Citizenship Practices Research Articles

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.

From decolonizing area studies to intercultural citizenship practice

From decolonizing area studies to intercultural citizenship practice

The reality of the practice of digital citizenship by secondary school leaders in Riyadh and the requirements for its activation in the light of the European experience from their point of view

هدفت الدراسة إلى التعرف على واقع ممارسة قائدات المدارس الثانوية بمنطقة الرياض للمواطنة الرقمية ومتطلبات تفعليها في ضوء التجربة الأوروبية من وجهة نظرهن، وقد تم اختيار عينة عشوائية طبقية بلغت (232) قائدة مدرسة، وتوصلت نتائج الدراسة إلى أن واقع المواطنة الرقمية لدى أفراد عينة الدراسة كانت بمتوسط كلي (3.50 من 5)؛ بدرجة (كبيرة) وأما مجالاتها؛ فحصل الوصول الرقمي على أعلى متوسط (3.37)، ثم محو الأمية (4.22)، وكلاهما بدرجة (كبيرة جداً)، وثالثا الصحة والسلامة (4.01) ورابعا؛ اللياقة (3.93) وخامساً؛ الاتصالات (3.67) وأخيراً؛ الحقوق والمسؤوليات (3.54) وجميعها بتقدير (كبيرة)، وحصل محور متطلبات تفعيل المواطنة الرقمية على متوسط كلي (4.57) بدرجة (كبيرة جداً)، وأخيرا تحديات المواطنة الرقمية بمتوسط (4.18)، وتقدير (كبيرة)، وعدم وجود فرق دال إحصائياً بين متوسط درجات أفراد عينة الدراسة حول دور المواطنة الرقمية لدى قائدات مدارس التعليم العام للمرحلة الثانوية في ضوء التجربة الأوروبية والتي تعزى إلى المؤهل العلمي، في حين يوجد فرق دال إحصائياً بين أفراد العينة تبعاً للمتغيرات الآتية: (سنوات الخبرة التعليمية في محور واقع المواطنة الرقمية، ولصالح من سنوات خبرتهم 10 سنوات فأكثر، وتبعاً للبرامج التدريبية في محور تحديات المواطنة الرقمية ولصالح الأفراد الذين لم يتلقوا برامج تدريبية. وفي ضوء نتائج الدراسة تم وضع تصور مقترح لتفعيل دور المواطنة الرقمية في ضوء التجربة الأوروبية.

The Recovering Citizenship Learning Collaborative: a system-wide intervention to increase citizenship practices and outcomes

PurposeThis paper aims to describe the Recovering Citizenship Learning Collaborative (RCLC), a training, consultation and implementation effort for 13 local mental health authorities and two state hospitals.Design/methodology/approachThe learning collaborative used a Recovering Citizenship approach, which holds that recovery occurs in the context of people’s lives in their communities and society, that is, their citizenship. The RCLC was implemented by the Connecticut Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services (DMHAS) in the USA and the Yale Program for Recovery and Community Health along with lived experience leaders. The RCLC supported system change through training DMHAS staff on concepts of recovery and citizenship and developing agency action plans, with the long-term goal of improving citizenship-oriented care at the agency-level and recovery and citizenship-related outcomes for people receiving services.FindingsLessons learned include the importance of assessing organizational readiness for change, addressing leadership investment and attention to systemic barrier, and offering tools to promote structure and accountability. Next steps are supporting agency action plans through technical assistance, state-wide educational offerings and a resource library.Research limitations/implicationsSystemic barriers are considerable and must be addressed before system transformation is possible.Practical implicationsThe authors are hopeful that the RCLC has been part of overcoming those challenges and can be a tool for building foundations for improving citizen practices and people’s citizenship-related outcomes.Social implicationsNext steps are sustaining agency action plans, ongoing agency-specific technical assistance, ongoing state-wide educational offerings and a resource library.Originality/valueThe RCLC has provided tools and supports to build the foundation for improved citizenship practices and client outcomes at the multiagency system level.

Creating the governable population: authoritarian cultural citizenship and the ethnic minorities in a Sino-Tibetan intercultural area in contemporary China

ABSTRACT This study interrogates how China’s ethnic minorities in a Sino-Tibetan intercultural area practice their citizenship. We build on the ideas of cultural citizenship and authoritarian citizenship to develop an analytical framework of authoritarian cultural citizenship which highlights the interactive mechanisms between the powerful Chinese state and the resilient ethnic minorities. We identify their traditional cultural citizenship practices in such multi-ethnic, -cultural, and religious site, and further discover their additional authoritarian cultural citizenship practices profoundly affected by the presence of the Chinese state, and lastly explain in length their changes and responses in such practices as the security-driven state effects become intensified.

Affecting belonging: experimental education, cultural resources, and affective cultural citizenship in contemporary China

ABSTRACT This article explores how Chinese grassroots actors engaged in ‘experimental education’ (EE) practice a new form of Chinese cultural citizenship. Using cultural resources gleaned from grassroots social movements ranging from ‘Chinese Traditional Culture’ (CTC) revival to Steiner education, EE activists establish affectivity, or the embodied sensory capacity to receive and exert influence, as a legitimate education goal and a key criterion of socio-cultural belonging. Using affectivity as a basis, EE activists contest the state’s exclusionary education politics. In their grassroots social networks, EE activists construct radical inclusion for ‘value minorities’ – individuals and groups who misfit normative conceptions of Chinese cultural citizenship. These include CTC educators who promote ‘non-cognitive knowing’, Steiner educators who run illegal ‘Voldemort Schools’ to foster children’s affective development, and neurodivergent children who putatively demonstrate ‘terrifyingly strong affective abilities’. I argue that these diverse EE activists articulate and practice ‘affective cultural citizenship’, ranging from moderate to militant forms. Their contestations amount to community-based cultural citizenship practices, asserting the right to be different and to belong in an authoritarian state.

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.

Digital transnationalism in the era of China’s rise: WeChat, Chinese diaspora, misconceptions and future research

In the dialogue, Professor Wanning Sun, an internationally renowned scholar on media and communication in the Chinese diaspora, first introduces her new book co-authored with Professor Haiqing Yu titled Digital Transnationalism: Chinese-language Media in Australia (Brill, 2023). Professor Sun then responds to a few misconceptions that have been dominant in public discourses in the global West on the diasporic Chinese media. She argues that diasporic Chinese people’s transnational citizenship practices will become increasingly bound up with geopolitics that has significantly impacted the operation, regulation and use of Chinese social media platforms in the West. She points out that future research in ‘digital transnationalism’ of the Chinese diaspora could further explore the changing relations between Chinese digital/social media and the formation of a new kind of transnational Chinese subjectivities with a comparative approach.

Gaining access to unspoken narratives of people living with dementia on a hospital ward-A new methodology.

This is a methodological paper that aims to advance the conceptualisation of participatory research by focusing on the value of capturing and understanding movement as a vital means of communication for older people with dementia in a general hospital ward. Qualitative research involving people with dementia tends to be word-based and reliant upon verbal fluency. This article considers a method for capturing and understanding movement as a vital means of communication. This narrative enquiry is underpinned by the model of social citizenship that recognises people with dementia as citizens with narratives to share. The study focused on spontaneously produced conversations that were video recorded and analysed through a lens of mobility. This enabled each participant to share what was important to them in that moment of time without always using words. The study findings showed that people with dementia have narratives to share, but these narratives do not fit the bio-medically constructed model that is generally expected from patients. Utilising a mobilities lens enabled the narratives to be understood as containing layers of language. The first layer is the words; the second layer is gestures and movements that support the words; and the third layer is micro movements. These movements do not only support the words but in some cases tell a different story altogether. This methodology brings attention to layers of communication that reveal narratives as a mobile process that require work from both the teller and the listener to share and receive. Movements are shown to be the physical manifestations of embodied language which when viewed through a lens of mobility enable a deeper understanding of the experience of living with dementia when an inpatient. Viewing narratives through a mobilities lens is important to the advancement of dementia and citizenship practices.

Citizenisation in the aftermath of domestic violence: the role of family, community and social networks

Domestic violence impedes women’s exercise of full participatory citizenship. This article explicates the role of family, community and social networks in the aftermath of an abusive relationship as both an indicator of intimate citizenship as an achieved status and as a facilitator of the process of citizenisation in the private and public spheres. Based on life history interviews with 26 South Asian women in the UK, the findings reveal the myriad ways in which denial of citizenship continues long after, and in part due to, the end of the abusive relationship, and outline women’s efforts to regain a sense of identity, belongingness and membership within their intimate, family and community lives. In doing so, this article advances conceptual understandings of the lived practice of citizenship. It also problematises the binary construction of ‘victims’ versus ‘survivors’, which is premised on a linear and successful journey towards citizenisation following the end of the abusive relationship.

Analysis of the Digital Citizenship Practices among University Students in Pakistan

This paper intended to analyze the practices of digital citizenship among university student in Pakistan. The quantitative descriptive survey research design was adopted for this study. The population of the study was 800 students of BS (Education) program in ten public sector universities in Punjab, Pakistan. Simple random sampling technique was used for the selection of sample. T

Recognizing agency and everyday citizenship practice for people at forensic psychiatric care

Recognizing agency and everyday citizenship practice for people at forensic psychiatric care

Practices of health citizenship in South Africa: a case study of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) in Khayelitsha, Cape Town

This article examines the Treatment Action Campaign’s (TAC) evolution and attrition as a social movement organisation to discern its implications for practices of health citizenship at the grassroots level. A qualitative approach to case study research was used to collect and analyse data. Practices of health citizenship were framed around the integration of biomedical knowledge and people’s experiences of grassroots activism. By exploring how the TAC’s brand of activism filtered down to the community level, the findings reveal the importance of diverse forms of activist-led collective action in promoting health-seeking behaviour. These comprise activist-led branch meetings, community workshops, health promotion talks at clinics and community radio stations, as well as protest action at community clinics. Findings indicate that participation in TAC-led activism in Khayelitsha is not a passive form of responsible HIV citizenship. Rather, it is an active process through which TAC members integrate their lived experiences with biomedical knowledge to construct meanings and articulate grievances to enhance the quality of health service delivery in their community. Also, although the TAC’s practices of health citizenship have not changed significantly over time, its campaigns have evolved based on contextual factors. These practices have entrenched ways of being, doing and knowing that have become an important resource for activist-led health promotion. Key stakeholders in government and civil society can harness these practices to strengthen health systems.

DEVELOPMENT OF CITIZENSHIP EDUCATION IN INDONESIAN

This article tries to contribute to building judgments based on many important issues. This study is intended to evaluate comprehensively, in this case, citizenship education as part of the curriculum. Systematic reviews are used to examine this study, which refers to a methodological combination in which a literature review is an important component. At the same time, assessment is a matching technique. Matching approach compares quality with criteria to a particular result. This study reveals that citizenship education and civil engagement is based on the belief that citizenhood education is a powerful instrument with the capacity to influence the future. Consider applying the ideas and practices of citizenship and intercultural education to international and local development. Global Citizenship, digital citizenship and media citizenships are concepts used in contemporary politics

Stratified Citizens: Conceptualizing Civic Capital in Mediatized Societies

While there are many ways to understand citizenship in terms of what constituents (should) do, think, feel, and say, there is a felt absence of a perspective that factors in the social reasons for how people enact citizenship and the role of media in enacting such forms of citizenship. Based on a review of key studies of citizenship in audience research and political science, this study introduces a Bourdieusian perspective to examine citizenship in mediatized societies. We argue for two main advantages to this approach. First, it cuts across scholarly silos and scrutinizes the civic habitus of people as it unfolds across both mediated and non-mediated life. Citizenship is thus seen as a complex interplay of online and offline practices that vary for agents across the social space. Second, this approach is attentive to dimensions of social inequality and power, emphasizing how the many citizenship practices in the modern era are situated in a vertically stratified social world with a distinct symbolic order. Linking this to the concepts of symbolic power and dominance, we develop the notion of civic capital to illuminate how certain forms of citizenship practices, mostly those available to the affluent strata, are elevated as correct expressions of legitimate citizenship, whereas others are frowned upon.

University-driven coastal partnerships to address ghost gear pollution: A case study in Penghu Islands of Taiwan

Ghost gear has become a significant environmental and economic challenge affecting oceans worldwide. Preventing and eliminating ghost gear is essential for achieving sustainable development goals (SDGs), and partnerships between universities and multi-stakeholders are considered feasible solutions. This case study illuminates the implementation of the Partnerships for Ghost Gear Cleanups & Education Project (PGGCEP) conducted by the National Kaohsiung University of Science and Technology (NKUST) in the Penghu Islands of Taiwan, which involves engagement with local stakeholders to prevent and remediate ghost gear in Penghu seas, providing insights into coastal partnerships building to promote ocean sustainability. The conceptual schemes of PGGCEP include education projects, marine citizenship practices, and awareness campaigns. The outcomes of PGGCEP were analyzed under the framework of SDGs. The results showed that PGGCEP not only successfully supported SDG 14 life below water through the achievement of SDG17 partnerships for the goals, and it also contributed to other SDGs, including SDG 4 quality education, SDG 5 gender equality, SDG 8 decent work and economic growth, and SDG 10 reduced inequalities. Future directions for PGGCEP were subsequently provided to refine the project. Based on the findings, this study proposed a framework of university-driven coastal partnerships to address ghost gear pollution. This 4-phase framework highlights the pivotal role played by universities as facilitators of collaborative efforts that involve a broad spectrum of stakeholders for enhancing ocean sustainability.

Democratic Confederalism: An Alternative for Facing Tensions Between Global Citizenship and Localist Citizenship

This article explores the tensions between different conceptions of “citizenship.” On the one hand, we point out the virtues and limitations of cosmopolitan citizenship in the terms in which Seyla Benhabib understands it in The Right of Others…; on the other hand, we delve into another notion of citizenship, namely, the localist, in a version that could be at odds with some cosmopolitan values, that is, localism as understood by some Mexican autonomous communities, particularly the Zapatistas. Although Benhabib’s cosmopolitan federalism is inclusive in spirit, it is conceived within a preponderantly global perspective and ends up being asymmetrical. While her proposal has some positive aspects, it faces some difficulties in the case of Mexican autonomous communities. In this article, we shall introduce the notion of democratic confederalism as a form of sociopolitical organization that seeks to strengthen the self-organization of social actors and to recognize the practice of citizenship in the terms in which autonomous communities exercise it. We propose that democratic confederalism could be an alternative for decreasing tensions between global citizenship and the idea of citizenship within autonomous communities.

Practicing ecological citizenship through community supported agriculture: Opportunities, challenges, and social justice concerns

AbstractGreen political theorists often highlight local food systems as an exemplar of ecological citizenship. Nevertheless, the topic has received scant systematic and critical treatment within green political theory. Although local food initiatives generally tend to be environmentally friendly, not all such initiatives lead to better environmental outcomes, nor can they be essentially characterized as citizenship practices that foster social justice. This article argues that a situated analysis is necessary to understand how a particular local food initiative promotes ecological citizenship. Through a qualitative study of community supported agriculture (CSA) participants in the greater Edmonton region of Canada, this article analyzes the civic virtues nurtured by this community and interrogates the extent to which their everyday practices resemble ecological citizenship. It concludes that discursive and structural limitations prevent the Edmonton CSA community from achieving meaningful diversity and addressing social justice concerns within its realm.

Practical citizenship: how to learn and exercise participation in schools

ABSTRACT This article presents research designed to support teachers in the promotion of learning practical citizenship through the provision of appropriate guidelines and strategies. Practical citizenship refers to critical participation in democratic processes for social transformation. The authors recognise schools’ transformative capacity, despite their hierarchical structure and the prevalence of individuality. They contend that the analysis of how people learn and exercise practical citizenship in diverse contexts generates useful knowledge to be applied in schools.They have analysed the experiences and discourses of the stakeholders involved in participatory movements and practices: those generally located in informal and open contexts. Their interpretation of the results has drawn practical guidelines for helping teachers to make school the most democratic environment possible.

Negotiating senses of belonging and identity across education spaces

A multitude of educational programs attempt to facilitate young people’s engagement with ideas and practices of active citizenship. For young Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander or Indigenous people in Australia, such interventions are often subject to complex experiences of senses of belonging and non-belonging. This paper responds to calls from researchers to develop better understandings of young Indigenous people’s own senses and practices of belonging and to better understand the ways in which these perspectives and practices are spatially influenced at the level of local communities, ‘country’ and cultural groupings, and within larger state, national or transnational settings. Their testimonies illustrate the tensions that young Indigenous people must navigate in a settler colony that has never truly recognised Indigenous sovereignty but show that sovereignty remains intact. Focus groups were conducted with 58 young Indigenous people in Melbourne and regional Victoria who were participating in an Indigenous youth leadership program designed to foster formal and informal active citizenship practices, and to nurture a strong, affirming sense of Indigenous identity. The testimonies of these participants provide valuable insights into educational sites as spaces in which young people experience a spectrum of weak to strong senses of belonging. They also provide insights into the possibilities of engaging the challenges faced by many young Indigenous people in educational settings, challenges that include race discordance and exclusion, deficit discourses and gaps and distances in educational practice. They highlight the need to recognise the aspirations of young Indigenous people and the capacities of colonial education systems to meet them, and the imperative to celebrate young Indigenous identities in meaningful, non-tokenistic ways.