The Social Citizen

Human beings are social animals. Yet despite vast amounts of research into political decision making, very little attention has been devoted to its social dimensions. In political science, social relationships are generally thought of as mere sources of information, rather than active influences on one’s political decisions. Drawing upon data from settings as diverse as South Los Angeles and Chicago’s wealthy North Shore, Betsy Sinclair shows that social networks do not merely inform citizen’s behavior, they can—and do—have the power to change it. From the decision to donate money to a campaign or vote for a particular candidate to declaring oneself a Democrat or Republican, basic political acts are surprisingly subject to social pressures. When members of a social network express a particular political opinion or belief, Sinclair shows, others notice and conform, particularly if their conformity is likely to be highly visible. We are not just social animals, but social citizens whose political choices are significantly shaped by peer influence. The Social Citizen has important implications for our concept of democratic participation and will force political scientists to revise their notion of voters as socially isolated decision makers.

It has become a common complaint among academics and community leaders that citizens today are not what they used to be. Nowhere is this decline seen to be more troubling than when the focus is on young Americans. Compared to the youth of past generations, today’s young adults, so the story goes, spend too much time watching television, playing video games, and surfing the Internet. As a result, American democracy is in trouble. The Evolving Citizen challenges this decline thesis and argues instead that democratic engagement has not gotten worse—it has simply changed. Through an analysis of seven high school newspapers from 1965 to 2010, this book shows that young people today, according to what they have to say for themselves, are just as enmeshed in civic and political life as the adolescents who came before them. American youth remain good citizens concerned about their communities and hopeful that they can help make a difference. But as The Evolving Citizen demonstrates, today’s youth understand and perform their roles as citizens differently because the world they live in has changed remarkably over the last half century.

As citizens, we must all take responsibility for our own health to some extent, and recent developments in medical informatics have provided some valuable new ways to help us do that. This book presents the proceedings of the 2020 Special Topic Conference of the European Federation for Medical Informatics (EFMI STC 2020), held for the first time as a virtual conference on 26 & 27 November 2020, due to restrictions associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. Entitled Integrated citizen centered digital health and social care – Citizens as data producers and service co-creators, this conference focused on the citizen-centered aspects of health informatics. This topic provided the opportunity for contributors to present innovative solutions to allow citizens to take greater responsibility for their health with the help of information and communication technology, and the 52 presented papers published here cover a wide range of areas under the broad, invited subject headings of: tools and technologies to support citizen-centered digital services; capacity building to enhance the development and use of digital services; confidentiality, data integrity and data protection to guarantee trustworthy services; citizen safety in digital services; effectiveness and impact of citizen-digital and integrated health and social services; evaluation approaches and methods for digital services; usability, usefulness and user acceptance of digital services; and guidelines for the successful implementation of digital services for citizens. Offering a current overview of research and applications, the book will be of interest to all those health professionals working to increase citizen use of digital healthcare.

The aim of this book is to enable students, educators and designers in the early stages of their careers to learn and practise design in a socially responsible manner. It responds to the rise of academic debate and teaching in the areas of social design, sustainable design, ethical design and design futures. Citizen Designers is a practically and pedagogically focused book, with each chapter addressing a particular area or issue within design practice and education, with an overview framing essay, interviews with practitioners and educators, and assignment briefs through which the reader can understand the process by which a brief is set, met and critiqued.

This book examines the ways in which the welfare state impacts levels and distributions of political participation and democratic support in Western democracies. Going beyond the traditional contextual accounts of political behaviour, which primarily focus on political institutions or the socio-economic climate, this book looks specifically at the impact of public policy on a variety of political behaviours and attitudes. Drawing on the theoretical insights from the policy feedback approach, the author argues and empirically demonstrates that generous social policy offerings can not only foster democratic citizenship by promoting a more inclusive political culture, but are most beneficial to citizens who are otherwise excluded from political life in many other societies. This book will appeal most to scholars in the fields of political science and sociology who are especially interested in the welfare state, public policy, political sociology, and inequality.

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How can schools teach the skills required for a strong democracy to flourish? What Kind of Citizen? asks readers to imagine the kind of society they would like to live in—and then shows the ways in which schools can be used to make that vision a reality. Westheimer draws on groundbreaking research on school programs and policies to sharply critique the current direction of school reform. He points to the many varied and powerful ways to teach children and young adults to engage critically, to think about social issues, and to participate in authentic debate that acknowledges that intelligent adults can have different opinions. But today’s teachers are being forced to abandon these practices in favor of test-preparation in only a very narrow set of academic subjects. How did this happen? What can we do to set schools back on the right track? How can we realign school goals with what research shows parents, children, and teachers actually care about? How can we save our schools from today’s myopic interpretation of what constitutes an education? Westheimer answers these questions and makes a powerful call for schools to become more engaging, more democratic, and more educative. “Among the many casualties of a preoccupation with rigor and accountability is the prospect of education for meaningful democratic citizenship. In this refreshingly accessible book, Westheimer not only makes that point but explains the importance of helping students to think critically and question tradition. He issues a welcome invitation to connect our conception of the ideal school to its impact on our broader society.” —Alfie Kohn, bestselling author “What does it mean to be a democratic citizen? And what kind of education produces one? For the past 2 decades, Joel Westheimer has been one of North America's most knowledgeable and able guides to these critical issues. Along the way, he has forced us to reconsider the larger goals and purposes of our public schools. His book will provide an invaluable roadmap for anyone who asks the big questions, no matter what they think of his answers.” —Jonathan Zimmerman, New York University “In this highly readable, persuasive book, Joel Westheimer reminds us that, in our zeal for higher test scores, we seem to have forgotten the highest aim of education—to produce better people, more thoughtful citizens.” —Nel Noddings, Stanford University

As the idea of citizenship became more inclusive in the nineteenth century, England confronted the problem of those who seemed less fit for the responsibilities of political power. In a liberal society, fit behaviors had to originate in individual choices, rather than in coercion. Thus, social outreach became a matter not simply of giving information, but of educating and managing desire, which in turn required an active role in the very formation of subjectivity. Preparation for citizenship came to be seen as shaping the familial, moral, and physical environments required to foster a natural and healthy body and mind. The management of the social body through discourses of health became the principal means of negotiating these new questions of citizenship and the Condition of England. The Citizen's Body traces the construction of citizenship through the figure of the healthy body, in parliamentary debates on the franchise, in sanitary and housing publications, and in novels. The rhetoric of the healthy body as the ground of civic participation permeated the discourse of the novel, as shown in the work of Dickens, Oliphant, Disraeli, Eliot, and Gaskell. This book offers a new understanding of Victorian liberal thought, citizenship, the social body, and the Victorian novel.