Creating Citizenship Communities

On the basis of a national research project undertaken in England, this volume explores how and why young people's engagement is so important globally in education and society, and looks at what teachers and students think about citizenship and community. The authors make recommendations to enhance understanding and the potential for engagement.

Exploring a key aspect of European integration, this clear and thoughtful book considers the remarkable experiment with common rights and citizenship in the EU. Governments around the world traditionally distinguish insiders (citizens) from outsiders (foreigners). Yet over the past half-century, an extensive set of supranational rights has been created in Europe that removes member governments' authority to privilege their own citizens, a hallmark of sovereignty. The culmination of supranational rights, European citizenship not only provides individuals with choices about where to live and work but also forces governments to respect those choices. Explaining this innovation--why states cede their sovereignty and eradicate or redefine the boundaries of the political community by including "foreigners"--Willem Maas analyzes the development of European citizenship within the larger context of the evolution of rights. Imagining more than simply a free trade market, the goal of building a "broader and deeper community among peoples" with a "destiny henceforward shared"--creating European citizens--has informed European integration since its origins. The author argues that its success or failure will not only determine the future of Europe but will also provide lessons for political integration elsewhere.

The titles in the Be An Active Citizen series encourage readers to take an active role in their community. The titles explore what it means to be an active citizen and how to participate respectfully in the democratic process.

Interest in citizenship has never been higher. But what does it mean to be a citizen in a modern, complex community? Richard Bellamy approaches the subject of citizenship from a political perspective and, in clear and accessible language, addresses the complexities behind this highly topical issue.

Making Citizenship Work seeks to address questions of how a community reaches a place where it can actually make citizenship work. A second question addressed is "What does citizenship represent to different communities?" Across thirteen chapters a collection of experts traverse multiple disciplines in analyzing citizenship from different points of access. Each chapter revolves around the premise that empowerment of communities, and individuals within the community, comes in different forms and is governed by multiple needs and visions. Authors utilize case studies to demonstrate the different roles that communities from a broad sector of our society adopt to accomplish constructing democratic processes that reflect their goals, needs, and cultures. Concurrently authors address the structural obstacles to the empowerment of communities, arguing that the democratic process does not and cannot accommodate the diverse communities of society within a single universalistic model of citizenship. They conclude that fundamentally citizenship is not simply a legal right, an obligation, a state of rights, but a practice, an action on the behalf of community. Making Citizenship Work challenges conventional thinking about politics while also encouraging readers to go beyond the box that deters us from visualizing a human society. It is an ideal book for undergraduate and graduate courses in political science, sociology, history, social work and Ethnic Studies.

Local Citizenship in the Global Arena proposes a reconsideration of both citizenship and citizenship education, moving away equally from prevailing ‘global citizenship’ and ‘fundamental British values’ approaches towards a curriculum for education that is essentially about creating cosmopolitan, included and inclusive, politically-engaged citizens of communities local, national and global. Viewing education as both problem and solution, Findlow argues that today’s climate of rapid and unpredictable geopolitical and cultural re-scoping requires an approach to citizenship education that both reflects and shapes society, paying attention to relationships between the local and global aspects of political voice, equality and community. Drawing on a range of international examples, she explores the importance and possibilities of a form of education that instead of promoting divisive competition, educates about citizenship in its various forms, and encourages the sorts of open and radical thinking that can help young people cross ideological and physical borders and use their voice in line with their own, and others’, real, long-term interests. Successive chapters develop this argument by critically examining the key elements of citizenship discourses through the interrelated lenses of geopolitical change, nationalism, the competition fetish, critical pedagogy, multiculturalism, protest politics, feminism and ecology, and highlighting ways in which the situationally diverse lived realities of ‘citizenship’ have been mediated by different forms of education. The book draws attention to how we think of education’s place in a world of combined globalisation, localism, anti-state revolt and xenophobia. It will be of key interest to academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of education, political science, philosophy, sociology, social policy, cultural studies and anthropology.

The essays in the volume address educational issues that arise when national, sub-national and supra-national identities compete. How can we determine the limits to parental educational rights when liberalism's concern to protect and promote children's autonomy conflicts with the desire to maintain communal integrity? Given the advances made by the forces of globalization, can the liberal-democratic state morally justify its traditional purpose of forging a cohesive nationalidentity? Or has increasing globalization rendered this educational aim obsolete and morally corrupt? Should liberal education instead seek to foster a sense of global citizenship, even if doing so would suppress patriotic identification?In addressing these and many other questions, the volume examines the theoretical and practical issues at stake between nationalists, multiculturalists and cosmopolitans in the field of education. The fifteen essays, plus an introductory essay by the editors, provide a genuine, productive dialogue between political and legal philosophers and educational theorists.

This comparative text considers models of higher education in the UK and the US and individuals' perceptions about the role of university in society.