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Contemporary Citizenship: Four Types
Get PDFThe paper begins with an examination of three ideal types citizenship which are not necessarily mutual exclusive. The first type is national citizenship, typically associated with ethno-nationalism. The second form is social citizenship or ‘welfare citizenship’ refers to the creation of social rights and is closely connected to civil-society institutions rather than to the state or market. The third form of citizenship identifies the citizen with participation in the work force emphasizing self-reliance and autonomy. In this discussion, I argue that with economic globalization and the development of neo-liberal strategies the various forms of citizenship have converged towards a new model of passive citizenship in which the state is or has withdrawn from commitment to full employment and the provision of social security, especially universal provision of welfare services, and civil-society institutions have been eroded. The result is the emergence of the apolitical,isolated citizen as consumer. The fourth model of citizenship presupposes a consumer society, a weak state and the decline of civic institutions, where the passive citizen becomes a consumer of privatized goods and services. The rise of a fourth model of citizenship – the consumer-citizen – can be interpreted as a logical consequence of financialization.1
1 Some aspects of this chapter first appeared in Bryan S. Turner (2010), ‘Ralf Dahrendorf on Citizenship and Life Chances’, Citizenship Studies, 14 (2): 237–43
A Commonwealth Princess? The Instrumentalisation of Meghan Markle’s Race to Construct Her Royal Persona
Get PDFPrior to the Sussexes’ departure from their roles as senior royals, there was a significant attempt to construct for the Duchess of Sussex the persona of the “Commonwealth Princess”. There were two main purposes to this persona. The first was to use both the Duke and Duchess of Sussex and their popularity to leverage a more modern face to monarchy in the Commonwealth. The second purpose, stemming from this, was to maintain and strengthen contemporary relations with Commonwealth nations. Markle’s biracial identity was an important part of this strategy and persona as it became a means to connect to colonised people of colour
Playable Personas: Using Games and Play to Expand the Repertoire of Learner Personas
Get PDFThis article explores how playing and co-creating games in higher education contexts contributes to expanding learner personas and facilitating a multimodal learning experience. Working from the interdisciplinary perspectives of media/games studies, pedagogy, and linguistic anthropology, we conceptualize in-class learning as the making and playing of games, reporting on game experiments and playful practices targeted at learning key theoretical concepts in our disciplines. Game-based modifications to established educational practices involved: replacing lectures with Educational Live Action Role Play (Bowman 2014) sessions, using acting/performance games (Flanagan 2009) to critically reflect on ideas of community and collective identity, and introducing Twine (Werning 2017; Wilson & Saklofske 2019) to defamiliarize the expected structures and media modalities of academia. Based on evidence from participant reflections and classroom ethnographies, we argue that games can serve as a resource for extending the expressive spectrum of learner personas, for enabling embodied, participatory learning of theory, and for empowering students and educators to reflect on our internalized rules of the game of education
Positioning in Personal Games: Perspectives of the Author-Player Persona in Memoir En Code: Reissue
Get PDFIn creating autobiographical narratives through games, there exists a new theoretical problem in the game-player tension: how may a game creator relate their own story through a medium that relies primarily on another (the player) to execute? The blurring and shifting lines between the game creator and player resemble the same death knell Roland Barthes sounds for the literary Author in “La mort de l’auteur” (1967). This paper proposes a more nuanced theory for understanding the ‘player positioning’ of autobiographical games with a triangulated framework. The player position is a player/author persona collaboration that facilitates a shared presence in the game space through various ratios of three positions: the player as the protagonist, protagonist-proxy, and witness. Through a close reading of the autobiographical game Memoir En Code: Reissue by Alex Camilleri, the paper explores how the player may perceive the autobiographical game. Viewed through the protagonist, protagonist-proxy, and witness lens, the paper interrogates how the player position alters the nature of player-author identity within the game. It offers an approach for considering how the different perspectives of the author-player persona offer meaningful game(play), and argues for the shifting presentation of the author-player persona as an effective negotiation of a shared experience in the design of autobiographical games
South African specific complexities in aligning graduate attributes to employability
Get PDFSouth African higher education (HE) cannot be compared to any other country’s HE systems due to the unique political landscape and structural narrative that it has undergone. Subsequent to the reorganisation of HEIs in 2004, a number of complexities arose. These included accessibility to education across race and the alignment of the South African HEIs to global pedagogic benchmarks. With the changing political landscape, transformations within higher education, socio economic inequities and changes in the workplace, researchers failed to cognize the impact of these factors on graduate employability. Changing graduate attributes to align with a decolonised curriculum and Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) workspaces were transiently underway when COVID-19 set a new narrative for the future of employability. This paper seeks to identify the impact of workplace changes and its direct influence on successful graduate employment and integration into the HE curriculum. The work environment has cursorily moved from 4IR to an advanced stage of the 4IR, where there is a full emphasis on digitisation, non-localised workspaces and is an ostensible playground for digital natives (Generation Z). This paper provides a systematic review of literature in the South African HE contexts that pertains to graduate attributes for employability within the workplace. The adoption of malleable secondary data will allow for an understanding of the relationship between changing workplace environments and expectations from graduates. This correlation is directly linked to graduate attributes which students need to comply with from year one. The paper will provide context to changes which are required for the future success of graduates, and whether graduate attributes are adequate preparation for employability. A clinical model is recommended with an intervention to manage the risk factors of decolonisation of curriculum, the 4IR and multi-generational workplace and responses to COVID-19
Reclaiming Citizenship in the Post-Democratic Condition
Get PDFThis article reviews the central problematique of citizenship, arguing that the challenges imposed by neoliberal globalisation involve the loss of political, social and civil rights. By negating the mediations performed by citizenship between the people and the state, post-democracy renders citizenship meaningless. The article traces two main responses to this, a reactionary and a progressive one, none of which can address the problems of citizenship. The grains of a new response are found in three developments: a new ontology of the citizen, brought into being through digital acts; the existence of dual power, creating new forms of governance and social reproduction from below; and between these, the development of new procedures that directly engage with state power. Taken together, these considerations indicate a new possibility for the radicalisation of citizenship rather than a return to the former state of affairs
A Sporting Chance: Class in Markus Zusak’s The Messenger and Fighting Ruben Wolfe
Get PDFThe final decades of the twentieth century saw a shift in popular attitudes to class. Class location came to be viewed as a product of individual merit and self-responsibility, obscuring the role played by social structure and power. As a consequence, social disadvantage has come to be variously attributed to a poverty of civic values in poor communities, or to the failures and flaws of character of individuals. This ideological inflection of class promotes a culture of blame by endorsing the notion of an undeserving poor and a perception of the working poor, the unemployed and never employed as 'Other' to the middle class. As such, class oppression is not simply a question of economics, but class prejudice and its effects. The question this paper asks is, to what extent do Markus Zusak's young adult novels, 'Fighting Ruben Wolfe' (2000) and 'The Messenger' (2002), reflect and contest such understandings of those living on the social margins? To answer this question, this paper focuses on the interrelationship between the characters' class consciousness and the potential for individual agency
Postcolonial Transformation and Traditional Australian Indigenous Story
Get PDFPublished in 1964, 'The Legends of Moonie Jarl', told by Wilf Reeves and illustrated by his sister Olga Miller, marked a new direction in Australia's literary history. My examination of the history of traditional Australian Indigenous stories for children has established the first publication by an Indigenous author and illustrator in this genre as earlier than previously thought. As a research fellow in 2004, I assessed approximately 300 Indigenous and non-Indigenous representations in this genre.' The Legends of Moonie Jarl' is important not only as the turning point in Australia's literary history for a child readership, but also in the unique way this picture book challenges colonial assumptions and transforms reader perceptions of Aboriginality and traditional culture. In this paper I analyse the textual and visual strategies employed in the first story map in this collection within the context of postcolonial literary theory. This new reading of an old text is informed by an outline of the historical and social parameters which led to its publication
Understanding Memetic Media and Collective Identity Through Streamer Persona on Twitch.tv
Get PDFVideo game livestreamers on the leading platform Twitch.tv present a carefully curated version of themselves - negotiated in part via interactions with their viewers - resulting in collectively performed personas centred around individual streamers. These collective personas emerge from a combination of live performance, platform features including streamer-specific emoticons and audiovisual overlays, the games that streamers play, and how they play them. In this paper, I interrogate how these elements culminate in a feedback loop between individual streamers and non-streamer participants, specifically how platform features mediate and facilitate interactions between users. I also examine streaming persona as both a product and expression of this dynamic and the subsequent emergence of streamer-based social arrangement and collective value systems. I do this with particular attention to how memes operate uniquely within the livestreaming mode