Summoning the Active Citizen

Responsibility, participation and choice summon different images of the 'active' citizen and produce different publics. The tensions between them, however, tend to be displaced onto citizens themselves, colliding with other repertoires of action and political engagement.

I was recently part of a group of women – from different countries, disciplines and political backgrounds – who met in Milton Keynes. We had a great time, renewing old friendships and making new ones, and mixing talking, walking and (too much) eating. Having chance to meet face to face was important since the project raises significant challenges. One was how to use the concept active citizenship both as a policy term and an analytical concept (we decided we couldn’t). We also struggled with the dominant paradigm of cross national comparative work. Our focus on policy flows and transformative struggles attempts to challenge ‘methodological nationalism’ and some of the tired typifications of welfare state regimes. But this was not an easy process- for example we kept tripping over different meanings of concepts that we apparently had in common. For example did you know that the English word citizenship covers 2 Norwegian words: Statsborgerskap (state-citizenship- described as ‘the colour of your passport’), and Medborgerskap (co-citizenship – a policy catchphrase).

But across such differences we got excited by some common processes – for example how the policy concepts of responsibility, participation and choice drew on, borrowed or, as one of our members put it, ‘devoured’ the achievements of social movements and other citizenship struggles, depoliticising them but also opening up possibilities for new forms of agency. And excitement was also generated as we brought different feminist inflections to the analysis, opening up, we hope, new ways of understanding both the publicising and privatising dynamics of ‘active citizenship’.

We are now engaged in a writing project (co-edited by Janet Newman from the UK and Evelien Tonkens from the Netherlands) to be published next year by Amsterdam University Press.

P.S. This is my first ever blog and is no doubt much too stilted and much too long – I promise to get better.

Learn more about the research programme: Publics

Tags: welfare states, social movements, responsibility, participation choice, feminism, Europe, comparative, citizenship, active citizenship

Posted by Janet Newman on 8 May 2009, 15:15

2 comments

efi2 9 May 2009, 21:29

Thanks very much Janet for sharing your thoughts on the experience of this meeting. It sounds like it was a fascinating and stimulating gathering. It is interesting that you faced the challenge ‘how to use the concept active citizenship both as a policy term and an analytical concept’ and ‘decided that [you] couldn’t’. For years, I have struggled with the concept ‘active citizenship’ and eventually decided that I could not use it to describe the kind of citizenship that is dynamic, critical and, above all, creative. By working on the concept of ‘acts of citizenship’ I settled on ‘activist citizenship’ to contrast it with ‘active citizenship’ precisely for the reasons you and your colleagues seem to find ‘active citizenship’ problematic: it summons the image of an already established repertoire of being political. By contrast, I tried to describe ‘activist citizenship’ on the basis various empirical studies as that citizenship which is not summoned but summons new scripts of political action. Some of these studies eventually made into Acts of Citizenship. I wonder if you and your colleagues would find 'activist citizenship' in the way in which I attempted to use more amenable for your purposes. Engin

Janet Newman 1 June 2009, 17:37

Thanks, Engin, for the comment. The distinction between active and activist forms of citizenship is very important, I think, but as always I want to try to capture what might be going on across and between this binary. At least two dimensions of this are of interest, I think. The first is how the policies on active citizenship build on the success of activist engagements, but somehow transform them in new state practices and pedagogies that say, somehow, 'there you are, we are doing what you wanted'. The second is how people - individually and sometimes collectively - appropriate some dimensions of new discourses to carve out spaces of agency, but in deploying those same discourses become inscribed into governmental projects. We will see how this goes as the project proceeds.