Securitising Citizenship: (B)ordering Practices and Strategies of Resistance

This article builds upon Yasemin Soysal's early work on post-national citizenship as constituting sites of resistance in contemporary European politics. Post-national citizenship provides every person with the right and duty of participation in the authority structures and public life of a polity, regardless of their historical ties to that community. This celebration of human rights as a world-level organising principle is, however, constantly challenged by liberal discourses and practices aimed to securitise identities and citizenships through the bordering of space, place and identities. Proceeding from a critical take on securitisation, we propose that in addition to a focus on the exceptional and on elite speech acts, we need to recognise that it is through everyday practices that people engage in (de)securitising strategies and practices that both rely upon and contest notions of belonging and borders. We exemplify by looking at two (diverse) minority communities in Britain and Canada that have been securitised at transnational, national and local levels, and study the extent to which we can see evidence of everyday resistance through the explicit or implicit use of desecuritising strategies. In both settings, the communities we study are young Muslims

The dynamics of lateral relations in changing organizational worlds

This paper sets out to chart ways in which a number of linked but independent changes in the organizational contexts clients are bringing with them into consultancy are both drawing attention to and forcing us to reconsider ways in which we have hitherto thought about the dynamics of leadership, accountability, and authority. It proposes that one way of characterizing this direction of movement is that it is focusing around the experiences, challenges and dilemmas, both conscious and unconscious, being presented by lateral relations. The paper offers a provisional definition of ‘lateral relations’ and seeks to explore and test this against experiences in two consultancy assignments, in the private and public sectors, respectively. Both touch on themes of anxiety and vulnerability: in the dismantling of prior expectations and assumptions, and in the face of what might be termed the nakedness of being on one's own, with colleagues. The concluding section of the paper speculates on ways in which these developments may both challenge and affect our more familiar organizational and group relations paradigms

Percussion in an electronic environment

This essay is an account of the process of making work for a new percussion/software performance environment built using Max/Msp, with an electronic drum kit as control interface. Each of the works are Audio-visual responses to a number of key stimuli - the experience of urbanness, representations and accounts of mental illness, childhood and memory, and physicality - which are recurring concerns in my work. Submitted along with the supporting text are DVD documents ofthe four main pieces of work, which are presented here as medium-specific 'versions' of the pieces- i.e. edited specifically for for DVD replay rather than as 'neutral' documentation. Also submitted are the materials needed to perform each of the pieces, including written performance instructions and the Max/Msp patches (containing the relevant media) for each piece. *[N.B.: A DVD was attached to this thesis at the time of its submission. Please refer to the author for further details.]

Digital Funds of Identity: Funds of Knowledge 2.0 for the digital generation?

This paper is a theoretically orientated analysis that synthesises the literature on Funds of Identity with the literature on digital identities. It makes the case for considering Funds of Identity as more than just an enrichment of the Funds of Knowledge approach by suggesting that it is in fact a development. This article also extends the concept and methodology of Funds of Identity by situating identity within a digitised interpretation of social interaction. It does this by exploring the role that avatars and virtual learning environments could play in the development of online identities and their potential application within the classroom. The literature on funds of identity is then synthesised with the literature on new technology, identity and digital literacies This article also explains how digital funds of identity could be used in relation to domain specific knowledge which is illustrated by focusing on English literature and secondary education

A long view of liberal peace and its crisis

The ‘crisis’ of liberal peace has generated considerable debate in International Relations. However, analysis is inhibited by a shared set of spatial, cultural and temporal assumptions that rest on and reproduce a problematic separation between self-evident ‘liberal’ and ‘non-liberal’ worlds, and locates the crisis in presentist terms of the latter’s resistance to the former’s expansion. By contrast, this article argues that efforts to advance liberal rule have always been interwoven with processes of alternative order-making, and in this way are actively integral, not external, to the generation of the subjectivities, contestations, violence and rival social orders that are then apprehended as self-evident obstacles and threats to liberal peace and as characteristic of its periphery. Making visible these intimate relations of co-constitution elided by representations of liberal peace and its crisis requires a long view and an analytical frame that encompasses both liberalism and its others in the world. The argument is developed using a Foucauldian governmentality framework and illustrated with reference to Sri Lanka

Digital identities: tracing the implications for learners and learning

This is the fourth in a series of seminars, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, to examine ‘The educational and social impact of new technologies on young people in Britain’. Its purpose is to bring together academics, policy makers and practitioners from many different backgrounds in order to consider the contexts and consequences of use of new information and communication technologies for children and young people, with a particular focus on the implications on technological change on formal and informal education. The series is coordinated by John Coleman, Ingrid Lunt, Chris Davies and myself, together with guidance from our advisory board – Keri Facer, Neil Selwyn and Ros Sutherland

Structuring of Modern and Postmodern Identities with Reflections on the Pedagogical Implications in a Multicultural World

This essay explores the different discourses that intersect to define and explain the concept of "identity" and consists of two distinct parts. The former being an attempt to eclecticize the discourses around identity and the structuring of identity under modern and post-modern conditions. The latter consisting of reflections on the methodological and pedagogical implications in a fragmenting postmodern and multicultural condition. This essay is a theoretical attempt to deconstruct the notion of the essentialized, stable, static and coherent modernist subjectivity/identity and tries to explore the construction of a multilayered, non-unitary, fragmented, plural postmodern subjectivity/identity. The essay aims to discusses the current politics of `identity´, `difference´, `recognition´ and `multiculturalism´ and explores the intricate enmeshing of concepts such as identity, ethnicity, minorities and nationalism. It further tries to construct the representation of identities within a world-systems paradigm. Modernity is seen as being convergent and a result of capital accumulation resulting in globalisation. Post-modernity is seen as a condition of fragmentation due to capital flight, resulting in discontinuities between different forms of collective and individual life. The deconstruction of modernist identity has methodological and pedagogical implications. This fragmentation and disintegration of stable hegemony has emancipatory potential within research. It has led to the decline of writing the "Other". Writing the "Other" is seen as a violence, as it silences and disallows the other from representing themselves. Mere ethnographic observation needs to give way to a dialogic methodology. This has resulted in a focus in research on self-definition, self-identification, autobiographical and local narratives and a replacement of flawed grand narratives. It has also led to a new awareness of pluralism and diversity and articulation of a cultural politics in which culture is bound up with power and resistance. Feminist identity perspectives have strengthened research methodologies by creating empowering and self-reflexive research designs - concerned with producing emancipatory knowledge and empowering the researched. Pedagogically, from the perspective of postmodernism, modernist authority privileges western patriarchal culture and represses and marginalizes the voices of the subordinated. Hence the essay suggests the need for practicing "critical pedagogy" that views education as a political, social and cultural enterprise, and "border pedagogy" that incorporates the notion of difference as an ideal. In practice the culturally divergent fragmented postmodern condition calls for advocating policies of multiculturalism and multiligualism in education