Lynette Shultz

Ali A. Abdi

Essays that highlight the role of education in bringing about inclusive citizenship and human rights norms.

Educating for Human Rights and Global Citizenship

Ali A Abdi

Thashika Pillay

The ideas for this reader came out of a conference organized through the Centre for Global Citizenship Education and Research (CGCER) at the University of Alberta in 2013. With the high expansion of global citizenship education scholarship in the past 15 or so years, and with most of this scholarship produced in the west and mostly focused on the citizenship lives of people in the so-called developing world, or selectively attempting to explain the contexts of marginalized populations in the west, the need for multidirectional and decolonizing knowledge and research perspectives should be clear. Indeed, the discursive as well as the practical constructions of current global citizenship education research cannot fulfill the general promise of learning and teaching programs as social development platforms unless the voices of all concerned are heard and validated. With these realities, this reader is topically comprehensive and timely, and should constitute an important intervention in our efforts to create and sustain more inclusive and liberating platforms of knowledge and learning. This collection of cutting-edge theoretical contributions examines citizenship and neo-liberal globalization and their impacts on the nexus of the local and global learning, production of knowledge, and movements of people and their rights. Case studies in the collection also provide in-depth analysis of lived experiences that challenge the constructed borders, which derive from colonial and imperial re-structuring of the contemporary world and nation-states. The contributors articulate agency in terms of both resistance and proactive engagement toward the construction of an alternative world, which acknowledges equality, justice and common humanity of all in symbiosis with the social and natural environment. It is a valuable reader for students, scholars, practitioners, and activists interested in the empowering possibilities of decolonized global citizenship education. N Dr

Decolonizing Global Citizenship Education

Nearly sixty years after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in spite of progress on some fronts, we are in many cases as far away as ever from achieving an inclusive citizenship and human rights for all. While human rights violations continue to affect millions across the world, there are also ongoing contestations regarding citizenship. In response to these and related issues, the contributors to this book critique both historical and current practices and suggest several pragmatic options, highlighting the role of education in attaining these noble yet unachieved objectives. This book represents a welcome addition to the human rights and global citizenship literature and provides ideas for new platforms that are human rights friendly and expansively attuned toward global citizenship. Book jacket.

Tania Kajner

This volume brings together diverse theoretical reflections and practices of community engaged scholarship in order to stimulate critical discussion, deepen theory, and invite critical practice. It is an international trend that higher education institutions and agencies are encouraging and promoting community engagement. At the same time, there is recognition of a lack of consistent definitions and understandings of what it is they are promoting. As a counterweight to the dominance of pragmatic and technical discussions in the literature on engaged scholarship, the chapters in this book shift the discourse to ask foundational questions that emphasize the political nature of engagement. Recognizing that acts of engagement are never neutral, the authors in this book explore how engaged scholarship requires decision-making that is inherently grounded in values, beliefs, and interpretations of what is and what ought to be. Alongside complex global and local social movements rising to address issues, for example climate change or the global financial collapse and the uneven consequences of these globalized problems, we see corresponding concerns expressed about the limited participation by excluded, silenced, and invisibilized people throughout the world. How can engaged scholarship be mobilized and who will it serve within such contexts? With contributions covering such diverse topics as a non-binary approach to engagement; citizenship of knowledge; university contexts and corporatization; stranger pedagogies and anti-foundational approaches to service learning; contemporary revolutionary movements in the Arab world; and transforming higher education through Africanist onto-epistemologies, this volume is poised to open the door to a deeper understanding of engaged scholarship.

Lynette Shultz

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