Citizenship Project Research Articles

Community climate resilience and environmental education: Opportunities and challenges for transformative learning

Grassroots initiatives towards climate resilience in cities are likely to embed environmental education practices with potential transformative impact among young people. Through interviews and document review, we examine two initiatives involving different non-formal educational actions in Barcelona: a civic ecology practice based on the community gardening of tree pits and an energy citizenship project with the school community. Despite their diverse nature and outcomes, these educational actions promoted by grassroots groups intend to boost young people’s critical reflection, responsibility, and agency for taking individual action towards more climate-resilient cities. However, connections between agency, empowerment and transformative learning become more challenging when translated to the collective. Limitations relate to the lack of effective engagement approaches that reinforce social connectedness and local identity, and insufficient evaluation strategies. By discussing these potentials and challenges, we shed light on the synergies concerning transformative learning between the fields of environmental education and urban community resilience.

Progressive Urbanism in Small Towns: The Contingencies of Governing From the Left

The progressive potential of urban politics is the subject of growing interest. However, debates have been largely focused on large cities with strong progressive constituencies of activists and Left-voting residents. We know little about the opportunities and challenges for progressive politics in smaller urban areas. This article addresses these shortcomings through a discussion of “progressive urbanism” in relation to small towns. In doing so, it makes three main contributions. First, it provides a definition of progressive urbanism as political projects of social justice, citizenship and democracy exploring the contingent potential of “localism,” “urban movements” and “municipal government.” Second, the article provides empirical insights on small towns in the German state of Brandenburg governed by mayors of the Left Party. Third, the article outlines challenges and opportunities of progressive urbanism in small towns, providing points of reflection for future research.

Conceptual contours of migration studies in and from Asia

Conceptual contours of migration studies in and from Asia

Neo-rituals under construction. How and what do the finals of the CONMEBOL Copa Libertadores tell us?

This paper analyses the ritualization that has evolved around the Copa Libertadores de América finals: the most important football tournament in South America at club level. It seeks to understand its evolution from the beginning of the twenty-first century, paying attention to the confrontation between different national realities and the subcontinental institutions that govern football in the region, particularly the Confederación Sudamericana de Fútbol (CONMEBOL). Applying a methodology based on the audiovisual dimension of the event, and analysing multiple categories of ritualization, it can be seen that the institutional weakness of CONMEBOL has hindered the transmission of a clear message via the tournament. This has made it difficult for the tournament to consolidate itself as a unifying force for football in the region, and has prevented CONMEBOL, at least so far, from being able to lead a citizenship project around football in South America.

Critical global citizenship

This introductory paper to our first issue provides reflection on the concept of critical global citizenship at both theoretical and practical levels. We maintain that ‘citizenship’, irrespective of its level of articulation (i.e. national, international, global, etc.) remains an issue that reflects a status, a feeling and practices that are intrinsically interlinked. As a legal status, formal citizenship allows individuals to form a sense of belonging within a political community and, therefore, empowers them to act and perform their citizenship within the spatial domains of the nation-state. Critical global citizenship, asks these same individuals not so much to neglect these notions of belonging and practice to a particular locale, but to extend such affinities beyond the territorial boundaries of their formal national membership and to think critically and ethically about their local, national and global relationship with those who are different from themselves. Making a case for a critical global citizenship, however, also requires acknowledging material inequalities that affect the most vulnerable (i.e. migrants, asylum seekers, those experiencing poverty, etc.) and which mean that efforts to cultivate global citizenship orientations to address social injustice are not enacted on an even playing field. As such, a critical global citizenship approach espouses a performative citizenship that is at once democratic and ethical, as well as being aimed at achieving social peace and sustainable justice, but which is also affected by material conditions of inequality that require political solutions and commitment from individuals, states, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and civil society organisations.1
 1 This article is based on F. Mansouri (2014), ‘The Global Citizenship Project: From Words to Action’, published by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. © UNESCO, Paris

COVID-19, markets and the crisis of the higher education regulatory state: the case of Australia

ABSTRACT This article explores the impact of COVID-19 on the Australian higher education system. It analyses how the contradictions of Australian higher education, driven by expanding participation in the higher education system within the context of contained public funding, have been politically managed through regulatory regimes that link the public university with the neoliberal capitalist economy. Such modes of state intervention have been dependent on financialized instruments such as income contingent loans, the education–migration nexus, and precarious work. These regulatory instruments, embedded within a project of market citizenship, have both managed and expanded the marketization of higher education while also expanding participation. It is this regulatory model of market citizenship that is now facing a crisis of crisis management.

From ‘Natives’ to ‘Aborigines’: Late Colonialism, Indigenous Rights and the Global Politics of Sovereignty (1953–1962)

ABSTRACT This article addresses the dynamics of political and social continuity and change in Portuguese late colonialism after 1945. By focusing on the 1961 and 1962 imperial reforms, three main arguments are put forward. First, that only by analytically incorporating international and transnational dimensions the Portuguese protracted trajectory of imperial demise can be fully grasped. Second, by engaging with international institutions, norms and idioms, namely the then emerging indigenous international law and politics, Portuguese authorities and experts advanced a distinctive and alternative project of nationhood and imperial citizenship that contested the prevalent anti-colonial norm of self-determination. Finally, it is argued that in an authoritarian context, imperial and colonial reforms re-enacted and reconfigured, instead of abolishing, a juridical order shaped by acute racial inequalities and discrimination but that, nonetheless, made prevention of daily abuses and violence more effective.

\u2018If I Had My House, I\u2019d Feel Free\u2019: Housing and the (Re)Productions of Citizenship in Cape Town, South Africa

While urban divisions are commonly emphasized in urban studies, there has been less emphasis on reproductions and contestations of divides within marginal urban spaces. This paper explores the dynamics of juxtaposed differences related to housing and urban citizenship in Delft, Cape Town. Delft is a microcosm of thirty years of official housing interventions in post-apartheid South Africa. It is also a space in which differences of urban formality and informality and of permanence and temporariness co-exist, and where housing is at the centre of community politics. This is driven by residents’ perceptions, interpretations and negotiations of differentiated housing rights and opportunities, residential categories and identities and notions of belonging. A particular manifestation of juxtaposed material and temporal differences in housing infrastructure is the construction of temporary relocation areas (TRAs). The multifaceted challenges with the TRAs in Delft illustrate the political nature of housing infrastructure as reported by (Lemanski 2019a, b) and how citizen-making is shaped in and through articulations of formality and informality, and of permanence and temporariness. This informs a politics of citizenship where the precariousness of permanent temporariness as reported by (Yiftachel 2009) for those living in the TRAs is set against those whose right to secure housing is realized, giving them recognition and permanence as ‘proper’ citizens. These dynamics may simultaneously inform rights-based claims to citizenship through collective struggles and individual actions, and localized forms of exclusion from the project of citizenship.

Collections Housed at the Keats-Shelley House: A Digital Translation

ABSTRACT This article aims to illustrate the process behind the building of the KSH digital collections webpage by highlighting the research endeavour carried out by cataloguers and digital curators. It also demonstrates the importance and complexity of the mediating interaction with IT developers in the effort of mapping descriptions and content into conventional frameworks, in compliance with cataloguing and metadata standards and best practices such as MARC, MODS and controlled vocabularies. The influence and relevance of the cultural networks emerging from the holdings preserved in the KSH is one of the distinct features of this extraordinary and unique collection composed of heterogeneous materials. The research potential embedded in manuscripts, artworks and objects translated into digital bits is therefore offered to broader audiences and opens up new ways of interpretation by paving the way to citizenship projects, object-based sessions, virtual and augmented reality outputs.

Subject and citizen: the ‘Sikkim Subject’ in Indian democracy

ABSTRACT The paper deals with the empirical category of Sikkim Subject, now a special category of Indian citizens. It traces the path of the citizenship project in Sikkim, which remained insulated from the processes of India’s citizenship regime from 1975. The paper further analyses evolving citizenship discourse from the framework of acquiring citizenship through the incorporation of foreign territories by India after the commencement of the Indian Constitution, 1950, and the Indian Citizenship Act, 1955. One such encounter, the Sikkim Citizenship Order of 1975, highlights the evolving tensions associated with the practical imperatives of Indian citizenship often exacerbated by anti-immigrant movements in parts of North East India. The paper argues that Indian citizenship, liberal in its foundations, which situates individual equality as the unit of citizenship analysis converge with the differentiated model of citizenship with group and community-cultural rights in a historical specificity in Sikkim.

Alzheimer's Patient Organizations' Role in Enabling Citizenship Projects: A Comparison of the USA, Germany, and the UK.

This paper examines how Alzheimer's disease (AD) patient support organizations (POs) located in diverse healthcare regimes enable patients to claim and construct their rights as citizens. Since citizenship rights of people with AD are debated widely, it is important to recognize the role of POs in enabling people to construct citizenship identities. This paper thus examines the factors that shape the citizenship projects of the AD POs. Since collective health-related behavior changes in line with national differences, we compare the biggest AD POs in three starkly distinct healthcare regimes: the Alzheimer's Association in the US (ALZ), the Deutsche Alzheimer Gesellschaft (German Alzheimer's Association) in Germany (DAG), and Alzheimer's Society in the UK (AS), to examine how distinct health policy contexts shape their citizenship projects. Based on our website analysis of the three POs and other related secondary documents, we argue that the way each POs work toward enabling its members to claim rights and assume responsibilities depend upon the nature of healthcare funding and resource allocation for AD care. Since AD involves long-term care, the ways in which the three POs enable the people with AD to secure their care expenses set apart the nature of citizenships enactments.

Citizens under the umbrella: citizenship projects and the development of genetic umbrella organizations in the USA and the UK

Social scientists have observed previously that patient support groups began to have significant influence over both research and clinical services of medical genetics in the early 2000s. This observation led to the idea of genetic citizenship, suggesting that the active participation and intervention of patient support groups in the rapidly growing field of medicine marked the emergence of a new form of citizenship. To understand how this citizenship emerged, this paper examines the development of umbrella organizations of genetic support groups in the USA and the UK. The historical analysis demonstrates that the ways in which these organizations developed differ considerably, and that their visions and activities reflected the different structural and cultural organizations of medical genetics in their respective countries. By recognizing the early work of these organizations as citizenship projects, this article argues that they helped rather different forms of genetic citizenship to emerge in the two countries.

Seeking signs of transparency: audit, materiality, and monuments to active citizenship in New Delhi

AbstractIn New Delhi, the Chief Information Commissioner has ordered that municipal councillors should ‘proactively disclose’ details of the amounts spent on public works via Hindi‐language noticeboards displayed in every city ward. As ‘appropriate’ technology designed to reach out to the common people, the noticeboards are part of an ongoing technomoral project to develop and democratize citizen engagement with urban governance. An audit of the noticeboards carried out by Information Commission officials and ‘right to information’ activists reveals that many are badly positioned or assembled from inappropriate materials. As such, they are judged to be unreliable actants in the project to prefigure a more open and transparent city administration. A focus on the materiality and temporal orientation of the noticeboards, however, reveals them to be productive in other ways. We come to understand the noticeboards as monuments to earlier projects of active citizenship and as ongoing sites of contest or collaboration between actors concerned with their audit and remediation.

Exploring Citizenship: Unit 7 My World

The 4-H Citizenship Project offers the opportunity to help 4-H members relate all of their 4-H projects and experiences to the world around them. The 4-H Citizenship manuals will serve as a guide for 4-H Citizenship experiences. To be truly meaningful to the real-life needs and interests of your group, the contribution of volunteer leaders is essential. Each person, neighborhood, and community has individual needs that you can help your group identify. This 14-page major revision of Unit VII covers the “My World” project. Written by John Rutledge, Joy C. Jordan, and Dale Pracht and published by the UF/IFAS Extension 4-H Youth Development program. https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/4h021

Exploring Citizenship: Unit 6 My Government

The 4-H Citizenship Project offers the opportunity to help 4-H members relate all of their 4-H projects and experiences to the world around them. The 4-H Citizenship manuals will serve as a guide for 4-H Citizenship experiences. To be truly meaningful to the real-life needs and interests of your group, the contribution of volunteer leaders is essential. Each person, neighborhood, and community has individual needs that you can help your group identify. This 23-page major revision of Unit VI covers the “My Government” project. Written by John Rutledge, Joy C. Jordan, and Dale Pracht and published by the UF/IFAS Extension 4-H Youth Development program. https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/4h020

Exploring Citizenship: Unit 4 My Heritage

The 4-H Citizenship Project offers the opportunity to help 4-H members relate all of their 4-H projects and experiences to the world around them. The 4-H Citizenship manuals will serve as a guide for 4-H Citizenship experiences. To be truly meaningful to the real-life needs and interests of your group, the contribution of volunteer leaders is essential. Each person, neighborhood, and community has individual needs that you can help your group identify. This 14-page major revision of Unit IV covers the heritage project. Written by John Rutledge, Joy C. Jordan, and Dale Pracht and published by the UF/IFAS Extension 4-H Youth Development program. https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/4h019

Exploring Citizenship: Unit 5 My Community

Unit V: My Community
 The 4-H Citizenship Project offers the opportunity to help 4-H members relate all of their 4-H projects and experiences to the world around them. The 4-H Citizenship manuals will serve as a guide for 4-H Citizenship experiences. To be truly meaningful to the real-life needs and interests of your group, the contribution of volunteer leaders is essential. Each person, neighborhood, and community has individual needs that you can help your group identify. This 22-page major revision of Unit V covers the “My Community” project. Written by John Rutledge, Joy C. Jordan, and Dale Pracht and published by the UF/IFAS Extension 4-H Youth Development program. https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/4h018

Exploring Citizenship: Volunteer Guide

The 4-H Citizenship Project offers the opportunity to help 4-H members relate all of their 4-H projects and experiences to the world around them. The 4-H Citizenship manuals will serve as a guide for 4-H Citizenship experiences. To be truly meaningful to the real-life needs and interests of your group, the contribution of volunteer leaders is essential. Each person, neighborhood, and community has individual needs that you can help your group identify. This 6-page Volunteer Guide is a major revision written by John Rutledge, Joy C. Jordan, and Dale Pracht and published by the UF/IFAS Extension 4-H Youth Development program. https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/4h014
 Originally published May 1988.

Long-term impact of four intercultural citizenship projects in the higher education foreign language classroom

ABSTRACT This study reports on the evaluation of long-term impact of four intercultural citizenship projects undertaken in university foreign language classrooms. Curricular developments based on Byram’s intercultural citizenship theory have demonstrated the immediate impact including the development of self and intercultural awareness, criticality, social justice responsibility and language learning as well as the emergence of a sense of community and bonding among transnational peers. However, the long-term effects have not been investigated. This study sets out to analyse Argentinian students’ recollections – between two and four years after the event – of experiences in four intercultural citizenship projects undertaken over several years with students in the UK and in Italy. These one-year projects combined language teaching and citizenship/human rights education. Students’ retrospective reflection logs were analysed using content analysis, and findings show that the students remembered and valued their emotional engagement with critical content and with their transnational peers; they had varied and conflicting views about how the projects had contributed to their language learning; and mid- and long-term civic engagement occurred mostly at what Michael Byram refers to as the ‘pre-political’ level, involving thought, awareness and personal development, rather than action at the ‘political’ level.

Beyond Technological Literacy

We consider scholarly conversations about digital citizenship as a continuation of centuries of discourse about citizenship, democracy, and technoscience. Conceptually, we critique portrayals of citizenship from Jeffersonian polities to technical literacy to critical health and environmental justice movements. This analysis forms the basis for proposing an alternative, normative theoretical perspective on citizens' engagement in governance: the ethics of care. This framework enables a move from citizens' civic engagement as motivated by duty and risk perception to motivated by an affective desire to care for oneself and others. Using the ethics of care, we explore a digital citizenship project about civic open data in Charlottesville, Virginia, as an example of stakeholders caring about and for the construction of digital technologies as well as relationships of mutual interdependence between government and citizens. Despite pervasive assumptions and institutional gaps that limit this project's success, this case illustrates the potential power of reframing the motivations for democratic engagement as relational and affective rather than based on fear or duty alone.