Politics, Participation &
Power Relations:
Transdisciplinary
Reflections
Richard C. Mitchell
Associate Professor
Child and Youth Studies Dept.
Brock University, ON, Canada
rmitchell@brocku.ca
University of Edinburgh and International Center for Education for Democratic
Citizenship 8th Annual Conference Presentation, IOE, University of London June, 2014
Aims of Presentation
•
Overview of Mitchell & Moore
(Eds. 2012; Mitchell, ‘child
citizenship’ 2015 chapter)
•
Discuss use of various
‘citizenship’ frameworks
informing research, pedagogy,
praxis
Research/Teaching Standpoint
• Publishing bottom-up, qualitative CRC
implementation projects [solely] since 96
• Former frontline child/youth mental health,
education, foster care, youth justice
• 2001-04 doc fellowship at Stirling investigated
UNCRC implementation autopoietically
within/across local/global educational systems
• 2004 Brock’s Child and Youth Studies as
UNCRC researcher, sociologist of childhood,
Freirean critical pedagogue
Genesis* for Mitchell & Moore 2012
• Brock student initiated 1st
campus-based Free the
Children chapter in 08-09
• *Study reviewed by Brock
University Research Ethics
Board (PI’s Moore/Mitchell
08-289)
Study: “Young People’s Citizenship: Local,
global or imaginary?”
• ‘What are critical issues for yp as they attempt
to exercise rights to participatory citizenship in
Canada and beyond?’
• Theorised local/global child/youth citizenship
opportunities through UNCRC, critical social
pedagogy and transdisciplinarity
Brock ‘global citizenship’ rally with
child rights activist
What is critical social pedagogy?
• Philosophy of education influenced by 20th
century Brazilian educator Paulo Freire
• Education is a political, moral practice providing
knowledge, skill, social relations that enable
students to explore what it means to be
engaged citizens expanding and deepening
their participation in the promise of a
substantive democracy
• See H. Giroux (2010, Lessons from Paulo Freire
http://www.truth-out.org/archive/item/93016:lessons-to-belearned-from-paulo-freire-as-education-is-being-taken-over-bythe-mega-rich/
Giroux & Searls-Giroux (2004:102)
argue
• Educators forced to work within academic
disciplines they can develop ‘transdisciplinary
tools’
• Used to challenge how knowledge is
hierarchically produced, to contest economic,
political, cultural conditions reproducing
inequities in society
• UNCRC is a TD tool argue Moore & Mitchell,
2012; also 2007a,b; 2011, 2012; Mitchell, 2013
What is transdisciplinarity?
• A global discourse in HE whose aim is transformation
linked w/complexity theory, concern with nonlinear
relationships and interactive causality, emergent
properties of systems
• Albrecht, Freeman & Higginbotham (1998) say TD is
critical, integrative, emergent philosophy underpinning
health, social sciences
• Now women’s/gender studies, climate change, traditional
and sustainability sciences adopting TD frameworks
• TD work is difficult, on the margins, based upon a politics
of inclusion, a priori assumption and awareness that
academics do not have monopoly on wisdom
UNCRC implementation in Canada?
• Canadian Senate Children: The Silenced
Citizens, exhaustive 3-yr international
comparative study (2005, 2007)
• ‘….in theory and in practice, children’s rights in
this country are not understood, or indeed
provided….’ (2005, Chair’s Forward)
• No mandatory teaching of UNCRC or citizenship
pedagogies = complete lack of knowledge in
many regions, ++ egregious violations of treaty
Citizenship in Canada?
• Constrained by racist 1876 ‘Indian Act’
British colonialism, assimilation efforts still
reverberating
• Restricted First Nations, Aboriginal, Inuit and
Métis first peoples, their children from
trading, land ownership, rights to vote until
1960, and to freely move about
• South African ‘apartheid’ system modeled on
Canadian ‘Indian Reserves’ (Cambre, 2007;
Saul, 2010; Mitchell, forthcoming)
Rich qualitative dataset
• Ethnographic methods, GT analytical framework of ‘constant
comparison’ of data to data, to legal, policy docs, to literature
• Included + 2-yr participant observations with campus- and
community-based students FTC group preparing for ‘Me to We’
event
• Campus rally drew 350 elementary-, high school- and universityaged students
• Key informant interviews w/adult and young people before, during,
after , including co-founder C. Kielburger
• 14-15 year-old co-authors for research paper (2011, Moore, et al)
• See Kincheloe & McLaren’s 2005 concept of critical qualitative
approach of Bricoleur (Mitchell, 2013 )
Who are the Kielburgers?
• Canada’s Free the Children begins mid-1990s w/
primary students Craig & Marc crusade against
exploitative child labour
• Controversial efforts threw +++1000s child carpet
weavers out of work in Pakistan, Bangladesh
• Appearances on BBC,CNN, Oprah Winfrey Show, 60
Minutes and Today Show, Time and The Economist
• Craig multiple Nobel Prize nominee
• Are they global citizens?
What is child citizenship?
• Previously ++ contested commensurate w/
widespread, globalised UNCRC implementation
• + International empiricism being driven by INGOs
• Legalistic critiques frequently centred on adultist
views of nation-state (Cohen, 2005; Kiwan, 2005;
Lawy & Biesta, 2006)
• Kiwan (2005, critiquing P. Alderson) argues improper
to ‘conflate’ UNCRC implementation w/citizenship
• Dutch-US sociologist Saskia Sassen (2008) identifies
emergent ‘global assemblage’ based rights (also
Harvard’s S. Pinker, 2011, why violence declining =
various rights revolutions)
•
Deep/wide, cross-systemic, transnational, global discourse
• Scot researchers Hill & Tisdall (1997: 21) ‘rights,
related concept of citizenship, constitute powerful
discourses
• Irish educator Devine (2002: 303) argues schoolbased citizenship teaching must account for power
relations and control issues impacting children’s
self-concept as citizens
• ++Proponents, detractors see Cockburn, (2008);
Invernizzi & William (2008); Isin & Turner (2007);
Jamieson et al., (2010); Lister (2007); Moosa-Mitha
(2005); Pupavac (2008); Roche (2008); Turner (1997);
Stasiulis (2002a, b) - also Mitchell (forthcoming)
Former Committee on the Rights of the Child
Chair Jaap Doek (2008: xvi)
• Citizenship eludes definition (except in narrow, technical
fields of nationality, immigration), is variable, contextual,
contested. Closely linked to, but not synonymous with,
rights, implicitly confers on children the status of subjects
• Many associate citizenship w/being national of a State
but there is no right to State nationality where you are
born
• Human rights treaties do not contain a “right to a
nationality” (let alone to nationality of choice), but
UNCRC Art. 7.1 “every child has the right to acquire a
nationality”
Aussie PhD study (Phillips, 2010)
• Looking at 5-6yr-old primary students’ “active citizenship”
through storytelling, social action she assesses
Kielburgers’ work critically
• Worries that young people from rich countries speaking
out for those in poor countries “raises potential neocolonialist appropriations of third world issues”
• Notes FTC members “empowered, knowledgeable,
compassionate and autonomous” (pp. 37-38)
• Citing C. Kielburger (1998: 75) “struggle against child
labour did not ‘begin in the west, but rather with
organisations such as CWA (Child Workers of Asia)’ ”
•
Free the Children now in 45 countries
• Partnering w/ c, yp as ‘agents of global
change’ in global north and south, FTC
provides comprehensive service learning,
active citizenship programmes
• +Academic criticism, Kielburgers present as
social entrepreneurs catapulting We Day
events into international children’s rights
network opening UK base in London, 2010
• 2010 Call for Chapters quickly yields 10
contributors from 6 nations on 4 continents
•
Cover Photo from web-based US
news outlet Truthout
• Requested contributors from India, China,
Australia, England, Canada, US to use critical
pedagogy and transdisciplinary frameworks,
• Diverse methodologies incl. education of girls in
caste system, x3 critical analyses of UNCRC in
English teacher ed and studetn CE programmes
• PhD study from China looking into CCP power
and influence on citizenship education in
Shenzhen City (near Shanghai)
• Excerpt from M & M (2012:200)
Who is Omar Khadr?
Canadian-born child soldier
• Egregious example of Canada’s ‘silenced citizens’ child
soldier shot twice in the back and partially blinded during
a 2002 Afghanistan firefight with US marines, who was
tortured and languished in the US prison camp in Cuba
until being repatriated in 2012
• See M. Shephard, 2008, Guantánamo’s Child: The
Untold Story of Omar Khadr, John Wiley & Sons,
Canada, Ltd.
• Canadian Supreme Court ordered repatriation, current
federal regime refused until after plea bargained ‘murder’
conviction extracted
Common TD dimensions (Brown, Harris, and Russell,
2010: 136-138)
• Neither discipline- nor hypothesis-driven, but problemdriven
• Holistic, multi-systemic methods, analyses of complex
datasets
• Post-normal science, skepticism that questions
disciplinary orthodoxy ala Thomas Kuhn (1970)
• Indigenous knowledge systems
• Civil society (NGOs) and marginalised groups as
knowledge partners
• Epistemologically reflexive i.e. one’s values, beliefs,
biases influencing research must be accounted for
Findings: local/global citizenship model
(M & M, 2012: 193)
And to conclude
• Using TD tools - i.e. UNCRC - allows opportunities for
child citizenship discursively, through research and
application locally/globally within systems in education,
mental and physical health, welfare and protection,
juvenile justice, etc.
• Paraphrasing James & Prout (1997: 8) and their
‘sociology of childhood paradigm’, the ‘double
hermeneutic of the social sciences’ is ‘acutely present’
in this discourse as well
• To proclaim ‘child as citizen’ is to both engage in and to
reconstruct all expressions of ‘citizenship’ in society’
Selected References
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Albrecht, G., Freeman, S. & Higginbotham, N. (1998). ‘Complexity and human health: The case for a
transdisciplinary paradigm’. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 22(1): 55–92.
Doek, J. E. (2008). Foreward. In A. Invernizzi, & J. William (Eds.), Children and citizenship (pp. xii-xvii).
London, Thousand Oaks, CA, New Delhi, Singapore: Sage Publications, Inc.
Giroux, H. A., & Searls Giroux, S. (2004). Take Back Higher Education: Race, youth and the crisis of
democracy in the post-civil rights era. New York: PalgraveMacmillan.
Kincheloe, J.L. & McLaren, P., ‘Rethinking critical theory and qualitative research’. In The Sage Handbook of
Qualitative Research (3rd ed.) ed. N.K. Denzin & Y.S. Lincoln (Thousand Oaks, London and New Delhi: Sage
Publications, 2005) 303–342.
Mitchell, R.C. & Moore, S.A. (Eds. 2012) Politics, Participation & Power Relations: Transdisciplinary
Approaches to Critical Citizenship in the Classroom and Community. Rotterdam, Boston and Taipei:
Sense Publishers.
Mitchell, R.C. (2013) ‘Reflections on the UNCRC from a Transdisciplinary Bricoleur’, Special Issue on
“The Future of Children’s Rights” in The International Journal of Children’s Rights 21(3): 510-522.
Mitchell, R.C. (forthcoming) ‘Re-theorising Child Citizenship through Transdisciplinarity: From local to
global’, pp. 1-21 in Vandenhole, W., Desmet, E., Reynaert, D. and Lembrechts S. (Eds. 2015) Routledge
Handbook on Children's Rights (Studies). London: Routledge Publishers.
Moore, S. A. &Mitchell, R. C. (Eds. 2008) Power, Pedagogy and Praxis: Social Justice in the Globalized
Classroom. Rotterdam, Boston and Taipei: Sense Publishers.
Pratt-Clarke, M. (2012) ‘A Black Woman’s Search for the Transdisciplinary Applied Social Justice Model:
Encounters with Critical Race Feminism, Black Feminism, and Africana Studies’. The Journal of Pan
African Studies, 5(1): 83-102.
Sassen, S. (2008). Territory, authority, rights: From medieval to global assemblages. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.