Homelessness as the Unforgiving Minute of the Present: The Rhetorical Tenses of Democratic Citizenship

Popular discourse and advocacy efforts characterize homelessness as a social problem bound by the present-centered concerns of physical affliction and material deprivation. Wayne Powers's documentary film Reversal of Fortune exemplifies this tendency by performing a “social experiment” to investigate how giving a homeless man $100,000 would change his life: the film chronicles the intervention in terms of an ever-fleeting opportunity that the man ultimately fails to utilize. Such discourses deny the future-oriented grounds for identification between homeless and housed as citizens sharing a common political destiny. Discourses of homelessness thus provide an important opportunity for questioning how the rhetorical tenses of democratic citizenship can be cultivated or suppressed, and how such rhetorical work can contribute to a more dynamic democratic culture.     

Bordering the Civic Imaginary: Alienization,Fence Logic,and the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps

Current figurations of the “immigration problem” in the United States challenge our understanding of the rhetoricity of contemporary bordering practices. The public discourse of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps serves to chart the alienization of undocumented migrants and the enactment of alien abjection on the U.S.–Mexico border. Alienization promises an antidote to majoritarian anxieties regarding national disunity in the form of a shoring-up of cultural boundaries that border-crossing subjects render troublesome. Ultimately, the fence logic engendered by groups such as the Minutemen reveals how struggles over the boundaries of citizenship both enable and limit an affect-charged civic imaginary.     

A Rhetoric of Traumatic Nationalism in the Ground Zero Mosque Controversy

In the summer of 2010, a national controversy erupted suddenly as a majority of Americans protested the building of an Islamic community center near Ground Zero. In this essay, I suggest the so-called “Ground Zero mosque” controversy makes visible the emergence of a rhetoric of traumatic nationalism that articulates suffering to citizenship and reproduces national crisis through a motif of consecration whose upshot is a conservative, bipartisan moralism. An anti-political discourse of victimization masquerading as a memory discourse of righteous sacrifice, traumatic nationalism serves as an alibi that excuses the United States from answering responsibly for the war on terror and prevents critical examination of the state of the union.     

Pupils in Control: Sex Talk as an Educational Resource

Education for citizenship is now recommended for all primary schools. Whilst primary teachers have long covered social and moral education, they have been less likely to cover teaching about community and political literacy (including the discussion of topical, controversial issues). This paper reports research findings on current practice and identifies key areas for discussion. It argues that there is great scope for enriching and enlivening the primary curriculum through the introduction of education for citizenship, by extending current practice in social and moral education and incorporating the newer themes of community and political literacy into existing teaching.     

加强核心价值观，超越差异——应对多元文化挑战的英国公民教育

英国是一个种族、民族、信仰多元化的国家,如何使公民教育在加强学生对英国传统价值观的继承的情况下,促进他们对不同文化的理解和尊重,并对种族和信仰多元化有更深刻的认识,学会如何正确面对和处理种族分歧问题,成为构建多元文化社会和发展多元文化社会中的公民教育的核心之一。     

艾丽斯·杨的多元文化主义公民资格观与公民教育观探析

在全球化时代,一体与多元成为世界发展的两种趋势.以艾丽斯·杨为代表的多元文化主义公民教育思想在20世纪末以来已经成为世界公民教育理论与实践中一个令人注目的亮点.普遍与差异、同质与异质成为多元化时代公民教育不可忽视的两组矛盾.     

Pedagogies of Muslim feminisms: reflections on faith,space and citizenship

In this article, I offer a qualitative study of three spaces created by and for young Muslim women in Toronto, Canada: an after-school drop-in programme for Muslim girls, a Somali women’s group and a Muslim women’s collective. I focus on data gathered from interviews of seven Muslim women in their 20s who created the spaces, which offered refuge from the racism and Islamophobia in Canadian schools and society and from the patriarchal forms of social control in their families and communities. Drawing on feminist and ethnographic approaches to citizenship studies and a critical faith-centred epistemology, I consider how these spaces function as loci for teaching and learning self and community, building communities of resistance and articulating new notions of the political and of citizenship.     

Can teachers disrupt their professional identity and enable Children’s participation? Comparing teachers’ and municipal officials’ work with students in democratic spaces

This paper explores how teachers conceive and facilitate children’s participation in student councils, by comparing their conceptions and practices to those of municipal officials operating a municipal children’s parliament. Findings from an exploratory case-study suggest that the latter, guided by citizen consultation discourse, view children as municipal citizens and treat them as adults. In contrast, teachers, guided by pedagogical ethics and protectionist developmental discourses and approaches, treat children as adults-in-the making unprepared for full participation. This divergence, we argue, offers insight into the difficulty teachers have disrupting their professional identity to enable children an equal voice in democratic spaces. This difficulty is compounded, we show, by the complexity of facilitating children’s participation in the hierarchical setting of the school.     

农民工子女教育"问题":基于公民身份缺失的归因

在我国,由于人口流动出现的农民工子女教育成为一个"问题"。基于公民资格理论的分析,农民工的身份一直处在"公民——农民工——市民"的相互角力与焦虑之中。农民工身份的建构过程本身是一种权益受损的过程,它首先忽视了农民工作为公民的平等权利,同时在实际权益分配过程中,还有受到地方利益控制下的"市民"身份的阻碍。因此,农民工子女教育"问题"的求解需要公民身份制的重新建构。     

Transnational strategies and lifelong learning in the shadow of citizenship: Chinese migrants in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg

ABSTRACT

The Chinese are one of the oldest immigrant communities in Europe, and in some countries among the most economically successful. Media portraits of immigrant Chinese, however, are often filtered through racialised stereotypes, as culturally insular and economically savvy opportunists working in low-end take-outs, retails, and garment workshops. Based on ethnographic research conducted in a small European state Luxembourg, this article examines different modalities of learning and transnational strategies among three groups of Chinese migrants – temporary workers, visa overstayers, and restaurant owners. In analysing their pragmatic struggles, creative agency, and unending hopes for better lives, the paper illustrates how they engage in what Aihwa Ong calls the dual process of self-making and being made, vis-à-vis the Eurocentric citizenship regime, knowledge hierarchies, and exclusionary labour market. I offer a reading of their agentic, melodramatic everyday experiences as forms of lifelong learning, whether intended or unintended, that are rendered invisible and deficient in immigration laws, labour market practices, and sociocultural expectations. The paper challenges the Eurocentric citizenship regime and highlights immigrants’ heterogeneous ways of learning and transnational practices as part of the humanness often silenced in the global cycle of coloniality and inequality.