Excluded citizens? Participatory research with young people from a ‘failing’ school community

This paper examines a participatory community research project with young people from the ‘wrong side of the tracks’ in a provincial New Zealand town. This school-based project aimed to celebrate the expertise and insights of these young citizens by profiling their digital stories to their community. However, the failure to achieve this goal compelled the researcher to confront the ‘presentist’ assumptions underpinning this project. A re-analysis of the lingering impact of historic processes and practices of exclusion in this divided town drew attention to the temporal, spatial and relational nature of citizenship. The paper proposes that deeper recognition be given to the ‘webs of social relations’ (Arendt, Hannah. 1968. Between Past and Future: Eight Excercises in Political Thought. New York: Viking Press) that citizenship acts are constituted within, alongside the lingering impact of historical legacies of socio-spatial exclusion. Recognising these aspects will enrich our understandings of citizenship as well as enhance the transformative potential of participatory community research.     

The idea of freedom in the writings of non-Chalcedonian Christians in the fifth and sixth centuries

ABSTRACT

This article examines how Christians who had been deprived of the direct sponsorship of the state articulated their claims for political and religious freedom. I examine four cases from the fifth and sixth century in the Eastern Roman Empire and Sasanian Iran. Here I argue that Scriptural models provided an important reservoir of political ideas that could be used by clerics to undermine state authority, whether to underscore the conditional nature of Roman claims to authority or to deny an equality of religious freedom to non-Christian co-citizens.     

William Tell Militarism: The Swiss Model for Canada’s ‘Citizen Army’

Following Confederation in 1867, Canadians needed to move forward from their dependence on British imperial defence. Canadian militiaman Richard John Wicksteed was first to recommend adopting the model of the Swiss Army, a multi-ethnic, rifle-wielding citizen force powerful enough to ensure Swiss neutrality although surrounded by militaristic European powers. General Officer Commanding Edward Thomas Henry Hutton later proposed the Swiss model for a Canadian ‘National Army,’ echoed by Militia Minister Frederick Borden. In 1917, Colonel William Hamilton Merritt was the final advocate, drawn especially to the notion of equality in Switzerland’s universal military training programme. By this time, however, the Great War had changed concepts of Canada’s military needs from a reliance upon the defence-oriented citizen soldier to a more highly trained, expeditionary military force.