With apologies for cross posting
Please find below a call for papers for the session ‘Educating the
cosmopolitan national: Negotiating memory and conflict in making
democratic citizens’ at the American Association of Geographers’
Conference 2009. If you are interested in presenting a paper, please
contact Dan Hammett ([log in to unmask]) or Lynn Staeheli
([log in to unmask])
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Educating the cosmopolitan national: Negotiating memory and conflict in
making democratic citizens
The negotiation of belonging, the designation of ‘insiders’ and
‘outsiders’, and the manipulation of citizenship and nationhood refract
conflict and political struggles within states around the world. These
practices emphasize the need to develop citizens who uphold ideals of
democracy and nationhood, particularly in states that are negotiating
histories of inequality, oppression and conflict. Education programs and
policies provide one avenue through which government can directly affect
citizenship formation and the development of values, skills and
dispositions associated with the ‘good’ citizen. However, the pedagogy
of post-conflict nations is difficult, as governments try to present
narratives of national histories and character without inflaming
(sometimes quite recent) conflicts. One strategy has been to promote a
version of citizenship that negotiates cosmopolitan ideals and national
histories.
This session will examine the ways in which states seek to negotiate
tensions between cosmopolitan citizenship and national histories in
citizenship education programs. It asks: How do governments and elites
attempt to overcome histories of conflict in re-building nations? How
are policies of nation-building and citizenship-making negotiated and
transformed in their implementation? What happens when these policies
seem to limit the possibilities for reconciliation by glossing over
historical “truths”? What happens when national policies are deemed
inappropriate to the local context in which they are implemented?
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