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.

Community as the Material Basis of Citizenship

Community as the Material Basis of Citizenship
Author: Rodolfo Rosales
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2018
Genre: Citizenship
ISBN: 9781138080935

Community as the Material Basis of Citizenship addresses community as the site of participation, production, and rights of citizens and brings to bear a profound critique of a collective process that has historically excluded working class communities and communities of color from any real governance. The argument is that the status of citizenship has been influenced by a society that emphasizes the role of property in defining legitimacy and power and therefore idealizes and institutionalizes citizenship from an individualistic perspective. This system puts the onus on the individual citizen to participate in their governance, while the political reality is that organizations and corporations and their interests have great power to influence and govern. The chapters present an exciting departure from the long-standing traditions of the social basis of citizenship. In Community as the Material Basis of Citizenship, Rodolfo Rosales and his contributors argue that citizenship is a communally embedded and/or socially constituted phenomenon. Hence, the unfinished story of American Democracy is not in the equalization of communities but rather in their ability to participate in their own governance - in their empowerment.

Protest Dialectics

Protest Dialectics
Author: Paul Chang
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2015-04-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0804794308

1970s South Korea is characterized by many as the "dark age for democracy." Most scholarship on South Korea's democracy movement and civil society has focused on the "student revolution" in 1960 and the large protest cycles in the 1980s which were followed by Korea's transition to democracy in 1987. But in his groundbreaking work of political and social history of 1970s South Korea, Paul Chang highlights the importance of understanding the emergence and evolution of the democracy movement in this oft-ignored decade. Protest Dialectics journeys back to 1970s South Korea and provides readers with an in-depth understanding of the numerous events in the 1970s that laid the groundwork for the 1980s democracy movement and the formation of civil society today. Chang shows how the narrative of the 1970s as democracy's "dark age" obfuscates the important material and discursive developments that became the foundations for the movement in the 1980s which, in turn, paved the way for the institutionalization of civil society after transition in 1987. To correct for these oversights in the literature and to better understand the origins of South Korea's vibrant social movement sector this book presents a comprehensive analysis of the emergence and evolution of the democracy movement in the 1970s.

Cynical Citizenship

Cynical Citizenship
Author: Benjamin Junge
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Total Pages: 298
Release: 2018
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0826359442

The appeals of citizenship : a performative approach to discourse, subjectivity, and gender -- "We are gaúchos, we are gaúchas" : incitements to gendered and regional subjectivity in the 2002 election campaigns -- Political time in Porto Alegre : electoral citizenship, experimental subjectivities, and gendered self-agency -- Participation speaks louder : ambiguity and contradiction in official representations of citizenship in the Porto Alegre participatory budget -- Cynical citizenship : gendered performance and parody in the Porto Alegre participatory budget -- Invitations to global citizenship, neoliberal critique, and a party : official discourses and local media coverage of the 2003 World Social Forum -- Participation from the periphery : Beira Rio community leaders' perceptions of the 2003 World Social Forum -- Another citizenship (theory) Is possible

Gender and Citizenship

Gender and Citizenship
Author: Claudia Moscovici
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 164
Release: 2000
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780847696956

Moscovici proposes a new understanding of how gender relations were reformulated by both male and female writers in nineteenth-century France. She analyzes the different versions of gendered citizenship elaborated by Friedrich Hegel, George Sand, Honore de Balzac, Auguste Comte and Herculine Barbin revealing a shift from a single dialectical (or male-centered) definition of citizenship to a double dialectical (or bi-gendered) one in which each sex plays an important role in subject-citizenship and is defined as the negation of the other sex. Moscovici further argues that a double dialectical pattern of androgyny endows women with a (relational) cultural identity that secures their paradoxical roles as both representatives and outsiders to subject-citizenship in nineteenth-century French society and culture.

Paradoxical Citizenship

Paradoxical Citizenship
Author: Silvia Nagy-Zekmi
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2008
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780739132586

In a collection of intriguing essays on the work of Edward Said, internationally-recognized scholars pay homage to the late critic by addressing many aspects of his oeuvre, including his breakthrough Orientalism, the role of the intellectual, the Question of Palestine, and finally his dramatic memoir, Out of Place. This volume is a useful contribution for classroom use, as well as recreational reading for those interested in the work of this controversial thinker.

Bridging Scholarship and Activism

Bridging Scholarship and Activism
Author: Bernd Reiter
Publisher: Transformations in Higher Educ
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2015
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9781611861471

This timely book brings together activist scholars from a range of disciplines to provide new insights into a growing trend in publicly engaged research and scholarship. Bridging Scholarship and Activism creatively redefines what constitutes activism without limiting it to a narrow range of practices, with an ultimate goal of creating a decolonized and democratized forum for scholar activists worldwide.

Semi-Citizenship in Democratic Politics

Semi-Citizenship in Democratic Politics
Author: Elizabeth F. Cohen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2009-10-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 0521768993

This book introduces the concept of semi-citizenship into debates about individuals who hold some but not all elements of full democratic citizenship. Cohen uses theoretical analysis, historical examples, and contemporary cases of semi-citizenship to illustrate how divergent normative and governmental doctrines of citizenship make semi-citizenship inevitable in democratic politics.

Dialectics, Politics, and the Contemporary Value of Hegel's Practical Philosophy

Dialectics, Politics, and the Contemporary Value of Hegel's Practical Philosophy
Author: Andrew Buchwalter
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2012
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0415806100

This book explores and details the actuality (Aktualität) of Hegel's social and political philosophy--its relevance, topicality, and contemporary validity. It asserts--against the assumptions of those in a wide range of traditions--that Hegel's thought not only remains relevant to debates in current social and political theory, but is capable of productively enhancing and enriching those debates. The book is divided into three main sections. Part I considers the actuality of Hegel's social and political thought in the context of a constructed dialogues with later social and political theorists, including Marx, Adorno, Habermas, and Rawls. Part II explores Hegel's internal criticism of Enlightenment rationality as well as the unique manner in which his thought reaffirms both the classical tradition of politics and the Christian conception of freedom in order to deepen and further develop our understanding of modernity and modern secularity. Part III considers Hegel's contribution to current theorizing about globalization.