From national security to global sustainability: Rethinking citizenship education in the diaspora

• In Event: Highlighted session: Rethinking global citizenship education within macro and micro levels

Proposal

In the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo shootings in Paris, when two French-born gunmen of Algerian descent shot and killed 11 journalists in the satirical Paris newspaper, the French education minister announced a vast program of education reforms. At the center was a program of civic education to expand the teaching of democratic values, include “more emphasis on reasoning and the use of the French language, including for parents who do not speak it; [and] greater involvement of parents in the disciplining of their children” (Lilla 2015). Civic education was explicitly framed as an antiterrorist measure: the minister made the case that educational reform was “crucial for national security.” This program of citizenship education for national security reflects broader policy discourses of immigrant integration that position immigrant youth as problems and potential threats to democratic society, who must be disciplined and transformed into acceptable subjects of the nation-state (Jaffe-Walter 2016; Shirazi 2017). The current political moment—in which right-wing nationalist sentiment is on the rise across democratic states—and this year’s conference theme make this an opportune time to question nationalist models of citizenship education and to engage young people’s transnational experiences as a resource for global sustainability. Taking a cue from this year’s conference theme, “Education for Sustainability,” this paper raises the question, what are the costs of a citizenship education that aims to protect and secure the nation-state from those deemed undesirable? How can the transnational practices of young people growing up between nations help us think more deeply about citizenship education for global sustainability?

Despite growing research on the benefits of transnationalism, popular media and policy discourses continue to treat immigrant youth who maintain transnational ties as a risk for extremist or criminal violence, separatism, and a threat to social cohesion. In part this has found support in dominant research on immigrant integration, conducted from the perspective of and with the categories of the nation-state, which reproduces binaries of assimilated or oppositional im/migrant youth (Dyrness & Abu El-Haj, forthcoming; Schinkel 2018). These binaries obscure the often undemocratic teachings of nationalism as well as the democratic learnings of transnationalism: that is, what young people learn from transnational experiences that might inform citizenship for global sustainability. Drawing on findings from ethnographic research with first- and second-generation immigrant youth of Latin American origin in Madrid, Spain, this paper explores the cultural resources of “diasporic citizenship”—defined as social and cultural practices of belonging within webs of transnational relations (Siu 2005; Lukose 2007; Villenas 2007) for a citizenship that forwards global sustainability.

This research is informed by anthropological perspectives on citizenship education that highlight both formal and informal processes of citizenship formation (Levinson 2011), and view citizenship as lived experience, rather than juridical status (Ong 1996; Abu El-Haj 2015). Anthropological perspectives on citizenship highlight cultural processes of “subject-ification”, in Aihwa Ong’s (1996) words: “a dual process of self-making and being-made within webs of power linked to the nation state and civil society” (p. 738). Focusing on the everyday experience of national belonging allows us to explore the “disjunctures” between legal structures and lived experience for diaspora youth, as well as the creative ways youth are responding to these (Abu El-Haj 2015; Coutin 2016). Forms of social belonging, membership and participation are both explicitly cultivated by state entities (formal citizenship education) and forged informally in everyday associations. On the formal end, critical ethnographers have examined how state-led efforts at citizenship education for immigrant youth are a political project imbued in the logics of power (Ríos-Rojas 2018); technologies of governance and control that constitute deserving and undeserving national subjects (Jaffe-Walter 2016; Ong 1996).

However, beyond the gaze of the state, in the interstitial spaces outside or on the margins of formal educational institutions, migrant collectivities are nurturing new forms of belonging and collective identities that are not tied to the nation-state (Dyrness and Hurtig 2016; Dyrness, forthcoming). This paper draws on insights from research in distinct contexts of citizenship formation to tease out aspects of diasporic citizenship that lend themselves to global sustainability. The bulk of the data comes from participant-observation, interviews, and participatory research conducted at three community organizations in Madrid, Spain: two after-school programs in state-funded agencies designed to “integrate” the children of immigrants, and a transnational, feminist activist association dedicated to combating gender violence in Latin America. In all three organizations, my collaborators and I engaged immigrant youth in reflecting on their relationships to multiple communities in Spain and their countries of origin, exploring together how identities are shaped by both places, how lives ‘over there’ and ‘here’ overlap and affect each other (Dyrness and Sepúlveda, forthcoming). In this paper, I discuss the forms of commitment and critical consciousness young people learn from their experiences in transnational social fields; the reasons transnational feminists and other migrant activists refuse national identity; and the forms and practices of citizenship they forge instead. I highlight the cultural resources and spaces of acompañamiento (accompaniment, Sepúlveda 2011) that help diaspora youth navigate their experiences of displacement and broker hegemonic national discourses of belonging. Building community around shared experiences of difference, these spaces allow diaspora youth to embrace the in-between, insider-outsider position as a privileged space of critical reflection and identity formation. Gloria Anzaldúa (2015) calls this space of creation “Nepantla”: “the point of contact y el lugar between worlds—between imagination and phys¬ical existence, between ordinary and nonordinary (spirit) realities…Nepantlas are places of constant tension, where the missing or absent pieces can be summoned back, where transformation and healing may be possible, where wholeness is just out of reach but seems attainable” (Anzaldua 2015 p. 2).
While state-led citizenship education focuses on assimilation into the nation-state, suppressing critique, cultural difference, and histories of oppression, spaces of diaspora citizenship formation engage critique, ambiguity and difference, excavating histories of oppression in both ‘home’ and ‘host’ countries and centering the resistance efforts of colonized peoples. I suggest that researchers pay more attention to these informal, in-between spaces as fertile ground for a citizenship that forwards global sustainability.

Author

• Andrea Dyrness, University of Colorado Boulder