. The debate on citizenship and belonging has become the centre of academic and public debate since the 1990s in Europe and the USA. However, historical cases in colonial contexts might shed some light on long-term continuity in such discussions.

“Graceful Failure”: The Privatization of Resilience

The author describes the 2012-2013 school year at East Hampton High School in New York, which began with tragedy. In late September, a sixteen-year-old student, an immigrant from Ecuador, committed suicide. This was the second suicide in three years, followed two weeks later by the third, committed by a student about to transfer to the school. Asked in an interview to reflect on the past year, the principal of East Hampton (ranked as one of the best schools in the nation, with many graduates going on to Ivy League universities) "'sighed and moved his hand up and down, suggesting a roller coaster. 'Resiliency,' he said. 'That's my theme word for graduation'" (quoted in Rutenberg 2013). In this article the author considers the popularity of resilience in relation to its more specific emergence in the constellation of issues raised in the East Hampton story: class, race and education. Without seeking completely to discount the value of resilience as a focus and strategy for individuals, institutions, and communities, she concurs with those critics who counsel wariness, regarding the all-too-neat alignment between the concept of resilience, or the capacity to thrive through change, and the ideology of neoliberalism (Botterell 2009; Evans and Reid 2013; Joseph 2013; Neocleous 2012; O'Malley 2010; Walker and Cooper 2011; Zebrowski 2009). In particular, she notes the enthusiastic embrace of resilience by independent schools at a time of growing social disparity and reduced funding for public schools, and suggest that this trend is not just symptomatic of this disparity, but complicit in its deepening. Language: en

Muslim Young People Online: “Acts of Citizenship” in Socially Networked Spaces

This paper reviews the current literature regarding Muslim young people’s online social networking and participatory practices with the aim of examining whether these practices open up new spaces of civic engagement and political participation. The paper focuses on the experiences of young Muslims living in western societies, where, since September 11, the ability to assert claims as citizens in the public arena has diminished. The paper draws upon Isin & Nielsen’s (2008) “acts of citizenship” to define the online practices of many Muslim youth, for whom the internet provides a space where new performances of citizenship are enacted outside of formal citizenship rights and spaces of participation. These “acts" are evaluated in light of theories which articulate the changing nature of publics and the public sphere in a digital era. The paper will use this conceptual framework in conjunction with the literature review to explore whether virtual, online spaces offer young Muslims an opportunity to create a more inclusive discursive space to interact with co-citizens, engage with social and political issues and assert their citizen rights than is otherwise afforded by formal political structures; a need highlighted by policies which target minority Muslim young people for greater civic participation but which do not reflect the interests and values of Muslim young people.

Evaluando la participación institucional: la “temperatura” de la deliberación y sus consecuencias

Changes recently occurred in contemporary societies are transforming the forms of citizens’ participation in the public sphere, challenging institutional participation initiatives promoted by various governments over the past decade. It is quite necessary to evaluate these initiatives to ensure its functionality in this new scenario. In this context, this article proposes different criteria and participation assessment instruments in order to apply them into a concrete experience: the participatory process on forest management carried out in Muntanya de Sant Miquel in Setcases (Cataluna). At the same time, the article reflects on what are the best ways and conditions to promote effective participation, focusing its attention on the debate on the ‘temperature’ of deliberation. We conclude that it is extremely difficult to combine hot and cold deliberation. However, this may be the best solution when the participatory topic addresses high conflict of interests between stakeholders and, at the same time, requires to be addressed from the logic of collective interest because it affects the whole community.