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How did Ichabod Crane and other characters from children’s literature shape the ideal of American citizenship? 2015 Honor Book Award, Children's Literature Association From the colonial period to the end of the Civil War, children’s books taught young Americans how to be good citizens and gave them the freedom, autonomy, and possibility to imagine themselves as such, despite the actual limitations of the law concerning child citizenship. Imaginary Citizens argues that the origin and evolution of the concept of citizenship in the United States centrally involved struggles over the meaning and boundaries of childhood. Children were thought of as more than witnesses to American history and governance—they were representatives of “the people” in general. Early on, the parent-child relationship was used as an analogy for the relationship between England and America, and later, the president was equated to a father and the people to his children. There was a backlash, however. In order to contest the patriarchal idea that all individuals owed childlike submission to their rulers, Americans looked to new theories of human development that limited political responsibility to those with a mature ability to reason. Yet Americans also based their concept of citizenship on the idea that all people are free and accountable at every age. Courtney Weikle-Mills discusses such characters as Goody Two-Shoes, Ichabod Crane, and Tom Sawyer in terms of how they reflect these conflicting ideals.
This is the first authoritative reference work to map the multifaceted and vibrant site of citizen media research and practice, incorporating insights from across a wide range of scholarly areas. Citizen media is a fast-evolving terrain that cuts across a variety of disciplines. It explores the physical artefacts, digital content, performative interventions, practices and discursive expressions of affective sociality that ordinary citizens produce as they participate in public life to effect aesthetic or socio-political change. The seventy-seven entries featured in this pioneering resource provide a rigorous overview of extant scholarship, deliver a robust critique of key research themes and anticipate new directions for research on a variety of topics. Cross-references and recommended reading suggestions are included at the end of each entry to allow scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds to identify relevant connections across diverse areas of citizen media scholarship and explore further avenues of research. Featuring contributions by leading scholars and supported by an international panel of consultant editors, the Encyclopedia is essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as researchers in media studies, social movement studies, performance studies, political science and a variety of other disciplines across the humanities and social sciences. It will also be of interest to non-academics involved in activist movements and those working to effect change in various areas of social life.
From the rise of cyberbullying and hactivism to the issues surrounding digital privacy rights and freedom of speech, the Internet is changing the ways in which we govern and are governed as citizens. This book examines how citizens encounter and perform new sorts of rights, duties, opportunities and challenges through the Internet. By disrupting prevailing understandings of citizenship and cyberspace, the authors highlight the dynamic relationship between these two concepts. Rather than assuming that these are static or established “facts” of politics and society, the book shows how the challenges and opportunities presented by the Internet inevitably impact upon the action and understanding of political agency. In doing so, it investigates how we conduct ourselves in cyberspace through digital acts. This book provides a new theoretical understanding of what it means to be a citizen today for students and scholars across the social sciences. This new and updated edition includes two new chapters. A Preface consists of reflections on developments in digital politics since the book was published in 2015. It considers how recent major political struggles over digital technologies and data can be understood in relation to the conceptualization of digital citizens that the book offers. While the Preface positions dominant responses to these struggles such as government regulations as ‘closings’, a new final chapter, Digital citizens-yet-to-come offers examples of ‘openings’ – digital acts such as new forms of data activism that are less recognised but which point to the emergence of paradoxical digital acts that are producing new digital political subjectivities.

Being Digital Citizens

Engin Isin, Professor of International Politics, Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) and University of London Institute in Paris (ULIP)

Published: 2015-04-09

Total Pages: 222


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Developing a critical perspective on the challenges and possibilities presented by cyberspace, this book explores where and how political subjects perform new rights and duties that govern themselves and others online.
Citizens’ Assemblies (CAs) are flourishing around the world. Quite often composed of randomly selected citizens, CAs, arguably, come as a possible answer to contemporary democratic challenges. Democracies worldwide are indeed confronted with a series of disruptive phenomena such as a widespread perception of distrust and growing polarization as well as low performance. Many actors seek to reinvigorate democracy with citizen participation and deliberation. CAs are expected to have the potential to meet this twofold objective. But, despite deliberative and inclusive qualities of CAs, many questions remain open. The increasing popularity of CAs call for a holistic reflection and evaluation on their origins, current uses and future directions. The De Gruyter Handbook of Citizens’ Assemblies showcases the state of the art around the study of CAs and opens novel perspectives informed by multidisciplinary research and renewed thinking about deliberative participatory processes. It discusses the latest theoretical, empirical, and methodological scientific developments on CAs and offers a unique resource for scholars, decision-makers, practitioners, and curious citizens to better understand the qualities, purposes, promises but also pitfalls of CAs.
The Smart City paradigm aims at resource efficient urban development by means of ICT implementation. Cities where we work and conduct our research are building Smart City strategies and that research institutions increasingly fund research into the development of smart infrastructure and. Smart Cities are considered a radical paradigm shift and motors of technological innovation: economic growth, higher quality of life, efficiency and risk control in the face of shrinking resources and impending climate change. This smartification is contrasted by increasing calls by civil society and urban social movements for more encompassing inclusion in decision-making. New urban actors are acquiring agency through situated knowledge, local expertise, social networking, and cooperation and collaboration skills. Behind these movements a seemingly parallel discourse to the “Smart City” paradigm is gaining ground – the discourse of the commons. Commons are defined as the combination of resources, people and practices: resources which are defined and managed by a group of people – of commoners – and a practice of commoning that looks after, takes care for and fosters this resource without exhausting it. Commoning is a practice that seems closer than any other practice to a sustainable way of life. Are these two discourses – the discourse on the Smart City and the discourse on the urban commons – irreconcilable antagonists or do they share a common ground which needs to be uncovered, developed and advocated. This question is by no means merely theoretical. It is also a very practical question which pertains to the management and distribution of the resources we depend on. It is a very political question as it demands negotiation and the taking of sides. And it is an ethical question in that it relates to how we respect and stand up for each other – our fellow human beings and also the non-human nature for which we are responsible. The essays and transcripts of the symposium “Beware of Smart People!” want to make a first contribution and stimulate future research in the field. Das Paradigma der Smart City ist Ausdruck der Ambition, Stadtentwicklung durch die Anwendung von IKT effizient und Ressourcen schonend zu gestalten. Städte in denen wir arbeiten und über die wir forschen entwickeln Smart City Strategien und Forschungsförderung spezialisiert sich zunehmend auf die Entwicklung „smarter“ Infrastrukturen und Steuerungsmechanismen. Smart Cities werden als radikaler Paradigmenwechsel gelesen und als Motoren technologischer Entwicklung: ökonomisches Wachstum, höhere Lebensqualität, Effizienz und Risikokontrolle angesichts abnehmender Ressourcen und drohenden Klimawandels. Dieser „Smartifizierung“ stehen die zunehmenden Forderungen zivilgesellschaftlicher Gruppen und sozialer Bewegungen für mehr und umfassendere Einbindung in Entscheidungsprozesse entgegen. Neue urbane Akteure werden zu Agenten, indem sie ihre Erfahrungswissen, ihre lokalen Kenntnisse, ihre sozialen Netzwerke und Fähigkeiten zur Kooperation und Kollaboration einbringen. Hintergrund diese Bewegungen ist ein augenscheinlich paralleler Diskurs zur „Smart City“ welcher sich zunehmend Gehör verschafft – der Diskurs über die Gemeingüter, die Commons. Commons werden definiert als das Zusammenspiel von Ressourcen, Menschen und Praktiken: Ressourcen, die von einer Gemeinschaft – den Commonern - definiert und verwaltet werden, und eine Praxis des Commoning, welche die Ressource schonend bewirtschaftet ohne sie zu verbrauchen. In diesem Sinne scheint Commoning eine Praxis, die einer nachhaltigen Lebensweise am nächsten kommt. Sind diese zwei Diskurse – der Diskurs über die Smart City und jener über die urbanen Gemeingüter – unvereinbare Antagonisten oder teilen sie Gemeinsamkeiten, welche offen gelegt, weiter entwickelt und verfechtet werden sollten? Diese Frage ist keineswegs eine rein theoretische. Sie ist eine sehr praktische Frage, da sie auf das die Verteilung und das Management lebenswichtiger Ressourcen zielt. Sie ist eine politische Frage, da sie Auseinandersetzung und Parteinahme einfordert. Und sie ist eine ethische Frage, denn sie fordert gegenseitigen Respekt und Einsatz ein – für unsere Mitmenschen sowie für die nichtmenschliche Natur für die wir Verantwortung tragen. Die Texte und Aufzeichnungen des Symposiums „Beware of Smart People!“ wollen hierzu einen Beitrag leisten und zukünftige Forschungsvorhaben stimulieren.
Explores how traditional notions of citizenship are contested and altered through literature. Literature has always played a central role in creating and disseminating culturally specific notions of citizenship, nationhood, and belonging. In Reconfiguring Citizenship and National Identity in the North American Literary Imagination, author Kathy-Ann Tan investigates metaphors, configurations, parameters, and articulations of U.S. and Canadian citizenship that are enacted, renegotiated, and revised in modern literary texts, particularly during periods of emergence and crisis. Tan brings together for the first time a selection of canonical and lesser-known U.S. and Canadian writings for critical consideration. She begins by exploring literary depiction of "willful" or "wayward" citizens and those with precarious bodies that are viewed as threatening, undesirable, unacceptable—including refugees and asylum seekers, undocumented migrants, deportees, and stateless people. She also considers the rights to citizenship and political membership claimed by queer bodies and an examination of "new" and alternative forms of citizenship, such as denizenship, urban citizenship, diasporic citizenship, and Indigenous citizenship. With case studies based on works by a diverse collection of authors—including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Djuna Barnes, Etel Adnan, Sarah Schulman, Walt Whitman, Gail Scott, and Philip Roth—Tan uncovers alternative forms of collectivity, community, and nation across a broad range of perspectives. In line with recent cross-disciplinary explorations in the field, Reconfiguring Citizenship and National Identity in the North American Literary Imagination shows citizenship as less of a fixed or static legal entity and more as a set of symbolic and cultural practices. Scholars of literary studies, cultural studies, and citizenship studies will be grateful for Tan's illuminating study.
In this book, Eva Brann sets out no less a task than to assess the meaning of imagination in its multifarious expressions throughout western history. The result is one of those rare achievements that will make The World of the Imagination a standard reference.
What activities did the women of ancient Greece perform in the sphere of ritual, and what were the meanings of such activities for them and their culture? By offering answers to these questions, this study aims to recover and reconstruct an important dimension of the lived experience of ancient Greek women. A comprehensive and sophisticated investigation of the ritual roles of women in ancient Greece, it draws on a wide range of evidence from across the Greek world, including literary and historical texts, inscriptions, and vase-paintings, to assemble a portrait of women as religious and cultural agents, despite the ideals of seclusion within the home and exclusion from public arenas that we know restricted their lives. As she builds a picture of the extent and diversity of women’s ritual activity, Barbara Goff shows that they were entrusted with some of the most important processes by which the community guaranteed its welfare. She examines the ways in which women’s ritual activity addressed issues of sexuality and civic participation, showing that ritual could offer women genuinely alternative roles and identities even while it worked to produce wives and mothers who functioned well in this male-dominated society. Moving to more speculative analysis, she discusses the possibility of a women’s subculture focused on ritual and investigates the significance of ritual in women’s poetry and vase-paintings that depict women. She also includes a substantial exploration of the representation of women as ritual agents in fifth-century Athenian drama.
This edited volume is the first to focus on how concepts of citizenship diversify and stimulate the long-standing field of law and literature, and vice versa. Building on existing research in law and literature as well as literature and citizenship studies, the collection approaches the triangular relationship between citizenship, law and literature from a variety of disciplinary, conceptual and political perspectives, with particular emphasis on the performative aspect inherent in any type of social expression and cultural artefact. The sixteen chapters in this volume present literature as carrying multifarious, at times opposing energies and impulses in relation to citizenship. These range from providing discursive arenas for consolidating, challenging and re-negotiating citizenship to directly interfering with or inspiring processes of law-making and governance. The volume opens up new possibilities for the scholarly understanding of citizenship along two axes: Citizenship-as-Literature: Enacting Citizenship and Citizenship-in-Literature: Conceptualising Citizenship.