Migrant mothers’ creative interventions into racialized citizenship

Racialized migrant mothers are often cast as marginal to theoretical and political debates of citizenship, yet by taking seriously the contributions to cultural and caring citizenship they make, we challenge the racialized boundaries of citizenship. Drawing on theories of enacting citizenship, that is, challenging hegemonic narratives of who can legitimately claim to contribute to citizenship, we explore migrant women’s mothering through participatory theatre methods. Through analysis of participatory action research (PAR) with migrant mothers in London, we emphasize the significance of embodied and affective meanings for challenging racialized citizenship. The theatre methods allow participants to develop collective subjugated knowledges challenging racialized, gendered and classed stratifications of rights, burdens and privileges of caring citizenship. This draws attention to the important role of creativity of the self as an aspect of both cultural and care work for understanding racialized migrant mothers’ citizenship

Blurring the Boundaries Citizen Action Across States and Societies

Taking a "citizen's perspective", looking upwards and outwards, these studies offer a unique insight into how citizens see and experience states and other institutions which affect their lives, as well as how they engage, mobilise and participate to make their voices heard

The Politics of Indigenous Participation Through “Free Prior Informed Consent”: Reflections from the Bolivian Case

This article explores the challenges of ethnic-based participation and its potential for creating inclusive and effective forms of decision-making for marginalized social groups. Empirically, it examines a recent attempt to establish more participative forms of resource and development governance for indigenous communities in Bolivia through Free Prior and Informed Consent/Consultation (FPIC). Rooted in international human rights law, FPIC aims at achieving more effective bottom-up participation by establishing an obligation to consult – or obtain the consent of – indigenous peoples before large development projects and legal reforms that would affect them can proceed. Interest in FPIC initiatives has been growing for reasons that range from efforts to build more equitable management of natural resources to attempts to introduce more effective local-scale practices of participation and active citizenship. We argue that the idea of prior consultation and FPIC itself are not neutral instruments; they will not automatically lead to better or more democratic governance and a more equal society. The way in which FPIC is currently being implemented and framed in Bolivia is in tension with broader ideas of representation and legitimacy, inclusiveness, and management of public and common goods because there is no real clarity as to who is entitled to participation, why they do, and whether they are doing so as a corrective to exclusion, a promotion of citizenship, or as a mechanism for redistribution. As we show here, FPIC implementation can have unintended consequences and consultation can sometimes embed existing social, cultural, and economic tensions. The paper offers some broader reflections on participatory governance and collective rights especially in relation to the tensions between inclusive participation and exclusive rights or – put differently – the challenges for building cultures of participation and inclusion in complex and ethnic diverse democracies

Enacting children's citizenship: developing understandings of how children enact themselves as citizens through actions and acts of citizenship

Children have an unsettled relationship with the status of citizenship, being given some rights, responsibilities and opportunities for participation, and being denied others. Yet if citizenship is conceived of as a practice, children can be firmly seen as citizens in the sense that they are social actors, negotiating and contributing to relationships of social interdependence. This article develops understandings of children’s agency in citizenship and some of the different ways in which children’s actions enact them as interdependent citizens. It presents one aspect of the understanding of citizenship generated from research by six groups of marginalised children, aged 5-13, in Wales and France. Synthesising the research groups’ descriptions of activities they associated with the component parts of citizenship with citizenship theory, these children can be seen to engage in actions of citizenship that include making rules of social existence, furthering social good and exercising freedoms to achieve their own rights. Their activities also transgress the boundaries of existing balances of rights, responsibilities and statuses, through their (mis)behaviour, in ways that can be interpreted as Acts of citizenship. In children’s everyday activities, however, the distinction between actions and Acts of citizenship can at times be blurred. This is because recognizing aspects of children’s practices as citizenship is a challenge to dominant definitions of citizenship, and claims a new status for children. Exploring children’s citizenship in these ways has potential for widening understandings of participation and appreciating broader aspects of children’s agency in citizenship

Political participation from a citizenship perspective

Conventional academic studies on political participation mostly focus on electoral politics including electoral systems, political party structures and their interaction with other governmental processes. These studies adopt an approach that presumes the existence of a pre-defined people (demos). Hence, existing literature on electoral politics and government structures take for granted a pre-defined demos and then survey participatory practices. Yet, there is another way to study political participation. It can be studied from the angle of citizenship. This involves an approach that does not rely on an ex post facto interest in the activities of a pre-defined demos but one that unravels the factors that go into its definition. Study of political participation from a citizenship perspective contains an effort to problematize the very notion of demos. Decoupling of national identity and participation empowers a vision of citizenship not as membership in a nation-state but as a set of rights that include multi-cultural rights. It is the contention of this article that European Union processes have the potential to contribute to the deepening of democratization by promoting diversity through introduction of denationalization of citizenship as well as processes of deliberation in member and candidate countries

Subaltern imaginaries of localism: constructions of place, space and democracy in community-led housing organisations.

The localism strategies of the UK government provide a suite of ‘rights’ for community organisations that licence place-based political imaginaries with the intent to construct the community as a proxy for a smaller state. Conflating place with participation and promising to devolve power, localism authorises a performative enactment of democracy, citizenship and the ‘public’ through the lived experience of space. In constituting the local as a metaphor for democracy and empowerment, however, community localism foregrounds the pivotal role played by place and scale in cementing social differentiation and in naturalising hierarchical power relations. This paper explores the subaltern strategies of localism that may emerge when the rights of localism are exercised by residents’ organisations in marginalised communities of social housing. Drawing on research with community-led housing organisations it demonstrates how the spatial imaginations and spatial practices of localism can be implemented to assert new claims on democracy and citizenship. In particular it identifies four spatial practices – the extension of domestic space, the invocation of locality, the construction of domestic scale, and the scalar reimagining of democracy – that subvert the reordering of political space that is localism’s regulatory intent

Participatory citizenship: critical perspectives on client-centred occupational therapy

Background/aims: This article aims to discuss client-centred practice, the current dominant approach within occupational therapy, in relation to participatory citizenship. Occupational therapists work within structures and policies that set boundaries on their engagement with clients, while working with complex, multidimensional social realities. Methods: The authors present a critical discussion shaped by their research, including a survey, discussions at workshops at international conferences, and critical engagement with the literature on occupational therapy, occupation, and citizenship. Conclusion: A focus on citizenship suggests reframing professional development based on the participation in public life of people as citizens of their society. While occupational therapists often refer to clients in the context of communities, groups, families, and wider society, the term client centred practice typically represents a particular view of the individual and may sometimes be too limited in application for a more systemic and societal approach. Significance: The authors question the individual focus which has, until recently, been typical of client-centred occupational therapy. Placing citizenship at the core of intervention is a transformative process that assumes all people are citizens and conceives of health as a collective issue, influencing the way we educate, do research, and practise. Key words: Collective, dis-citizenship, inequalities, professional development, participation, paradigms, occupational justice</p

Framing children's citizenship: exploring the space of children's claims for social justice using Nancy Fraser's conception of representation

This paper seeks to contribute to a dynamic understanding of the space of children‟s citizenship by exploring perspectives generated by children age 5-13 in two countries in the light of Nancy Fraser‟s (2008) theory of representation. To ensure that understandings of the spaces of children‟s citizenship are guided by the views of children themselves, the paper reports findings from six Children‟s Research Groups who, in a process inspired by Freire (1973), acted and reflected on their understandings of citizenship using participatory methods that they created. The spaces they describe in their data were analysed drawing on Fraser‟s theories for reframing claims to social justice. This synthesis of empirical research and political theory suggests the need to supplement Fraser‟s theory of representation with more diffuse understandings of how influence occurs in relational spaces. The dynamic spaces of children‟s citizenship can then be conceived of as framed by a concern for social justice that children identify and deepened by exploring the way in relationships, institutions and networks influence the achievement of this claim over time, for different social groups. This approach enables children‟s citizenship to be located simultaneously in children‟s lived practices, in local and in global distributions of actions, attitudes and resources

Pupil participation in Scottish schools: final report

This research was commissioned by Learning and Teaching Scotland (LTS) to evaluate the nature of pupil participation in primary and secondary schools across Scotland. The specific objectives of the research were: &lt;p&gt;· To describe what school staff and pupils understand by the term ‘pupil participation’.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;· To describe the range and usage of pupil participation mechanisms employed in schools.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;· To describe how school staff respect and respond to pupils’ views and ideas, and those of the wider community.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;· To identify the characteristics of schools and classrooms that facilitate effective pupil participation.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;· To identify possible barriers to the development of pupil participation in schools and to make suggestions about how these can be overcome.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;· To capture examples of effective practice of pupil participation.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;· To make suggestions about how pupil participation can help support the implementation of the Curriculum for Excellence.&lt;/p&gt

Who you’re gonna call? The development of university digital leaders

In our hyper-connected digitised educational world, university tutors are interested in capitalising on affordances of digital trends in teaching and learning. Students, under the alias of preservice- teachers, walk among them equipped with digital skills in areas of their interest. How can we encourage collaboration between tutors and students that can promote the use of the digital force wisely, support the development of students’ professional identities further and extend tutors’ digital competences? The story of nine tutors and eleven undergraduate pre-service-teachers working together on digital partnerships is set against discussions around digital leadership and citizenship. This case study aims to highlight how universities can respond to technology-driven change by engaging students further and support their awareness of digital citizenship. The overall results showed that the informal learning that students have capitalised outside the classroom can be used to scaffold their development of digital citizenship through offline community engagement. It demonstrates the advantage of using such opportunities as a means to encourage citizenship practices among university student communities and the positive impact that such synergies can have on all the participants