Across European and numerous other nations, a growing body of education policy purports to foster active citizens who have the capacity to ensure their own social, economic and democratic participation as well to contribute to an improved social, economic and democratic fabric at local, national, regional and global levels. These purposes are also reflected in the pedagogical practices of many schools, whether through formal citizenship education programs supported by policy or more grassroots initiatives developed by individual schools to meet their own local purposes.

Particularly when these policies and practices are applied to working-class young people living on the edges - literally or metaphorically – of the social and economic centres where opportunity is created and distributed, they represent a curious combination of purposes.

On the one hand, they promote a relatively new educational discourse that constructs young people as globally conscious, reflexive and mobile citizens. On the other, they reflect and reinforce a much older educational discourse that constructs youth as a state of transition or becoming, a state in which young people are waiting to become full citizens and members of society. In Kelly’s words, this discourse constructs youth as “principally about becoming: becoming an adult, becoming a citizen, becoming independent, becoming autonomous, becoming mature and becoming responsible” (2011, p.48). Even more fundamentally, it constructs the young person as being in a state of “waiting to become his/her true self” (Bansel, 2007, p.299), a self that is proposed to be realised only with the attainment of a normative adulthood.

Such educational discourses, and the educational practices they authorise, create deeply ambiguous experiences for young people who are already bearing the brunt of the precarity brought by globalisation, the policies of austerity and residual forms of localised and structural disadvantage.

This paper draws on the emerging scholarship of emotional geography (e.g. Davidson et al 2005) to suggest that the construction of youth citizenship within education policy and practice overlooks the contradictory, socio-spatial experiences of locality and mobility, and of inclusion and exclusion, which continue to attend the lives of young people in low socioeconomic communities. 

Bansel, P. (2007). Subjects of choice and lifelong learning. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 20(3), 283–300. Bauman, Z. (2000). Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Beck, U. (1992). Risk society: towards a new modernity Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications. Davidson, J., Bondi, L., & Smith, M. (2005). Emotional Geographies. Hampshire: Ashgate. Kelly, P. (2011). An untimely future for youth studies? Youth Studies Australia, 30(3), 47-53.