Localizing Citizenship: Tracing the Pedagogy of American Membership through the Language of Neighborhood

• In Event: Scholar to Scholar II
  In Paper Session: Citizenship as Stability and Change: Exploring Technologies of American Virtue and Belonging

Abstract

With all the talk of globalization, it is difficult to decide how or even whether national identity and citizenship matters anymore. Without dismissing the importance of shifting world conditions, this project moves away from global citizenship and attends instead to the way that local space is gathering new energy and excitement as a site of citizenship. Put differently, I trace how the local neighborhood or community is emerging as a potent site where citizenship and national identity is lived out and understood. Particularly in recent years, as heightened anxiety over the capacity and responsibility of the nation state has made the question of citizenship an even more urgent and vexing matter, the site of the local offers a new site to get it “right”, animating a renewed optimism away from the disappointments and suspicions at the national or even global level.
To get at this question, I examine the discourse of President Obama’s election campaign and two series of children’s books on citizenship in order to show how those local practices contour - and are contoured by - the discourse of “American values". Specifically, I trace how the homey themes of neighborhood, community organizing, and even a neighborhood inaugural ball forge a new responsibility-oriented optimistic citizenship animated by the little and local acts by ordinary Americans. These help explain how the terms and conditions of citizenship are shaped and directed by both stability and change through its links to tradition and contingency.

Author

• Julie Borkin, Oakland University