Teaching Collective Action: Strategies for Fostering Racial and Social Justice

Universities teach students about social problems but provide few concrete tools for acting to promote social change. Teaching about challenges but not about possible solutions can be potentially disempowering and may reduce civic agency. This chapter discusses the development of a required class on community organizing and civil resistance that provides students with specific strategies for engaging in collective action. The author explores a range of tensions involved in teaching this class: making it experiential without forcing students to work on issues or take steps they might not agree with, providing multiple traditions of social action so they do not get the sense that there is one “right” way, working with students whose perspectives might differ from ones he sees as legitimate, and teaching a class that some outside the institution might see as beyond the purview of a university. Ultimately, he argues that it is incumbent upon universities to provide concrete skills for social action, because failing to do so restricts their capacity to become effective civic actors in our democracy.

The Place of Civil Society in the Creation of Knowledge

This interdisciplinary volume addresses the relations between civil society and knowledge from a social, institutional, and spatial perspective. As knowledge and civil society are co-constitutive (any voluntary civic agency would seem to require a minimum of knowledge and the kinds of civic agency shape the production and use of knowledge), we approach their relationship from two viewpoints: (a) what we know and how we think about the civil society shapes our action in it; (b) the particular relations between knowledge and civil society shape how knowledge in civil society becomes actionable. Adhering to the first imperative, we should carefully reflect and occasionally reconsider our assumptions about civil society. In line with the second imperative, we should carefully distinguish the ways in which civil society impacts knowledge. These range from knowledge creation, its interpretation, and its influence on societal and political discourses to its dissemination through civil society.

Cultivating Inclusion: Belonging and Agency in Young Black Men through Civic Action Research

This paper examines how community-based civic action research can cultivate civic engagement, civic belonging, and shifts in civic stakeholders’ perceptions of racially and economically minoritized youth’s civic agency. Specifically, this paper examines the implementation of Youth, Research and Plan (YRP) – a community-based research methodology that cultivates equitable relationships between schools, cities, and communities by situating disenfranchised youth and their schools at the center of civic and urban planning – in a unique academic program focused on the development of Black manhood and achievement in a public high school. Using a Critical Race Theoretical application of Communities of Practice and drawing on qualitative data gathered over the course of two years, we show how YRP was instrumental in the development of three interrelated communities of practice that supported the youth’s academic endeavors and civic agency and yielded important shifts in civic stakeholders’ perceptions of and relations with Black urban youth.

Temporary Art Platform and the Reconfiguration of the Public Space in Beirut

The main objective of this article is to understand the ways in which Lebanese artists are dealing with issues of normativity and legibility while operating in public spaces. By looking at the work developed by Temporary Art Platform (TAP) during the last ten years, I argue that public art has been crucial in the production of alternative understandings of civic agency and the public space. Simultaneously, by looking at A Few Things You Need to Know When Creating an Art Project in a Public Space in Lebanon, a toolkit designed by TAP in 2014, I intend to problematize the lexicon and strategies that are usually associated with understanding art activism, both as forcefully contextual and provisional.

The Enigma of Commoning in Precarious Times: A Critical Perspective on Social Transformation

The article explores movements for social transformation in precarious times of austerity, dispossessed commons, and narrow nationalism. The authors contribute to social theory by linking questions by critics of “post-politics” to precarity studies on changing conditions of citizenship, labour and livelihoods. They discuss an ambiguous constitution of precariat movements in the borderlands between “civil” and “uncivil” society and “invited” and “invented” spaces for civic agency, and posit that contending movements of today are drawing intellectual energy from past movements for democracy, recognition and the common. The paper discusses the issue of an urban justice movement in Sweden emerging from the precariat in this formerly exceptionalist welfare state’s most disadvantaged urban areas. With its vision of reconstructing commons with roots in the working class movement, it has put forward claims for an egalitarian and non-racial democracy while confronting politically grounded frames of institutional conditionality.

Diasporic Civic Agency and Participation: Inclusive Policy-Making and Common Solutions in a Dutch Municipality

With a growing presence in The Hague municipality, the sub-Sahara African diasporas like other minority groups face challenges related to integration, participation, representation, and social exclusion. The majority still find difficulties with the Dutch language, with access to education, the labour market, and public services. These concerns also inform initiatives by the municipality in search of joint solutions through citizen participation with the African diasporas. Equally, African diasporas engage in formal and informal initiatives targeting decision-maker in The Hague, seeking to reverse their sense of vulnerability and social exclusion in the city. Using data gathered through ethnographic fieldwork in The Hague from 2015 to 2017, this article examines how African diaspora organisations have sought to exercise their civic agency and to influence policy-making to become more inclusive, by proposing common solutions and collective initiatives. The aim is to understand how diaspora collective initiatives are informed by notions of civic agency, and how prospects can be generated for diasporas to secure the ‘right to have rights’ and ensure that the host municipality addresses concerns related to the diasporas’ exclusion. The concept of civic agency is also used to analyse dynamics influencing diasporic activities, the broader context of diaspora engagement, and some likely socio-political outcomes. I argue that collective diasporic initiatives are broadly aimed at ensuring more inclusive policy-making and that solutions are an expression of diasporic people’s collective energy and imagination. These collective initiatives demonstrate the significance of enacted citizenship in challenging broader conditions of social and economic exclusion that the African diasporas face in host municipalities like The Hague.