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"Civics in literature"
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Virtuous Citizens
Demonstrates how contemporary manifestations of civic
publics trace directly to the early days of
nationhood The rise of the bourgeois public sphere
and the contemporaneous appearance of counterpublics in the
eighteenth century deeply influenced not only how politicians and
philosophers understood the relationships among citizens,
disenfranchised subjects, and the state but also how members of
the polity understood themselves. In
Virtuous Citizens :
Counterpublics and Sociopolitical Agency in Transatlantic
Literature , Kendall McClellan uncovers a fundamental and
still redolent transformation in conceptions of civic identity
that occurred over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. Literature of this period exposes an emotional
investment in questions of civic selfhood born out of concern for
national stability and power, which were considered products of
both economic strength and a nation’s moral fiber.
McClellan shows how these debates traversed the Atlantic to
become a prominent component of early American literature,
evident in works by James Fenimore Cooper, Catharine Maria
Sedgwick, Sarah Josepha Hale, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, among
others. Underlying popular opinion about who could participate in
the political public, McClellan argues, was an impassioned
rhetorical wrestling match over the right and wrong ways to
demonstrate civic virtue. Relying on long-established tropes of
republican virtue that lauded self-sacrifice and disregard for
personal safety, abolitionist writers represented loyalty to an
ideals-based community as the surest safeguard of both private
and public virtue. This evolution in civic virtue sanctioned acts
of protest against the state, offered disenfranchised citizens a
role in politics, and helped usher in the modern transnational
public sphere.
Virtuous Citizens shows that the modern public sphere
has always constituted a vital and powerful space for those
invested in addressing injustice and expanding democracy. To
illuminate some of the fundamental issues underlying
today’s sociopolitical unrest, McClellan traces the
transatlantic origins of questions still central to the
representation of movements like Black Lives Matter, the
Women’s March, and the Alt-Right: What is the primary
loyalty of a virtuous citizen? Are patriots those who defend the
current government against attacks, external and internal, or
those who challenge the government to fulfill sociopolitical
ideals?
The Practice of Citizenship
2019
In the years between the American Revolution and the U.S. Civil War, as legal and cultural understandings of citizenship became more racially restrictive, black writers articulated an expansive, practice-based theory of citizenship. Grounded in political participation, mutual aid, critique and revolution, and the myriad daily interactions between people living in the same spaces, citizenship, they argued, is not defined by who one is but, rather, by what one does.In The Practice of Citizenship, Derrick R. Spires examines the parallel development of early black print culture and legal and cultural understandings of U.S. citizenship, beginning in 1787, with the framing of the federal Constitution and the founding of the Free African Society by Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, and ending in 1861, with the onset of the Civil War. Between these two points he recovers understudied figures such as William J. Wilson, whose 1859 \"Afric-American Picture Gallery\" appeared in seven installments in The Anglo-African Magazine, and the physician, abolitionist, and essayist James McCune Smith. He places texts such as the proceedings of black state conventions alongside considerations of canonical figures such as Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Frederick Douglass.Reading black print culture as a space where citizenship was both theorized and practiced, Spires reveals the degree to which concepts of black citizenship emerged through a highly creative and diverse community of letters, not easily reducible to representative figures or genres. From petitions to Congress to Frances Harper's parlor fiction, black writers framed citizenship both explicitly and implicitly, the book demonstrates, not simply as a response to white supremacy but as a matter of course in the shaping of their own communities and in meeting their own political, social, and cultural needs.
\Who Cares?\: Young Adolescents' Perceived Barriers to Civic Action
2022
While civic participation is a crucial component of healthy and sustainable democracies, young adolescents may perceive or experience barriers that limit their civic action. This study draws from focus groups and surveys during a week-long summer civics camp to explore ways in which 47 young adolescents entering Grades 6-9 described barriers they perceive to civic action in their schools and communities. Findings reveal that participants entered camp believing they were capable of making a difference in their communities. Their ideas for youth civic action in schools and broader communities typically represented personally responsible and participatory notions of citizenship. Key obstacles to civic activities included partnerships with peers/adults, peers' reluctance to exercise civic duty, social-emotional factors, and lack of resources.
Journal Article
What Social Scientists Have Learned About Civic Education: A Review of the Literature
Historically there has been a relative dearth of social science research into civic education-even in political science, a discipline that had civic education as one of its founding objectives. This is partly due to the mistaken impression that civics instruction has no effect on civic and political participation, a conclusion that was once conventional wisdom but has since been refuted. More and more evidence has accumulated that well-designed civic education-both formal and informal-has meaningful, long-lasting effects on the civic engagement of young people. Existing research finds four aspects of schooling that affect civic learning and engagement: classroom instruction, extracurricular activities, service learning, and a school's ethos. Furthermore, state-level civics exams can positively affect knowledge about politics and government. The unifying theme that arises from this burgeoning literature is that effective civic education can compensate for a dearth of civic resources in the home and community. However, the renaissance of research into civic education is only just beginning, as more needs to be done. The existing data are too limited, and randomized studies are rare. Truly advancing our understanding of civic education will require a large-scale, multi-method, interdisciplinary effort.
Journal Article
The Door Was Always There
2021
In this practitioner research study, I explored how a pedagogy of multiliteracies supported the civic learning of eight middle and high school Indonesian American youth in a summer literacy program. Tracing how transnational youth face barriers to civic learning and engagement in times of rising inequality and xenophobia, I analyzed the ways in which program participants engaged with a curriculum featuring discussions of contemporary civic issues, transnational literary texts, and opportunities for expression. I found how, using their multiliteracies and border-crossing lives as resources, participants critiqued systemic issues hidden in everyday interactions, expressed the tensions of claiming transnational identities, and repurposed academic literacies to argue for civic justice. I name the affordances of using multiliteracies-oriented civic pedagogies that center the semiotic resources, identities, and experiences of transnational youth, as well as the civic openings that such learners themselves identify.
Journal Article
Transmitting leadership based civic responsibility: insights from service learning
by
Mohd Nasir Badlihisham
,
Miftachul, Huda
,
Mat Teh Kamarul Shukri
in
Citizen participation
,
Classrooms
,
Community service
2018
PurposeAs a fundamental notion of transmitting civic responsibility with leadership, preparing service learning into the transformative experiential education aims to link classroom and community as an initiative in transforming civic responsibility among students. This paper aims to examine the insights of service learning to transmit the civic responsibility-based leadership.Design/methodology/approachThis paper builds on recent reviews on ethical engagement for service learning to underlie in performing civic responsibility. This literature review stage critically investigates service learning for contributing leadership-based civic responsibility. In-depth analysis from referred books, journals and conferences using keywords such as service learning and leadership-based civic responsibility was conducted. Meta-synthesis was conducted from findings by searching for information organized using substantive keywords.FindingsThere are three core stages to understand and provide insight into the importance of civic responsibility-based leadership: strengthening commitment to work with a strategic plan in community engagement, nurturing creative thinking and professional skills with experiential leadership and enhancing leadership awareness with rational problem-solving. This study is supposed to contribute to the theoretical construction of civic responsibility with insights from service learning.Originality/valueCivic responsibility-based leadership is mainly seen as a comprehensive method of putting individual and societal basis in experiential learning. It aims to give insights to enhance the personal and social awareness to get involved in the community engagement by which to be the citizen with responsible essences.
Journal Article
American Precariat
Fifteen essays coedited by a collective of award-winning incarcerated writers, featuring contributions from Lacy M. Johnson, Kiese Laymon, Valeria Luiselli, Kao Kalia Yang, and more, with a foreword by Zeke Caligiuri and an introduction by Eula Biss. \"This is a volume edited by the imprisoned, because the history of class has always been written by the powerful.\"This groundbreaking anthology of essays edited by incarcerated writers takes a sharp look at the complexity and fluidity of class and caste systems in the United States. Featuring accounts that include gig work as a delivery driver, homelessness among trans youth, and life with immense student loan debt, in addition to transcripts of insightful discussions between the editors, American Precariat demonstrates how various and often invisible extreme instability can be. With the understanding that widespread recognition of collective precarity is an urgent concern, the anthology situates each individual portrait within societal structures of exclusion, scarcity, and criminality.These essays write through the silence around class to enumerate the risks that our material conditions leave us no choice but to take. A rendering of the present moment told from below, American Precariat shares stories of the unseen and the unspoken and articulates the lines of our division. In doing so, it offers healing for some of the world's fractures.
Future Cities
2025,2019
Bringstogether architecture, fiction, film, and visual art toreconnectthe imaginary city with the real, proposing a future for humanity that is firmly grounded in the present and the diverse creative practices already at our fingertips. Though reaching ever further toward the skies, today's cities are overshadowed by multiple threats: climate change, overpopulation, social division, and urban warfare all endanger our metropolitan way of life. The fundamental tool we use to make sense of these uncertain city futures is the imagination. Architects, artists, filmmakers, and fiction writers have long been inspired to imagine cities of the future, but their speculative visions tend to be seen very differently from scientific predictions: flights of fancy on the one hand versus practical reasoning on the other. In a digital age when the real and the fantastic coexist as near equals, it is especially important to know how these two forces are entangled, and how together they may help us best conceive of cities yet to come. Exploring a breathtaking range of imagined cities—submerged, floating, flying, vertical, underground, ruined, and salvaged— Future Cities teases out the links between speculation and reality, arguing that there is no clear separation between the two. In the Netherlands, prototype floating cities are already being built; Dubai's recent skyscrapers resemble those of science-fiction cities of the past; while makeshift settlements built by the urban poor in the developing world are already like the dystopian cities of cyberpunk.
Rhetorical Citizenship and Public Deliberation
2012
Citizenship has long been a central topic among educators, philosophers, and political theorists. Using the phrase “rhetorical citizenship” as a unifying perspective, Rhetorical Citizenship and Public Deliberation aims to develop an understanding of citizenship as a discursive phenomenon, arguing that discourse is not prefatory to real action but in many ways constitutive of civic engagement. To accomplish this, the book brings together, in a cross-disciplinary effort, contributions by scholars in fields that rarely intersect. For the most part, discussions of citizenship have focused on aspects that are central to the “liberal” tradition of social thought—that is, questions of the freedoms and rights of citizens and groups. This collection gives voice to a “republican” conception of citizenship. Seeing participation and debate as central to being a citizen, this tradition looks back to the Greek city-states and republican Rome. Citizenship, in this sense of the word, is rhetorical citizenship. Rhetoric is thus at the core of being a citizen. Aside from the editors, the contributors are John Adams, Paula Cossart, Jonas Gabrielsen, Jette Barnholdt Hansen, Kasper Møller Hansen, Sine Nørholm Just, Ildikó Kaposi, William Keith, Bart van Klink, Marie Lund Klujeff, Manfred Kraus, Oliver W. Lembcke, Berit von der Lippe, James McDonald, Niels Møller Nielsen, Tatiana Tatarchevskiy, Italo Testa, Georgia Warnke, Kristian Wedberg, and Stephen West.
Postapocalyptic fiction and the social contract
2010,2012
Postapocalyptic Fiction and the Social Contract: 'We'll Not Go Home Again' provides a framework for our fascination with the apocalyptic events. The popular appeal of the end of the world genre is clear in movies, novels, and television shows. Even our political debates over global warming, nuclear threats, and pandemic disease reflect a concern about the possibility of such events. This popular fascination is really a fascination with survival: how can we come out alive? And what would we do next? The end of the world is not about species death, but about beginning again. This book uses postapocalyptic fiction as a terrain for thinking about the state of nature: the hypothetical fiction that is the driving force behind the social contract. The first half of the book examines novels that tell the story of the move from the state of nature to civil society through a Hobbesian, a Lockean, or a Rousseauian lens, including Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank, Malevil by Robert Merle, and Into the Forest by Jean Hegland. The latter half of the book examines Octavia Butler's postapocalyptic Parable series in which a new kind of social contract emerges, one built on the fact of human dependence and vulnerability.