Opening discourses of citizenship education: a theorization with Foucault.

We argue two major difficulties in current discourses of citizenship education.
The first is a relative masking of student discourses of citizenship by positioning
students as lacking citizenship and as outside the community that acts. The second
is in failing to understand the discursive and material support for citizenship
activity. We, thus, argue that it is not a lack of citizenship that education research
might address, but identification and exploration of the different forms of citizenship
that students already engage in. We offer a fragmentary, poststructuralist
theorization oriented to explore the ‘contemporary limits of the necessary’, drawing
on specific resources from the work of Michel Foucault and others for the
constitution of local, partial accounts of citizenship discourses and activities, and
exploration of their possibilities and constraints. We argue this as a significant
tactic of theorization in support of an opening of discourses of citizenship and in
avoiding the discursive difficulties that we have identified. Our theorization,
then, is significant in its potential to unsettle discourses that confine contemporary
thought regarding citizenship education and support exploration of what
might be excessive to that confinement.