Activated Citizenship

Activated Citizenship
Author: Marjan H. Ehsassi
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2024-08-14
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1040109993

To counter pervasive levels of citizen disengagement from political institutions, this book examines democratic innovations that meaningfully engage with citizens to address some of the deficits of Western representative democracies. Citizens’ assemblies provide one such innovation, offering opportunities for more consistent participation between elections, more meaningful input in government decision making, and more impactful platforms for participation. This cutting-edge book introduces a new definition for an Activated Citizen, along with a methodology to measure civic and political engagement. Relying on a mixed-methods approach and field research conducted in Paris, Brussels, Ottawa, and Petaluma (California), as well as participant observations, over 180 surveys, 61 in-depth interviews and storytelling, the book provides case studies and in-depth analysis of hotbutton topics including climate change, unhoused populations, democratic expression, assisted suicide and euthanasia. Each chapter weaves quantitative results with rich qualitative testimonies from participants, government representatives, and observers. Based on empirical evidence, the book explores the ways in which government-led citizens’ assemblies can promote a more Activated Citizen. To fully realize the transformative potential of deliberative platforms, a final chapter offers a blueprint for impact, outlining concrete measures along with recommendations for the design and implementation of future government-initiated deliberative platforms. Activated Citizenship urges the deliberative community to be more discerning and intentional to more positively impact participants’ knowledge, sense of community, enthusiasm, political engagement, as well as their sense of meaningful voice. It will be required reading for all students and scholars interested in political participation and democratic innovation.

Claiming the State

Claiming the State
Author: Gabrielle Kruks-Wisner
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 341
Release: 2018-08-16
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1108187978

Citizens around the world look to the state for social welfare provision, but often struggle to access essential services in health, education, and social security. This book investigates the everyday practices through which citizens of the world's largest democracy make claims on the state, asking whether, how, and why they engage public officials in the pursuit of social welfare. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in rural India, Kruks-Wisner demonstrates that claim-making is possible in settings (poor and remote) and among people (the lower classes and castes) where much democratic theory would be unlikely to predict it. Examining the conditions that foster and inhibit citizen action, she finds that greater social and spatial exposure - made possible when individuals traverse boundaries of caste, neighborhood, or village - builds citizens' political knowledge, expectations, and linkages to the state, and is associated with higher levels and broader repertoires of claim-making.

Talking to Strangers

Talking to Strangers
Author: Danielle Allen
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2009-08-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0226014681

"Don't talk to strangers" is the advice long given to children by parents of all classes and races. Today it has blossomed into a fundamental precept of civic education, reflecting interracial distrust, personal and political alienation, and a profound suspicion of others. In this powerful and eloquent essay, Danielle Allen, a 2002 MacArthur Fellow, takes this maxim back to Little Rock, rooting out the seeds of distrust to replace them with "a citizenship of political friendship." Returning to the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954 and to the famous photograph of Elizabeth Eckford, one of the Little Rock Nine, being cursed by fellow "citizen" Hazel Bryan, Allen argues that we have yet to complete the transition to political friendship that this moment offered. By combining brief readings of philosophers and political theorists with personal reflections on race politics in Chicago, Allen proposes strikingly practical techniques of citizenship. These tools of political friendship, Allen contends, can help us become more trustworthy to others and overcome the fossilized distrust among us. Sacrifice is the key concept that bridges citizenship and trust, according to Allen. She uncovers the ordinary, daily sacrifices citizens make to keep democracy working—and offers methods for recognizing and reciprocating those sacrifices. Trenchant, incisive, and ultimately hopeful, Talking to Strangers is nothing less than a manifesto for a revitalized democratic citizenry.

Activate! 2

Activate! 2
Author: Anne Knapp
Publisher: Nelson Thornes
Total Pages: 84
Release: 2002
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780748760206

Written with the Institute for Citizenship, this course has been researched and tested nationwide to ensure that all areas of concern are covered. The scheme combines whole-school planning notes, lesson notes, a CD-ROM, textbooks and an online programme of material delivery. It assumes no prior knowledge of the subject.

Projecting Citizenship

Projecting Citizenship
Author: Gabrielle Moser
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 170
Release: 2020-04-29
Genre: Photography
ISBN: 0271082852

In Projecting Citizenship, Gabrielle Moser gives a comprehensive account of an unusual project produced by the British government’s Colonial Office Visual Instruction Committee at the beginning of the twentieth century—a series of lantern slide lectures that combined geography education and photography to teach schoolchildren around the world what it meant to look and to feel like an imperial citizen. Through detailed archival research and close readings, Moser elucidates the impact of this vast collection of photographs documenting the land and peoples of the British Empire, circulated between 1902 and 1945 in classrooms from Canada to Hong Kong, from the West Indies to Australia. Moser argues that these photographs played a central role in the invention and representation of imperial citizenship. She shows how citizenship became a photographable and teachable subject by tracing the intended readings of the images that the committee hoped to impart to viewers and analyzing how spectators may have used their encounters with these photographs for protest and resistance. Interweaving political and economic history, history of pedagogy, and theories of citizenship with a consideration of the aesthetic and affective dimensions of viewing the lectures, Projecting Citizenship offers important insights into the social inequalities and visual language of colonial rule.

The Dialectics of Citizenship

The Dialectics of Citizenship
Author: Bernd Reiter
Publisher: MSU Press
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2013-05-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1628951621

What does it mean to be a citizen? What impact does an active democracy have on its citizenry and why does it fail or succeed in fulfilling its promises? Most modern democracies seem unable to deliver the goods that citizens expect; many politicians seem to have given up on representing the wants and needs of those who elected them and are keener on representing themselves and their financial backers. What will it take to bring democracy back to its original promise of rule by the people? Bernd Reiter’s timely analysis reaches back to ancient Greece and the Roman Republic in search of answers. It examines the European medieval city republics, revolutionary France, and contemporary Brazil, Portugal, and Colombia. Through an innovative exploration of country cases, this study demonstrates that those who stand to lose something from true democracy tend to oppose it, making the genealogy of citizenship concurrent with that of exclusion. More often than not, exclusion leads to racialization, stigmatizing the excluded to justify their non-membership. Each case allows for different insights into the process of how citizenship is upheld and challenged. Together, the cases reveal how exclusive rights are constituted by contrasting members to non-members who in that very process become racialized others. The book provides an opportunity to understand the dynamics that weaken democracy so that they can be successfully addressed and overcome in the future.

Disputing Citizenship

Disputing Citizenship
Author: Clarke, John
Publisher: Policy Press
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2014-01-27
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1447312546

Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. Citizenship is always in dispute – in practice as well as in theory – but conventional perspectives do not address why the concept of citizenship is so contentious. This unique book presents a new perspective on citizenship by treating it as a continuing focus of dispute.The authors dispute the way citizenship is normally conceived and analysed within the social sciences, developing a view of citizenship as always emerging from struggle. This view is advanced through an exploration of the entanglements of politics, culture and power that are both embodied and contested in forms and practices of citizenship. This compelling view of citizenship emerges from the international and interdisciplinary collaboration of the four authors, drawing on the diverse disputes over citizenship in their countries of origin (Brazil, France, the UK and the US). The book is essential reading for anyone interested in the field of citizenship, no matter what their geographical, political or academic location.

The Birth of the Athenian Community

The Birth of the Athenian Community
Author: Sviatoslav Dmitriev
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 429
Release: 2017-10-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 1351621440

The Birth of the Athenian Community elucidates the social and political development of Athens in the sixth century, when, as a result of reforms by Solon and Cleisthenes (at the beginning and end of the sixth century, respectively), Athens turned into the most advanced and famous city, or polis, of the entire ancient Greek civilization. Undermining the current dominant approach, which seeks to explain ancient Athens in modern terms, dividing all Athenians into citizens and non-citizens, this book rationalizes the development of Athens, and other Greek poleis, as a gradually rising complexity, rather than a linear progression. The multidimensional social fabric of Athens was comprised of three major groups: the kinship community of the astoi, whose privileged status was due to their origins; the legal community of the politai, who enjoyed legal and social equality in the polis; and the political community of the demotai, or adult males with political rights. These communities only partially overlapped. Their evolving relationship determined the course of Athenian history, including Cleisthenes’ establishment of demokratia, which was originally, and for a long time, a kinship democracy, since it only belonged to qualified male astoi.

Mapping and the Citizen Sensor

Mapping and the Citizen Sensor
Author: Giles Foody
Publisher: Ubiquity Press
Total Pages: 400
Release: 2017-09-11
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 191152917X

Maps are a fundamental resource in a diverse array of applications ranging from everyday activities, such as route planning through the legal demarcation of space to scientific studies, such as those seeking to understand biodiversity and inform the design of nature reserves for species conservation. For a map to have value, it should provide an accurate and timely representation of the phenomenon depicted and this can be a challenge in a dynamic world. Fortunately, mapping activities have benefitted greatly from recent advances in geoinformation technologies. Satellite remote sensing, for example, now offers unparalleled data acquisition and authoritative mapping agencies have developed systems for the routine production of maps in accordance with strict standards. Until recently, much mapping activity was in the exclusive realm of authoritative agencies but technological development has also allowed the rise of the amateur mapping community. The proliferation of inexpensive and highly mobile and location aware devices together with Web 2.0 technology have fostered the emergence of the citizen as a source of data. Mapping presently benefits from vast amounts of spatial data as well as people able to provide observations of geographic phenomena, which can inform map production, revision and evaluation. The great potential of these developments is, however, often limited by concerns. The latter span issues from the nature of the citizens through the way data are collected and shared to the quality and trustworthiness of the data. This book reports on some of the key issues connected with the use of citizen sensors in mapping. It arises from a European Co-operation in Science and Technology (COST) Action, which explored issues linked to topics ranging from citizen motivation, data acquisition, data quality and the use of citizen derived data in the production of maps that rival, and sometimes surpass, maps arising from authoritative agencies.

No Citizen Left Behind

No Citizen Left Behind
Author: Meira Levinson
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 454
Release: 2012-04-23
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0674069587

While teaching at an all-Black middle school in Atlanta, Meira Levinson realized that students’ individual self-improvement would not necessarily enable them to overcome their profound marginalization within American society. This is because of a civic empowerment gap that is as shameful and antidemocratic as the academic achievement gap targeted by No Child Left Behind. No Citizen Left Behind argues that students must be taught how to upend and reshape power relationships directly, through political and civic action. Drawing on political theory, empirical research, and her own on-the-ground experience, Levinson shows how de facto segregated urban schools can and must be at the center of this struggle. Recovering the civic purposes of public schools will take more than tweaking the curriculum. Levinson calls on schools to remake civic education. Schools should teach collective action, openly discuss the racialized dimensions of citizenship, and provoke students by engaging their passions against contemporary injustices. Students must also have frequent opportunities to take civic and political action, including within the school itself. To build a truly egalitarian society, we must reject myths of civic sameness and empower all young people to raise their diverse voices. Levinson’s account challenges not just educators but all who care about justice, diversity, or democracy.