Active Citizenship

This article explores the informal dimension of the Dutch participation society. As the state retreats from welfare provision under neoliberal conditions, it invites and incorporates citizens into spaces of governance that were formerly closed off to them. Deregulation, as a policy tool, is currently employed to provide ‘active citizens’ with more room to manoeuvre and bridge the gap between their fellow citizens and the state. While the main debates on citizen participation and ‘active citizenship’ are structured around cases in the global North, this contribution develops a more international perspective, informed by studies on how certain individuals, acting as political brokers, bridge the gap between the state and the population. The article proposes that deregulation and informalization can be seen as new techniques of governmentality, while also emphasizing the importance of studying brokers’ agency and their informal politics in new spaces of governance.

Keywords: participation society, brokerage, governmentality, informal politics, citizenship, the Netherlands

In the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, it has been stated that all learners should acquire the knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development. Consequently, and also with the great proliferation of knowledge and rapid changes in technology, it is important to develop students’ understanding of the principles of sustainability.
The Special Issue “Geography Education Promoting Sustainability” focuses on views and
experiences in geography education at schools and in teacher education, which support curricular
work and school practices sharing a vision of a society that lives in balance with Earth’s carrying
capacity. In addition, the special issue presents and reflects on the ideas that offer learners a context
for developing active, global citizenship and participation for understanding of the interdependencies
of ecological, societal, and economic systems.

The purpose of The Special Issue “Geography Education Promoting Sustainability” is to enhance understanding of sustainability and foster initiatives and applications of sustainability based activities at schools and in teacher education.

The book includes a multi-sided view of sustainability and sustainable development, and many useful teaching and learning ideas for promoting them in Geography Education at different educational levels.

Democracy is a highly desirable but contested concept in education. However, little is known about how current and future educators perceive, experience and relate to democracy, which could have a significant impact on how students learn about, and become involved in, civic engagement and democracy. This paper reports on a study of 129 College of Education students, finding that they generally have a narrow conceptualization of democracy, primarily focused on electoral politics, only weakly connecting it to education. Social justice, in particular, was highlighted as requiring more attention.

This PhD research project tackles youngsters’ role as citizens, by recognising them as experts of their own life experiences, capable of giving unique contributions and views on addressing certain issues related to their local and learning needs. The youngsters engaged in this process belong to the local community of Miragaia in Porto, coming from an elementary school with an age bracket between 12 and 16 years old.


Through a participatory action approach, the aim is to encourage youngsters’ self-empowerment through codesign practices. This is established by co-sharing and co-deciding conditions for the learning environment, co-creating the learning tools and discussing the learning process, through which young people can reflect upon their identities as learners within the school context and life-long trajectories.
 Since schools are the first window and practice of belonging to a wider society, there is a certain parallel drawn between active learning and active citizenship having in mind that students have the right and the duty in learning to learn by actively engaging in a democratic process within the school life and its local communities.


The researcher reflects upon school’s constraints and conditions to learn by deconstructing the possibilities for youngsters’ meaningful participation inside and outside of the classroom, endeavouring the pluralistic approach to a more participatory education.


In 2014, a long-term project in Miragaia school has been initiated as a case study of codesigning participatory practices with, for and by youth. In the first stage "warmUP", an ethnographic and participatory observation was conducted through voluntary weekly sessions that tackled the wellbeing of youth in the school context, their motivational drivers and awareness towards learning and participating in loco. The gathered results demonstrated the intergenerational gap in communication and understanding of certain terminology related to citizenship topic.


In the second phase, "buildUP", students continued participation in the weekly sessions in which they were invited to take ownership and co-manage implementation of initiatives of their own interest, such as the Christmas party and the tournament in football. After the winter break, Miragaia students created a community of practice with design students from the Árvore school located in the same area. Together they co-created a learning tool - visual dictionary "Ilustracionário, à minha maneira 1.0" - by reflecting upon their own levels of understanding of 23 concepts that associate with the topics of youth policy and civic participation and representing them visually through illustrations.


"play" is the last phase which was implemented in the classroom and the students were invited to reflect upon their motivation to learn, learning practice and their competencies of co-creating learning tools that can be used inside/outside of the classrooms.


The principles of codesigning learning processes are based on individual needs and nonhierarchical, voluntary, learner-centred, collaborative, transparent, experiential, experimental and flexible approaches.
 The data gathered through weekly sessions in the last three academic years is analysed and contributes to shaping a learning framework in active citizenship, as a recommendation of applying to codesign in facilitating learning with, for and by youth.

Keywords: youngsters, codesign, citizenship, learning, framework

This paper has not been generally available. It was originally prepared  as an introductory paper for an EU  unit interested in promoting 'active citizenship'. It has been quoted in :

Nelson, J. and Kerr, D. (2006), Active citizenship in INCA countries: definitions, policies, practices and outcomes: Final report, London: Qualification and Curriculum Authority. p.6.

Ross, A. & Dooly, M. Young people’s intentions about their political activity
Citizenship Teaching and Learning, 6 (1), 43-60.

Schulz, W.,  Fraillon, J.,  Ainley, J.,  Bruno, L. &  Kerr, D.  International Civic and Citizenship Education Study – Assessment Framework. Amsterdam: International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement, p.23.

In this paper I discuss the model of active citizenship which has been promoted in England’s secondary school curriculum in relation to the more established model of service learning. Through the comparison I seek to highlight the substantial areas of overlap between the two models and also to sharpen some of the distinctions between these traditions. This discussion raises several issues which link to foundational questions about the nature, scope and purpose of citizenship education we should be promoting.

Active citizenship and participatory community-development approaches have evolved partly in response to perceived aid-dependency among rural communities. In Solomon Islands these methods have met with mixed success. This article reflects on the frustration often felt by local and international development workers when working with rural communities. It questions some of the assumptions that shape the way in which development workers and programmes understand the types of community which make up Solomon Islands.

This paper employs qualitative research methods to gain a better understanding of how residents of Colombian low income neighbourhoods engage in participatory planning programs to develop their neighbourhood. The paper draws on twenty-one semi-structured interviews that were conducted in 2009 in four participatory urban renewal projects in two Colombian cities – Bogotá and Medellín. Participatory planning projects were rolled out to encourage the inclusion of marginalised neighbourhoods within the physical and social fabric of the city, but the research revealed that participants’ experiences of empowerment and inclusion were limited. Participatory projects were appreciated for the physical, social and economic improvements they generated, and for the avenues for future projects they opened up. However, lack of genuine opportunities to participate led to further feelings of dependence and frustration, negatively affecting people’s sense of belonging in the city and in the neighbourhood. Pressure exerted on people to participate conflicted with their imperative to earn a living, and public servants’ expectations of grateful and complicit participants resulted in feelings of frustration. Further, participants’ perceptions of nearby neighbourhoods with better service provision, acquired without the necessity to participate, made them feel forgotten. Together, these results illustrate the complexities of citizen participation in marginalised neighbourhoods. The potential causes for conflict and misunderstanding highlighted in this paper have relevance for planning strategies and participation policies that seek to include previously marginalised citizens into the social and physical fabric of the city.

This article analyzes the ways in which Canadian and Australian immigration policies represent causes and consequences of neoliberal restructuring. Interrogating neoliberalism as a series of political-economic and moral changes derived from the marketization of societal and governmental arrangements, it illustrates how numerically-based ‘points systems’ have been employed as mechanisms for: gauging human capital; establishing indices of risk and undesirability; and promoting the ‘responsibilization’ of incoming migrants. In doing so the points systems' historical trajectory is traced through a variety of administrative reforms characteristic of neoliberal government and flexible accumulation. Ultimately, this article contends that as rational, technical and economically guided systems of enumeration and assessment, both governments' policies mirror, enhance and extend neoliberal arrangements and sensibilities. In providing ostensibly objective techniques of evaluation the points systems have assisted in injecting the ideal neoliberal citizens- who are, above all, flexible, cosmopolitan, entrepreneurial and autonomous- from abroad. Overall this paper contributes to studies of state restructuring by providing new insights into the links between the neglected domain of immigration control and emergent techniques of societal regulation and citizen-making.

This article aims to understand the geographical specificity of the repoliticized public space in the Cabanyal-Canyamelar-a neighbourhood in Valencia (Spain). The goal of this endeavour is to discuss how the struggles over public space reveal and expose hidden, latent, and wider tensions that produce different configurations of active citizenship; those, in turn, pose the questions of the access to and the uses of public space, which are mostly determined by class and ethnicity. To this end, the peculiar topography and history of the Cabanyal-Canyamelar, the practices, politics, and discourses through which the 'publicity' of space is produced, the differences in the social, cultural, and power capital among two antithetically polarised groups of grassroots associations have been considered and compose the discursive and empirical ground on which the research was based on. This research shows how within the abstract definition of public space as a space open to everyone, structured conflicts among unequal and plural publics pose questions of who is entitled to claim and assert control over space.

The 20th century has been characterized, amongst other ways, by the new role of intellectuals in public debate. Julien Benda’s book La Trahison des clercs represents a sort of summary of all the problems that emerged until the end of 1920s concerning the relationship between politics and culture. By going beyond superficial readings of his work, it is possible to identify that which is key for intellectuals as they carry out their specific role as citizens. In fact, along with the process of democratization, various forms of so-called ‘active citizenship’ have appeared. It is right to collocate, among them, intellectuals’ actions, when are invested, with a sense of responsibility, in the pursuit of the defence and development of common goods.

Participation in social movements, particularly movements which raise radical political challenges, adopt confrontational strategies and / or lack economic resources, power or cultural privilege, can be personally challenging as well as intensely rewarding. State repression, financial costs and cultural / interpersonal sanctions can all contribute to making it difficult for individuals to continue their activism as well as disrupting interpersonal networks and wider movements. Sustainable activism (under whatever name) is therefore a major concern for many movements, in terms of enabling newcomers to overcome these hurdles, supporting existing participants, building on the learning and networks embodied in individuals, developing a presence across different areas of society and enabling generational transmission.

Different movements face very different challenges in this respect, dependent not only on the social situation of their core participants (with the emphasis variously on physical and social survival, movement-relevant skills and resources, or emotional sustainability) but also on how movements interface with social routines (workplace-based movements, community-based movements, professional / full-time activism and “leisure” activism) and the relationship of movement cultures with the wider society (long-standing movement presence, whole classes or cultures which support participation, moments of generational transformation and newly-formed or culturally marginal movements).

The chapter further discusses some of the strategies and theorisations adopted within different social movements in relation to activist sustainability: what aspects of sustainability do different movements prioritise, how do they tackle the problem, and how do they think about the issue? Examples range from survival-oriented solidarity, via strategies geared to developing organisational capacity, to prefigurative approaches. Socialist, community, radical-democratic, feminist, ecological and radical-spiritual variants are explored. Beyond this again, activist sustainability represents the challenge of how people lacking power, wealth or cultural privilege can become and remain active and radical political subjects.

This thesis inquires into possibilities for young children‘s active citizenship as provoked through a practice of social justice storytelling with one Preparatory class of children aged five to six years. The inquiry was practitioner-research, through a living educational theory approach cultivating an interrelational view of existing with others in evolving processes of creation. Ideas of young children‘s active citizenship were provoked and explored through storytelling, by a storytelling teacher-researcher, a Prep class of children and their teacher. The three major foci of the study were practice, narrative and action. A series of storytelling workshops with a Prep class was the practice that was investigated. Each workshop began with a story that made issues of social justice visible, followed by critical discussion of the story, and small group activities to further explore the story. The focus on narrative was based on the idea of story as a way knowing. Stories were used to explore social justice issues with young children. Metanarratives of children and citizenship were seen to influence possibilities for young children‘s active citizenship. Stories were purposefully shared to provoke and promote young children‘s active citizenship through social actions. It was these actions that were the third focus of the study. Through action research, a social justice storytelling practice and the children‘s responses to the stories were reflected on both in action and after. These reflections informed and shaped storytelling practice. Learning in a practice of social justice storytelling is explained through living theories of social justice storytelling as pedagogy. Data of the children‘s participation in the study were analysed to identify influences and possibilities for young children‘s active citizenship creating a living theory of possibilities for young children‘s active citizenship.

The so-called ‘participatory turn’ or ‘social turn’ (Bishop) has been propelled by the arrival of the digital culture and new possibilities in the area of technology and communications, which offer audiences unprecedented possibilities for involvement. A tide of terms like ‘smart mobs’ (Rheingold), ‘collective intelligence’ (Levy), ‘people formerly known as the audience’ (Rosen) and ‘crowdsourcing’ (Howe) renegotiate (often uncritically) the place of audiences in creative process and suggest that audience is getting highly engaged in all areas of innovation and creativity. Moreover, a growing literature on citizenship tries to prove that arts participation is an active force in the creation of active citizenship (i.e. Stevenson, Mercer). However, recent researches of cultural needs and habits of Serbian population (Cvetičanin), especially younger part of it (Mrđa), show disturbingly low (and decreasing) interest for any kind of institutionalized culture or arts. I argue here that a very important factor for this is the same kind of low interest of artists, arts critics and producers for the audience. Thus, theorizing about audience activity is often distanced from the activity itself.
The main research question of this paper is how artists and cultural practitioners in the Serbian theatrical community construct the idea of their audience. What kinds of roles do audiences play in theatre? To understand and interpret the relation between artists (and other families of cultural system - Mollard) and audience, study focused on the discourses about audience, which were analysed using the discourse analysis method. Data derived from over one hundred interviews with ten most-acclaimed actors and actresses in the last twenty years in Serbia. Analysed interviews were published in special publications by the National Theatrical Museum in the occasion of awarding these artists with a lifetime achievement award ”The Ring of Dobrica.”
The results suggest that inside institutionalized, elite cultural scene in Serbia discourses about audience are oddly rare; in discourses that do exist, audience is most often constructed as passive mass; collaboration or any other sharing with audience does not exist. All this leads to the conclusion that the whole theatrical system of Serbia is in many ways distanced from the audience. This is arguably linked to the wider public dis-engagement in transitional Serbia. However, in order to become an agent of change, theatre and arts in general, have to create a new concept of audience.

This paper addresses the debate surrounding the participatory and emancipatory approaches in disability research. The purpose is to provide evidence in order to answer the research question related to what extent participatory and mancipatory research can represent a paradigm able to contribute to the emancipation of disabled people and to the development of a transformation of fundamental social structures and relationships.
The paper is mainly inspired by academic literature reviews and international document- analysis that have led to interpretations and suggestions for a new trajectory of research in the disability field.
The first section sets a brief summary of the main authors and theories in relation to the participatory and emancipatory research and how these approaches can develop into means able to support the self-determination of disabled people in the research field.
In the second section, the attempt is to tentatively - suggest a trajectory of research, in which: the participatory and emancipatory paradigm of research if applied to a model of disability as a civil rights problems, could guide the collection and analysis of data and information with the active
involvement and participation of disabled people in order to develop innovative solutions, transform social structures and change relationships.

After we analyse the terms political thinking and critical political thinking, as two of the main kinds of thinking that sociopolitical education subjects should cultivate among students of secondary education, we propose different teaching approaches which may promote these forms of thinking, so that students can become capable of analysing critically and perceiving politically the current and existing sociopolitical reality. Finally, we suggest teaching methods and techniques that will help students adopt attitudes that will make students acquire attitudes that embrace political participation in an effort to increase the probability that they will become active citizens, as adults, following a democratic path.

"Citizenship.
Selected European Philosophical and Cultural Ideas.
Historical-hermeneutic study".

The transformations of the last decades of the 20th century resulted in the Polish society, like other societies of Central and Eastern European countries, facing a real chance to rebuild its due subjectivity. At the same time, it was faced with the necessity of reconsidering, in particular, structural and normative aspects of this kind of subjectivity, as well as the citizenship that is strictly correlated with it.

Taking into consideration the commonly observed chance to rebuild the subjectivity and citizenship of the Polish society, as well as the proposed necessity of deliberation on their proprium and their Polish shape, the present monograph is intended to contribute to the deliberation thus understood.

We intend to realize the deliberation by attempting a philosophical and cultural, and especially historical-hermeneutic reflection on selected ideas, conceptions and theories of subjectivity and citizenship, articulated mainly by the European and Polish socio-political philosophical thought over the centuries.

The principal aim of the reflecion thus understood is, firstly, an attempt at the reconstruction of the deliberation on citizenship, present in the European philosophical traditions. Of particular interest here are those articulated aspects which in a significant way became, or still are an inspiration for the Polish thought in this scope.

Secondly, the aim is the particularizing conception underlying the reflection – a quest for a contemporary model of citizenship in the context of the multi-century tradition of philosophical theorizing about it. A quest for its essence and criteria governing it, as well as its typically Polish shape which would express the identity and political culture embedded in the cultural heritage of the nation, and developed by the nation’s current self-understanding.

The research area of the citizenship thus analyzed is delineated, on the one hand, by selected philosophical conceptions of statehood, subjectivity and citizenship, belonging to the European philosophical traditions which – as defined by the author – have substantially contributed to the formation of the present understanding of them in the western European cultural circle. On the other hand, this field is further specified by significant Polish philosophical and cultural concepts of statehood, subjectivity and citizenship, articulated in various socio-political contexts of our history.

The starting point of the present study is an attempt at an reinterpretation of selected philosophically-argued perspectives on the issues of statehood, subjectivity and citizenship of the society. These perspectives have been developed by European philosophical schools and/or socio-political thought evironments which have a) greatly contributed to the formation of the western European and Polish understanding of them, and at the same time, b) above the differences that characterize them, claim the right to define their solutions as formulas of the civil society (Part I). The main criterion of selection of these European perspectives is the fact of the inherent presence of philosophical deliberation on the issue of citizenship, as well as their substantial impact on the understanding of this issue in the European and Polish thought.

The descriptively, cognitively and normatively complex picture of the European deliberation on idea of citizenship, which emerges from Part I, and whose solutions inspire the native philosophical thought, delineates the European horizon of the understanding of the idea.

In Part II, its Polish counterpart will be revealed by the analyses of selected paradigms of citizenship and the implied models of civic self-determination, which are present in the modern and contemporary Polish thought and in socio-political practice.

The last stage of the proposed research is an attempt at formulating at least some of the essential criteria of the contemporary concept of citizenship, as well as its proper ethos (Part III).

Given the complexity of the issues under discussion, we adopt an interdisciplinary approach – mainly of a philosophical, sociological and culturalstudies character – which takes into account both the citizenship concepts of selected socio-political philosophy schools, crucial for the western European cultural circle, and the Polish solutions, which have frequently interacted with these, and which have significantly been contributing to the history of citizenship in Poland.

Regarding the latter, the crucial research material is constituted by philosophical-political literary and current affairs texts concerned with these issues. Also, unquestionably valuable – particularly in the context of reflection on civic involvement following year 1989 – are source texts on multi-faceted research into the civic-minded society in Poland, and its socio-cultural determinants.

Drawing on a study conducted with an association of citizens operating in the European public sphere and applying the Discourse Historical Approach, this paper investigates how the organisation’s members construct their transnational citizenship and how they negotiate it vis-à-vis European, national, and local identities. The analysis reveals that informants often claim their transnational identities as membership of an expanded community of relevance, through the transportability of their civic engagement and through meta-narratives of spatiality and progress whereby cosmopolitan scenarios are often reterritorialised within the European space. These arguments are frequently realised through the metaphorical scenario of ‘spatial dynamics’ which makes sense of identities as emergent from unbounded social interaction, and through the indexicality of transnational narratives as specific discourses of socio-historical transformation of nationhood.

How does academic literature across various disciplines conceptualize and empirically address active citizenship? What are the potential benefits and dangers of dominant epistemological and ideological perspectives on ‘good citizenship’? Our paper engages with these questions by drawing on literature across 12 disciplines. We used textual analysis software T-LAB to quantify and visualize co-occurrences, word associations and thematic clusters in the abstracts of 770 texts gathered by eight country teams and original in-depth qualitative analyses of ideological positions and discourses taken up in a selection of key texts across the corpus. Our paper elaborates the findings: that many of the key themes surrounding young people and citizenship in the literature share little or no connection with European citizenship; that there is a significant gap in the literature on young European citizens; and that studies connected to internal, status-based factors connected to citizenship are far more prevalent than those examining external, practice-based factors or dissidence and dissent. Our conclusions examine the potential normative implications of the disjuncture between dominant conceptions and critical accounts of youth active citizenship.

Taking direction from the well-received exhibition Design with the Other 90%: CITIES (2011 – 2012) in America, this paper will refer to the notion of  ‘Architecture “with the Other 90%”’. By making reference to collaborative community-led architectural projects emanating from the African continent to illustrate the shift towards ‘Architecture “with the Other 90%”’ in addressing spontaneous urbanism in these regions. The main case studies that will be analyzed in the discussion is the Makoko Floating School in Lagos, Nigeria by NLÉ Architects lead by Kunlé Adeyemi (NLÉ Architecture & Design, 2016a) and the Design Indaba 10x10 Low-Cost Housing project by Luyanda Mpahlwa, from MMA Architects, for a family home in Freedom Park (Mitchell’s Plain, Cape Town) (Design Indaba, 2016a). This paper’s central focus is to illustrate a shift in social responsibility design and approach in Africa by referring to interdisciplinary architectural and design projects that are community-led, participatory, human-centered and promotes active citizenship.

This paper is focused on the emergence of the European public sphere debate. This discussion has become more and more prominent between scholars of European Studies who have given it both normative and empirical attention. This is due to a variety of reasons, but in particular the increase in research about the legitimacy of European integration, which has been the subject of a wide debate since at least the beginning of the 1990s. Firstly, the article critically assesses the normative arguments that have supported the development of the European public sphere, by focusing on the social, political and cultural dimensions of European integration. After having assessed this debate and underlined current challenges emerged in light of recent events (such as the euro-crisis, the rise of euroscepticism and the rise in far right movements), the article then introduces the empirical research on the europeanisation of the public sphere, by looking at the development of an agenda that has more and more concentrated on the fragmentation and fluidity of such construct. This discussion is key to introduce the final part of the article, which focuses on the role of civil society in the broader European constituency and in the public sphere. The article highlights some of the ambiguities inherent to the current research agenda, by calling for a more comprehensive approach to study active citizenship in Europe that departs from a consideration of the NGOs activists as the main locus of analysis.

This paper argues that the Hikajat Khonghoetjoe (The life story of Confucius), written by Lie Kim Hok in 1897, is a medium to propose modern ideas of flexible subjectivity, cosmopolitanism, active citizenship and the concepts of good governance to the Chinese Peranakans who experienced political and racial discrimination under Dutch colonization. Using the figure of Confucius, Lie aimed to cultivate virtuous subjects who apply their faith and morality in political sphere. He intended to raise political awareness and rights among the Chinese as colonial subjects and to valorize their bargaining power with the Dutch colonial government. By introducing Confucianism, Lie proposed that the Chinese reconnect themselves with China as an alternative patronage which could subvert White supremacy. Instead of using sources in Chinese, Lie translated the biography of Confucius from the European texts. In crafting his story, Lie applied conglomerate authorship, a technique commonly practised by Malay authors. It allowed him to select, combine and appropriate the source texts. To justify that Confucius' virtue and his teaching were superb and are applicable to contemporary life, Lie borrowed and emphasized European writers' high appraisal of Confucianism, instead of using his own arguments and opinions. I call this writing technique " indirect agency " .

We explore the effect of active citizenship on the likelihood of increasing the usage of e Government services in the European Union. E Government refers to the use of information and communication technology to improve public administration. The adoption of e Government systems by end users has remained below expectations and the efforts of many countries in Europe have remained vain. Scholars have found that the low adoption and use of e Government services by end users for government to citizen e services are still major barriers to successful e Government implementation. In order to foster wider participation, the challenge for government is to cater for non technical factors in designing, developing and delivering relevant and appropriate e services, which are adapted to the citizens' needs. Active citizenship encompasses the empowering, engaging and fostering participatory citizens. An index was defined in Europe to measure active citizenship to cater for lack of voluntarism and voting willingness. The results of the quantitative study show that the willingness to use the public e services will be stronger if government can foster participation and empower the average and passive citizen.

Vatandaşlık; sosyal, siyasal, ekonomik ve hukuksal boyutlarıyla uzun yıllar sonucunda şekillenen ve hala dönüşüm içerisinde olan bir olgudur. Bireyin devlet ve toplumla sahip olduğu geleneksel ilişki biçimlerine farklı bir boyut getiren modern vatandaşlık, insanın akıl ve irade sahibi bir varlık olarak konumlanması sonucunda ulaşılmış bir statüyü niteler. Fakat bu statü durağan ve tek boyutlu bir ilişkiyi ifade etmez; aksine dinamik, karmaşık ve girift bir yapıya sahiptir. 20. yüzyılın son çeyreğinden itibaren ve özellikle 21. yüzyılla birlikte, bu ilişki biçimini derinden etkileyen ve klasik vatandaşlık yaklaşımlarına meydan okuyan dönüşümlere şahit oluyoruz. Vatandaşlık artık sadece hukuki bir bağla açıklanamayacak bir bağlam kazanmıştır. Kimlik ve aidiyetlere ilişkin farkındalık ve talepler, dünya sorunlarındaki artış, bilimsel ve teknolojik gelişmeler, bu olgunun her seferinde yeniden üretilmesine zeminoluşturmakta, kavram da gittikçe çok boyutlu ve disiplinlerarası bir nitelik kazanmaktadır. Vatandaşlığın anlamına ve kapsamına yönelik bu tartışmalar, vatandaşlık eğitiminin hedeflerini ve içeriğini de doğrudan şekillendirmekte; “Nasıl bir vatandaş yetiştirmek istiyoruz?” sorusu farklı ülkelerde, farklı dönemlerde değişik yanıtlar bulabilmektedir. Eğitim sistemi açısından oldukça hayati olan bu soru, vatandaşlık ve vatandaşlık eğitiminin daha bütüncül bir şekilde incelenmesini gerekli kılmaktadır. Türkiye’de vatandaşlık konusunda olgun bir literatürün oluştuğu söylenebilir. Bununla birlikte vatandaşlık eğitimi açısından aynı yargıda bulunmak zor görünüyor. Bu durum konunun önemi dikkate alındığında büyük bir boşluğa işaret etmektedir. Kuramsal Temeller ve Güncel Tartışmalar Işığında 21. Yüzyılda Vatandaşlık ve Vatandaşlık Eğitimi isimli bu eser, vatandaşlık ve vatandaşlık eğitimi konusundaki güncel tartışma ve eğilimleri ele alarak bu boşluğun kapanmasına bir katkı sunmayı amaçlamaktadır. Kitapta vatandaşlık ve vatandaşlık eğitimini çeşitli yönleriyle ele alan on dokuz bölüm yer almaktadır. Bölümler, hem teorik ve tarihsel açıdan vatandaşlık kavramının gelişimini ve özellikle 20. yüzyılla birlikte yaşadığı dönüşümü, hem de bu dönüşümlerin vatandaşlık eğitimine yansımalarını incelemektedir. Eserin, bu alana ilgi duyan okurlara faydalı olması dileğiyle…