Citizenship and Identity

""This well-crafted book probes the key dimensions of Africa’s existential predicament. It constitutes an intellectual response to a gnawing “African situation”—the starting-point for grasping Africa’s social and religious quest. Beyond split explanations of external (e.g., colonization/slavery) vs. internal (e.g., leadership/cultural values) factors, this study accounts more comprehensively for emergent issues shaping this situation. The situation reflects a gamut of problems in (traditional) African religion and material culture, which hitherto defines African communality, polities and destinies vis-à-vis the cosmos and nature. Thus, African religion and communities, with their attendant values, operate via adaptation, rather than by critical engagement with larger issues of society and civilization, especially those shaped by the advent of (post-) modernity. The communal drive for natural and social harmony inevitably produces a preservationist view of culture (“leaving things as they are”). This study takes an integrative approach to religion, society and civilization, eschews dichotomies, broadly defines and resignifies life and wholeness as a true end of Africans’ quest today (from the Back Cover)

ENDORSEMENTS
(For more endorsements, see the US & World edition 2013 by University Press of America @ url: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9780761862680)

“This book … strives to lay bare the determining structures, decisive trends, and dominant principle that fashion and serve the goals of thought and action in Africa. … [It] is a project of interpretation of life’s heritage and baggage which Africans employ to craft their identities, sustain flourishing human socialities, and actualize their potentials. …. If there is a select group of books that captures the broad phenomenology of African peoples’ spirituality this book is arguably one of it.”     
~NIMI WARIBOKO, Katherine B. Stuart Professor & Chair of Christian Ethics, Andover Newton Theological School, Massachusetts, USA

“A formidable contribution to a giant topic … The author proceeds to the project with a broad knowledge of the field as well as with impressing pedagogical skills, and the result is a book that will serve as an important discussion partner for scholars of religion, theology, and biblical studies in Africa in the years to come.”
~KNUT HOLTER, Professor of Old Testament studies, MHS School of Mission and Theology, Norway

“A must-read document for every African citizen; a benchmark … for the new African project. [The] time has come for an African renaissance … with this cornerstone book …”
~DR. DANIEL ETOUNGA-MANGUELLE, Chairman and CEO of SADEG Consulting Group, Yaoundé, Cameroon & former member of the World Bank’s Council of African Advisors

“… A richness of bibliographical references and sources, together with innovative theories, is a further confirmation of the presence of new prestigious African authors committed to the challenge of understanding Africa.”
~Professor BEATRICE NICOLINI, PhD, Chair of History and Institutions of Africa, Faculty of Political Science, Catholic University, Milan-Italy

""

This paper interrogates Facebook, a prime example of a ‘Web 2.0’ technology, as a means for empowering citizens and democratising the media. Focusing on uses of Facebook pages, and drawing on the conception of cultural citizenship, I identify two dimensions of empowerment. The first relates to Facebook as a ‘space of becoming’, and I explicate this through an analysis of Māori cultural identity. The second relates to online protest, and here I explore a campaign to stop a ‘Win a Wife’ radio competition. These appropriations of Facebook afford citizens a degree of Do-it-Yourself media empowerment. However, I argue that they rely on notions of user agency that become problematic when the nature of Facebook as a platform is considered. Drawing on political economic critique, I argue that Facebook is a thoroughly branded environment that commodifies social relationships, reinforces the power of global media corporations, and facilitates forms of neoliberal subjectivity. Furthermore I draw on the work of David Beer to argue that Facebook produces metadata and related forms of ‘algorithmic’ power outside of user control, and is associated with the rise of a ‘technological unconscious’. These issues limit user agency, but are often elided in the face of popular discourse that constructs Web 2.0 applications as liberating technologies. I end by calling for a broader and more critically informed debate.

"Nationalism, Ethnicity, Citizenship: Multidisciplinary Perspectives

Edited by Martyn Barrett, Christopher Flood and John Eade


Nationalism, ethnicity and citizenship lie at the heart of many of the societal changes that are currently transforming countries across the world. Global migration has undermined old certainties provided by the established framework of nation-states, with inward migration, cultural diversity and transnational affiliations having become established facts of life in many countries. These phenomena raise significant challenges for traditional conceptions of citizenship.

This book provides a detailed examination, from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, of contemporary issues relating to nationalism, ethnicity and citizenship. The book aims to take stock of current understandings in this area, and to establish whether there are connections between the understandings that are being articulated within different social science disciplines. The contributors, who are all senior international figures in their respective fields, are drawn from a range of disciplines, including Politics, Sociology, Communication/Media, Geography, Psychology and Education. Collectively, they address the following specific questions:

• To what extent do multiculturalism and transnationalism undermine nationalism or, on the contrary, provoke its reassertion?
• How do the multiple identities and multiple levels of belonging experienced today interact with traditional nationalist ideology?
• Within multicultural societies, how far do representations of ‘cultural others’ still play a role in nationalist constructions of ‘the nation’?
• How successfully have the welfare systems of nation-states responded to the influx of migrants?
• How have national politicians responded to the cultural diversity of their own countries and have they moved beyond the traditional logic of nationalism within their thinking?
• Why are extreme right-wing parties gaining increased levels of support?
• What social and psychological resources do citizens require in order to function effectively at the political level within multicultural democratic societies?
• How can the educational systems of states, which have traditionally been used for nationalist purposes, be harnessed to enhance the competences needed by their citizens for successful living in multicultural societies?
• What changes need to be made to educational policies in order to ensure the effective integration of minority citizens?

Despite the fact that they have been written from different disciplinary perspectives, the various chapters in this book paint a consistent picture. They offer a view of a world in which nationalism is still very much a dominant ideology which configures the discourse and thinking of citizens and politicians alike about nation-states, ethnic diversity, multiculturalism and citizenship. The crucial role of education is also highlighted, with school systems being uniquely positioned to equip citizens with the psychological resources and intercultural competences that are needed to function effectively within multicultural societies.

Book contents
List of Contributors

Preface
Martyn Barrett, Christopher Flood and John Eade

Nationalism, Ethnicity, Citizenship: Multidisciplinary Perspectives –
An Introduction
Martyn Barrett, Christopher Flood and John Eade

Is Nationalism an Anachronism? Notes on the Mutations of National Idealism in a Global Age
Ulf Hedetoft

Nationalism, Belonging, Globalization and the ‘Ethics of Care’
Nira Yuval-Davis

Representing the Nation and the Muslim Other: Television News Coverage in Three Countries
Christopher Flood, Stephen Hutchings, Galina Miazhevich
and Henri Nickels

Citizenship, Ethnicity and Mainstream Society: The European Welfare States Navigating between Exclusion and Inclusion
Hans van Amersfoort

Rebranding Britain? Ideological Dilemmas in Political Appeals
to “British Multiculturalism”
Susan Condor

What does it take to be a Political Actor in a Multicultural Society?
Nicholas P. Emler

Intercultural Citizenship – An Education Perspective
Michael Byram

Integrationist to Citizenship Education Policy within England:
A Forward Movement or a Backward Step?
Richard Race

Name Index
Subject Index

"

The creation of European citizenship was greeted as a ignificant step towards a more 'politicised' form of Union, although the limits to this new status posed by the nationality of member states were identified (Closa; 1995). Several years after the Treaty of Maastricht, some of the obstacles to the effective implementation of this new status are now evident. These are, in the one hand, genuine practical difficulties for putting rights into effect. But secondly, collusion with national views on citizenship have been more evident. The case of Spain is particularly interesting for a number of reasons. Firstly, the Spanish government was the proponent and leading advocate for the inclusion of EU citizenship in the Treaty on European Union. The second and third reasons derive from Spanish political characteristics: democratic citizenship was only recovered in the 1970s after a 40 years dictatorship and it was recovered under the shape of a multilevel citizenship. This paper presents an overview of the relationship between Spanish and EU citizenship.

The Stockholm Programme remains silent on the rights of irregular migrants who cannot return to their country of origin. In this paper I consider the case of rejected sub-Saharan African female asylum seekers living in Malta and highlight how the intersectionality of inter alia gender, race and legal status leads to isolation and poverty.

A pdf is available by request to jmheyman@utep.edu .  U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) officers of Mexican ancestry do not identify with Mexican and other Latin American immigrants. Instead, they understand themselves as U.S. citizens who reject both domestic racism and ethnic loyalties that cross national borders. Their self understandings emerge from processes that include U.S. citizenship ideology and social mobility into primary labor market jobs with stability, benefits, and progressive careers. These processes insulate them from the experience of immigrants in casual and insecure labor markets devoid of social benefits. Thus they differ from immigrants not only in being on opposite sides of the bureaucratic encounter but also in being at opposite poles of bureaucratized social citizenship. This suggests that a cause of opposition to immigration in advanced capitalist societies is that citizenship based job and benefit systems restrict the scope of empathy.

لقد تكّلم الفلاسفة باتّصال المواطنة بصلاح المجتمعات والأفراد، وجسّدت كتاباتهم حق الانسان في نسيج من القيم المشتركة الضّامنة للحرّيات والحقوق، غير أننا قد فقدنا في لحظتنا التّاريخيّة الرّاهنة شرطا مركزيّا من شروط المواطنة وهو النديّة وأضعنا ما به يكون فعل المواطنة فعل اقتدار لا فعل عجز وتسليم، ونفهم في هذا المسار المكوّن اللّغويّ باعتباره المأوى والملاذ بالمعنى "الهايدقاري" لإرادة التحرّر النّاشئة في مجتمعنا، فتصبح اللّغة تعليما وتعلّما حدث تحرّر بامتياز.

In 1972, the establishment of an Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra challenged the complacency of Australians about the value of citizenship for Aboriginal people. Since they were effectively aliens in their own land, the demonstrators said, they needed an Embassy on the lawns opposite Parliament House to represent their interests to the government. The Embassy was borne out of disappointment following the 1967 referendum, which raised expectations that ‘full citizenship’ would be extended to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Although the referendum was successful, the Federal Government’s inaction, continued commitment to assimilation and denial of land rights fostered further resentment among Aboriginal people. In this chapter, we highlight how the demand for full citizenship by Aboriginal people who campaigned in the referendum was consistent with the struggle for land rights and self-determination that found dramatic expression in the Aboriginal Embassy. We then discuss how the Tent Embassy was both a negative demonstration of the dispossession and political alienation experienced by Aboriginal people and a positive demonstration of the rights to land and self-determination that they claimed. By dis-identifying as Australian citizens, the Tent Ambassadors constituted a counter public sphere within which to renegotiate the terms of political belonging between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in Australia.

Drawing on literature on self-help and travel guide writing, this paper interrogates five international medical travel guidebooks aimed at American and British audiences interested in travelling abroad to purchase medical care. These guidebooks articulate a three-step self-help “program” to produce a “savvy” international medical traveler. First, readers are encouraged to view their home healthcare system as dysfunctional. Second, they are encouraged to re-read destinations’ healthcare landscapes as excellent and accessible. Finally, these texts explicitly enjoin readers to see themselves as active, cosmopolitan consumers whose pursuits are central to rectifying the dysfunction of their home healthcare systems.

That talk is never disinterested complicates the relationship between the environment and the claims people make about it. Talk about place, and one's self in it, is particularly complex when the environment poses risk or is otherwise problematized. This study, a secondary analysis of interview data, seeks to extend discursive work on place-identity by examining the ways in which 14 residents of a small English village talk about themselves and their locale. The locale accommodates an active quarry, and many residents had lodged complaints to the quarry about dust, noise and vibrations from blasting. Attention to the interactional context of the interviews illustrates the ways in which (simply) interviewing people about their locale can threaten self- and place-identity. When asked about life in the village, interviewees oriented to two main dilemmas in protecting self- and place-identity: (1) how to justify continued residence in a challenging environment and (2) how to complain about the locale whilst maintaining positive place-identity. Discursive responses to these dilemmas drew upon typical identity processes, such as self- and place distinctiveness and the formulation of out-groups, as well as upon constructions of localized power-sharing and morally obligated tolerance of risk. We suggest that research on problematical places, and of environmental risk, needs to be sensitized to how it may constitute a threat to self- and place-identity, and how this may mediate formulations self and place, as well as of environmental risk.