Cities and Citizens

Clarissa Hayward

Much--arguably most--of our civic education takes place outside the classroom: in the neighborhoods, in the civic associations, in the city streets where we live, learn, and practice our citizenship. “Cities and Citizens” is the working title for a book-length study of the educative processes, broadly conceived, through which actors--from democratic state actors to ordinary citizens--define both democratic citizenship and its “others.” The study will address three questions. First, how do political actors define the civic “we”? Second, how do they form their conceptions of their political needs and interests? Third, how--that is, through what practical and institutional changes--can they do so in ways that are more democratic? The central conceptual problem that motivates this study is a political theoretical one. I plan to make the case that there is an important, yet largely overlooked, tension inherent in the normative ideal called “democratic citizenship”: a tension between, on the one hand, norms of democratic inclusiveness, and on the other, civic ideals of public-regarding politics motivated by identification with a tightly bounded political community. Producing and reproducing citizen-identities involves negotiating this tension. Although the central problem the study addresses is a problem in political theory, the project is relevant to the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation’s concerns, because I will address this question via careful on-the-ground analyses of the educative processes through which political actors produce and maintain their citizen-identities. Drawing on in-depth case studies of practices of citizenship in the American city--one key site where people learn their civic identities--Cities and Citizens will develop accounts of both the constriction of definitions of civic belonging through processes of racialization, and the privatization of citizens’ understandings of their interests and needs. A work of politically engaged and practically oriented political philosophy, it will inform creative thinking about how to transform extant definitions of political membership in order to render them more democratically inclusive and more responsive to the claims of the “others” they produce.

About Clarissa Hayward

Clarissa Rile Hayward is a Political Theorist on the faculty in Political Science at Ohio State University. She specializes in contemporary political theory. Her research and teaching interests include democratic theory; theories of identity, power, and justice; urban politics; and political aspects of education. Hayward’s first book, De-facing Power (Cambridge University Press, 2000), analyzes power relations in the classroom and the school, advancing an argument about how to conceptualize and to study power. Her current work centers on questions of political membership and belonging. It explores, through a focus on city life, both the ways in which boundaries defining political communities are demarcated, maintained, and legitimized, and the ways in which social actors learn and practice democratic citizenship. Her National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral project is a book-length study tentatively titled “Cities and Citizens.” It will use in-depth case studies of informal civic educative processes in the contemporary city to gain insights into how people form and maintain their civic identities.