Citizenship Foundation Voices

For the last two years the Foundation has been working with The British Council to launch a new international programme called ‘Active Citizens’.

This got going in earnest towards the end last year. Xenia Davis and I travelled to Bangladesh and Pakistan to help train the first set of trainers there: around 35 in each country.

I discovered today that since last November when we went there the training has been cascaded down to nearly six thousand people! There are now around 350 new social action programmes beginning all over those two countries - in busy urban to remote rural settings.

The programme uses simple principles developed over the years at the Citizenship Foundation. It helps people connect their experience of growing up in a particular culture with the issues that they would like to change. They then consider the decision-making structures in their area, and what they might do to raise awareness of the problem. Through their own collective action and through talking to policy makers they work towards a solution.

Participants in countries around the world will use the basis of this social action project to develop dialogue with each other.

In June I am going to Croatia to help to establish the European element of the programme, which is already alive in Southern Africa as well as Central Asia. Something like 15 European countries are expected to attend and start using the methods we have helped devise for the British Council.

On a personal level I’m still adjusting to the fact that 6,000 people across Asia have been using session ideas that I dreamt up to stimulate local and global citizen actions. Modesty aside, I’m told people love them! After 35 years of writing songs, I’ve finally had a hit…

I was struck by the clear distinction between these two terms in the article by Zygmunt Bauman in the new Demos / V publication ‘An Anatomy of Youth’.

In his article ‘Belonging in the age of networks’ he differentiates the essence of these two terms. In short, he suggests that a community is more normally a group that you have membership of regardless of personal choice, and that you can’t easily drop out of… e.g. the locality that you grew up in, or your extended family etc. Such communities are often crucial in your identity-formation - often because you didn’t get the chance to avoid them: you were formed in the crucible of their personal and cultural forces whether you liked it or not. By contrast ‘networks’ are nearly always opted into for personal benefit of some sort. Their subject or identity appeals to you, and your choice to affiliate will more likely relate to your ‘chosen’ identity than the one that you developed like it or not.

So ‘social networks’ and ‘communities’ are not then synonymous. The former can be lightly entered into, tested, adopted to various degrees as suits you, and opted out of again. The choices remain your own, and by inference, their ability to ‘form’ you is slight as you can resist their force and take your avatar and mouse elsewhere if you don’t like the way it’s going.

By contrast ‘communities’ can’t be avoided. You have to stay with them, learn to negotiate and manage your way through them. Communities have politics where networks have cultures. I use those phrases carefully. Of course, communities have cultures as well as politics, but the words I want to stress here are ‘negotiate’ and ‘manage’. These two words are at the heart of politics. Politics is the activity of negotiating and managing the social order into the preferred version of members of an organised community (my definition). We need politics precisely because we can’t opt out. But we can opt out of networks.

What’s critical here is that we recognise the role of social networks in politics. They are not communities of the same order and they are not the place to learn politics through simply being a member. By contrast, school is. You can’t avoid school, and it is indeed a crucible of personal and social formation, not just a place of education.

Social networks can be a place for amplifying preferred choices into a consolidated force for action in the way that members choose. In this way they can be a great force for political intervention. But we shouldn’t revere then as an equivalent of ‘real’ communities. Young people in social networks are not learning politics by virtue of being members. Perhaps it’s time to be uncool and mention that…

The other night I went to Education Unbound 2008, a debate on ‘how social technologies are blurring formal and informal learning‘. The panel comprised Dan Sutch (Futurelab), David Noble (Hillside School, Fife), Andy Gibson (School of Everything) and Catherine Howell (Centre for Applied Research in Educational Technologies). It was chaired by Matt Locke, Commissioning Editor at Channel 4.

As a 50.0 year-old I’m not particularly attuned to the finer points of web 2, so this took a while to assimilate, but some points stuck out that were particularly significant for citizenship. (more…)

It is often said that today’s young people are turned on to causes but turned off from politics. Except of course, the disaffected. They are neither turned on to causes nor drawn to politics. What’s worse they may have absolutely no sense of the connection between causes, politics and their own life, because except for the microcosm of their own experience, someone else ‘owns’ society: makes the rules, enforces them… and appears to leave them out. (more…)