Moral Citizenship Research Articles

Orthorexia and deprivation as ‘care’: how people with disordered eating understand care

This paper examines how contemporary understandings of health and care are engaged with by women with disordered eating. Based on findings from an Australian Research Council grant study, we explore the ways in which people align themselves with ‘healthy eating’ principles to legitimize their practices. Rather than always seeing their practices as a problem in need of intervention, many participants actively pursued and ‘tinkered with’ (Mol et al., 2010) their disordered eating as a form of self-care. We investigate how participants use the new food regime of orthorexia, as well as food choices and intolerances, as a normalised cover for restrictive diets. We argue that orthorexic practices entailing natural, medical and ethical concerns were successfully incorporated into participants' eating disorder repertoires. Participant's commentary on orthorexia reveals the vulnerability of people with disordered eating to the panoply of health and fitness advice circulating in contemporary society in which the pursuit of health and healthy lifestyles are at the centre of moral virtue, personhood and citizenship (Crawford, 1980). We demonstrate how these eating and body practices relate to an ethics of care that promotes moral virtues of hard work, purity and deprivation – all of which can ultimately lead to dangerous restrictive practices. Understanding how categories of health and care are understood and transformed by people with disordered eating has important implications for identifying people at all stages of help seeking.

Integration in Flanders (Belgium) – Citizenship as achievement

In this article we will show, with Flanders (Belgium) as a concrete case, how intertwined integration and citizenship discourses and policies have become in contemporary super-diverse societies. Flanders is a clear example of how integration is gradually being replaced by virtual or moral citizenship. The fact that (moral) citizenship has replaced integration, has as a consequence that the concept of citizenship has shifted, in a subtle way, from a dynamic and contextualized process, which shapes itself in daily practice through social networks, into ‘citizenship as achievement’. This is an achievement that is the sole responsibility of certain groups in society. It is also an impossible achievement, because some are exempt from it and others will always be perceived as not yet belonging to the category of ‘true citizens’.

To vote or not to vote: Is that the question?

Voting is seen as the sine qua non of moral citizenship for most Christians: not voting is unthinkable. But some believers, drawing from countercultural traditions within Christianity such as Christian pacifism, argue that abstaining from voting is necessary to provide a faithful witness to God’s kingdom. The result is a reductionist approach to voting that resolves in either a simple yes or no. Seeking to broaden this discussion, this article will analyze voting as a moral action. Attention will be given to how voting or not voting shapes the moral actor through analysis of the work of John Rawls, arguments for proportional representation and compulsory voting, and arguments for voting abstinence. Despite their differences, these arguments revolve around the question of moral imagination and community formation. Taylor will argue that voting or not voting are misunderstood morally if portrayed in terms of a relationship to political authorities. Voting and not voting are better understood as acts of neighbor love. Any ethic of voting must focus on how voting or not voting advances the good of the neighbor. Consequently, absolutist claims regarding voting or voting abstinence risk losing sight of the complex and changing needs of neighbors. A more flexible ethic of voting that allows us to vote or not vote depending on what our neighbors need should be the focus of ethical reflection on voting.

The Humanitarian Makeover

We examine how the makeover paradigm is mobilized in contemporary humanitarian communications—a practice we call “humanitarian makeover.” We demonstrate its operation in the Finnish television programme Arman and the Children of Cameroon and Plan's 2013 International Day of the Girl event. The analysis shows how helping distant others is configured within a makeover and self-transformation narrative, providing a stage for performance of an “ethical self.” We argue that while the humanitarian impetus is to disturb and redress global inequality and injustice, which includes exposing and interrupting the failures of neoliberalism, the makeover paradigm is intimately connected to and reinforces individualized “moral citizenship,” which conforms to and reinforces neoliberal values.

Of power and laughter: Carnivalesque politics and moral citizenship in Lithuania

ABSTRACTDuring Lithuania's 2008 parliamentary elections, National Resurrection Party members dressed up as vampires, insane people, criminals, and prostitutes to gain people's votes. They mocked the state and laughed at political elites and electoral politics. I argue that the 2008 electoral carnivalesque was a politics of becoming, a fluid and open‐ended process that engaged communities of despair and promoted moral citizenship through laughter. It was a form of political opposition, grounded in future‐oriented moral and affective reassemblages of social and political fields. This politics of becoming attracted new people to politics, reframed political debates, and challenged state policies, practices, and ideologies.

‘Won’t Somebody Think of the Children?’ Emotions, child poverty, and post-humanitarian possibilities for social justice education

Under models of moral and global citizenship education, compassion and caring are emphasized as a counterpoint to pervasive, heartless, neo-liberal globalization. According to such views, these and related emotions such as empathy, sympathy, and pity, can cause people to act righteously to aid others who are disadvantaged through no fault of their own. When applied to the contemporary issue of alleviating child poverty, it seems such emotions are both appropriate and easily developed through education. However, emotional appeals increasing a sense of urgency regarding such a dire issue should not necessarily be prioritized in the face of competing possibilities. Emotions can be difficult to develop, regulate, and sustain. Their appropriate expression and application in global contexts can be problematic, as people’s valuation and understanding of feelings varies across societies. Additionally, there are tensions between discourses of emotional care and compassion and rational duty to social justice. This article examines competing views on education for understanding and responding to child poverty, and defends post-humanitarian imaginaries and the possibility of non-relational care ethics. Care, compassion, empathy, and emotion may be involved in learning about child poverty, but an a priori rational orientation is also essential in such grave matters of social injustice.

Sewerage's Reproduction of Caste

The development of Ahmedabad's sewerage system both impinged upon and was itself modified to accommodate India's caste structure. Sewers became markers of legitimacy, sophistication, and moral citizenship through the notion of the “civic sense,” having corporeal, political, and economic repercussions upon the untouchable Bhangi caste, whose livelihood changed from sweeping gutters to clearing choked sewer pipes. Sanitation technology's humane intents were subverted over time by how the sewers were used and maintained, as caste discrimination was perpetuated under the aegis of public well-being and urban necessity.

Transitions to adulthood

The article argues that New Labour’s concern with productive moral citizenship underlies the model of ‘corporate parent’ which informs the Children (Leaving Care) Act, 2000. We show that there has been in statutory child care work a rather uncritical acceptance of ‘good parenting’ leading to ‘good outcomes’, based on the ‘Looking after Children’ (LAC) system. The Children (Leaving Care) Act, 2000, has transferred significant duties from the social security system to local government social services departments for the payment of personal allowances and housing costs of young people leaving care. It has provided powers for the discretionary interpretation of their circumstances and provision for their welfare, all as part of a social work assessment called a ‘Pathway Plan’. The government, through this legislation, presupposes that care leavers will benefit from a simulated experience of the transition to adulthood enjoyed by non-care leavers. The poverty and deprivation leading to social exclusion experienced by a significant minority of non careleavers is in fact the financial baseline of the provisions in this legislation. It is therefore hardly surprising that we find inherent tensions and contradictions within the legislative framework and the context of its implementation for social services and the practice of social workers with care leavers.

Consuming for the Social Good: Marketing, Consumer Citizenship, and the Possibilities of Ethical Consumption

Can consumers be socially responsible? Can the interests of consumers, corporations, and the overall society be reconciled? Traditionally, sociologists have conceptualized consumerism as enhancing individual wellbeing at the expense of moral citizenship. Yet throughout US history, popular discourse has linked consumption to the social good. Business schools currently expound this belief in their ‘principles of marketing’ courses. Popular textbooks promote ‘relationship management marketing’ which teaches students to target their most profitable customers, develop life-long relationships with them, and promote the societal concerns that they care about. The textbooks maintain that corporations are well-equipped to address the societal concerns of profitable customers through the use of cause marketing, granted minimal government interference. We describe this worldview as ‘neoliberal consumer citizenship’ and discuss its implications for social theory and a democratic society.

Hound pound narrative: sexual offender habilitation and the anthropology of therapeutic intervention

Preface Acknowledgments 1. Man Who Needs No Introduction 2. Goin' Down with the Hounds 3. Disordered Sex 4. Moral Citizenship Moral Habilitation 1: Stinkin' Thinkin' 5. It's Your Story Moral Habilitation 2: How To Say 'Fuck Off' Politely 6. Feeding Frenzy Moral Habilitation 3: Peter Meter 7. Rules for Staying Out of Jail Moral Habilitation 4: The Most Emotionally Draining Thing I Have Ever Done in My Life 8. A Pretty Shitty Place Out There 9. It's All in the Head Epilogue: Where Are They Now? Notes Works Cited Index

Senior Volunteerism in Japan: A Policy Perspective

This paper will discuss the development of Japan’s older adult volunteerism and how today’s older adult volunteerism needs to change in the face of a super-aging society coupled with changing social and economic needs. How Japanese organizations and communities can promote and sustain senior volunteerism will be examined in terms of four aspects of institutional capacity: access, information, incentives, and facilitation. The paper suggests that senior volunteerism is necessary for Japan’s aging society to provide meaning in later life, and sustain good health and well-being. However, to encourage volunteerism among aging baby-boomers, Japan needs to alter its traditional approaches, such as its top-down approach to organizing volunteerism and its focus on moral citizenship. With unique lives and experiences, the largely middle class baby-boomer generation will probably seek an experience of older adulthood different than that of their predecessors. Social work in Japan needs to expand its professional boundaries beyond poverty work to support the diverse needs of the aging population.

Graduateness: an empirical examination of the formative function of university education

The formative merits of university education are at risk of being reduced from graduateness in the sense of broad academic cultivation to professional training with a strong emphasis on employability. The difficulty in opposing this trend is the absence of a clear framework for academic cultivation. The aim of this study is to construct a model that uses the formative function of university education as a starting point, that distinguishes graduateness from employability, and that integrates theories on reflective thinking, scholarship, moral reasoning and lifelong learning. This approach offers the possibility of making use of insights from established theoretical traditions in the study of the intellectual development of students. For this study, a questionnaire was developed to investigate graduateness, or intellectual cultivation, among students in a research university. Structural equation modelling revealed that the expected structure was confirmed by the data. Reflective thinking has the strongest influence on lifelong learning; however, scholarship and moral citizenship are also important elements.

OUT OF WORK, OUT OF LEISURE, OUT OF PLACE: MORAL REGULATION, CITIZENSHIP AND VOLUNTEERING IN THE RURAL "IDYLL"

This paper presents components of semi-structured interview exploratory research (n=25) carried out during 2003in NSW's far north coast rainbow region as preparation of a larger agenda which seeks to interrogate ways in which national policy that circumscribes citizenship, interacts with cultural practices of belonging in rural "idyllic" tourism regions subjected to rapid growth in immigration from urban environments in successive waves. The central thrust of our approach is to examine the way in which work-for-the-dole volunteering, with it's emphasis on producing the active citizen in the bodies of the unemployed, operates to inform cultural practices of place infused with diverse, contradictory, and intersecting meanings of idleness bound up in culturally mediated relationships between joblessness and leisure. Though barely scratching the surface of highly complex and fluid relations, the paper focuses on how obligatory volunteering operates to both subvert and support the extent to which work-for the-dole ameliorates social alienation as a condition of joblessness. What happens to the sense of belonging when layers of regional migrants are pushed together by the welfare system

Impacting on Intimacy: Negotiating the Marriage Equality Debate

Impacting on Intimacy: Negotiating the Marriage Equality Debate

Spectacular Citizenships: Staging Latina Resistance through Urban Performances of Pain

Spectacular CitizenshipsStaging Latina Resistance through Urban Performances of Pain Emily Klein (bio) Not just a legal category, a stamp, or a government-issued document, citizenship in the age of twenty-first-century globalization is increasingly being thought of and studied as an embodied act, a dynamic set of behaviors, and a category of live (and lived) performance. Because of its role in transnational life, the modern city serves as the most obvious staging ground for performed citizenships. Distinct from traditional definitions of legal and political citizenship that entail obeying laws and helping to craft them, these new brands of embodied and engaged citizenship promote the broader values of critical reflection and, when necessary, active and spectacular expressions of dissent. Variously termed cultural citizenship, moral citizenship, and a citizenship of engagement, emergent streams of visibly resistant civic participation have been theorized by a small subset of scholars across a broad range of disciplines.1 Critics of the modern city have suggested that these new models of engaged citizenship are constituted primarily by the volatile and efficacious social interactions that have come to define city life. From protests, strikes, and picket lines to public performances and street art, popular urban modes of political and self-expression have helped to solidify a Western conception of cities as places where collective action comes to a head and incites social change. Gyan Prakash argues that "modern urban life … has produced new subjects, solidarities and meanings. The cityscape—its streets and sidewalks, its public space, the ebb and flow of its crowd, its infrastructure of transportation—has served as the setting for dynamic encounters and experiences."2 For feminist scholars one point of entry within this new area of research is to articulate how revolutionary urban models of female participatory citizenship reframe and expand the practices and rituals that have traditionally been associated with women in the public sphere. This essay takes up two examples of this phenomenon: the now canonical Madres de la Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires and the less widely known [End Page 102] Chicago-based Teatro Luna. The Madres are a group of mothers whose children were the victims of state-sponsored violence during the Dirty War. Their weekly protest events have become increasingly performative in the decades since they began their public marches around the Plaza de Mayo. Teatro Luna, a pan-Latina performance collective, stages innovative theatrical workshops and productions that aim to represent and advocate for the rights of Latina and Hispana women. These all-female urban collectives have each used established Latino/a performance traditions like the escrache and the carpa, as well as cultural archetypes like the mater dolorosa, to invert and politicize stereotypical Latina modes of citizenship for the purpose of reframing loss and trauma to incite social change. I argue that by using urban spaces as their staging ground for politically resistant performances of pain, Teatro Luna and the Madres creatively adapt traditional Latino/a performance practices to attract and mobilize new audiences. Key to these spectacularly performative inversions is the addition of the disruptive, raucous spirit that Yolanda Broyles-Gonzalez identifies as relajo.3 Even when performing stories of pain, the Madres and Teatro Luna both employ the resistant, mocking mood of relajo, which was first defined by Mexican philosopher Jorge Portilla as a "negation of required conduct" that "constitutes a subjective positioning of dissent vis-à-vis the dominant values of the social whole."4 This mode of boisterous and sometimes ironic critique allows Teatro Luna and activist groups affiliated with the Madres to question and subvert the status quo while still relaying their own traumatic stories as evidence of the need for structural change. While these two groups use entirely different performative modalities to reach their audiences—the street protest and the improvised short sketch—they both see relajo as a flexible but culturally specific way to attract engaged spectators and build community spirit. Operating from positions outside of the political mainstream, both of these groups use their cultural knowledge of various oral and embodied performance practices with roots in Central and South America to speak to a transnational Latino/a audience. Publicly sharing their personal stories of suffering within a...

The Virtualization of Citizenship

This article illustrates the difference between formal citizenship and moral citizenship, and traces the shift in focus from formal to moral citizenship in Dutch national and local policy. The mixing of ‘citizenship’ with ‘integration’ has given rise to what can be termed a virtualization of citizenship. When ‘integration’ becomes ‘citizenship’, the citizenship status of those persons that are formal citizens but supposedly lack ‘integration’ both shifts from an actual to a virtual possession, and also becomes defined as a ‘virtue’. The moralization of citizenship is largely state-initiated and is accompanied by a neoliberal focus on ‘individual responsibility’. Thus the state, whose position is endangered in times of globalization, finds a new functional potential in securing the in- and exclusion of ‘society’ through the pronunciation of moral citizenship in paternalist policies.

Youth protection and the prevention of juvenile delinquency

The year 1926 marked the passage of Germany’s Law to Protect Youth from Worthless and Obscene Publications. In combination with the Reich Motion Picture Law of 1920, this legislation sought to shelter minors from the corrupting forces of cultural narrative and imagery. As the discourse surrounding these laws attests, the terms of Germany’s so-called ‘cinema debate’ were ambivalent, and discussions about films thematizing crime were especially complex. Whereas many detective and crime films were condemned for glorifying delinquency, brutalizing the senses and exposing youth to excessive details about criminal activity, educational films and films that sounded a warning were viewed by reformists as ideal means to teach moral responsibility and good citizenship. This paper explores the purported connection between visual imagery, sensual—psychological stimulation, crime and censorship during the early years of the Weimar period.

‘You’re In Oil Country’: Moral Tales of Citizen Action against Petroleum Development in Alberta, Canada

The Canadian province of Alberta has experienced phenomenal growth in its oil and gas industry. As the petroleum–industrial complex expands it has sparked a number of community-based conflicts over noxious facilities that are seen by some to be the cause of a number of health problems. The research reported here used two case studies to examine siting conflicts involving natural gas extraction facilities in rural Alberta. We found that the stories shared by citizens involved in these conflicts functioned as ‘moral tales’. These moral tales were political in the way they challenged implicit and institutionalized rationales for redistributing benefits and burdens of oil and gas development. They also created a space for collective action by articulating spatial transgressions and by constructing a type of moral citizenship.

The Tyranny of Sleep: Somnambulism, Moral Citizenship, and Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly

The Tyranny of Sleep: Somnambulism, Moral Citizenship, and Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly

The Moralisation of Citizenship in Dutch Integration Discourse

In this essay two arguments are made about the Dutch integration policy discourse drawing on a distinction between formal citizenship and moral citizenship. First it is argued that citizenship is increasingly framed as moral citizenship and subsequently that this entails a shift from actual citizenship to a virtual conception of it. This virtualisation of citizenship leads to the discursive articulation of certain citizens - immigrants who are citizens in the formal sense - as quasi-subjects, at once protected and feared within the nation-state. This entails that the virtualisation of citizenship does not concern formal inclusion in the nation-state, but rather the moral inclusion in the discursive domain of 'society'.