ABSTRACT
From the modernist education project, through regionalism to border crossing The difficulties in constructing a meaningful citizenship framework around both the one nation and global citizenship ideas multiply when imported into educational ideologies and policies. The origins and contours of citizenship education’s current lack of direction and relevance can be traced to the sorts of huge shifts in ideas about education, citizenship, nation and community and the relationship between these that we have seen over the past century. A historico-spatial perspective helps us to appreciate the importance of place (as site, resource, territory and positionality) to the identity and action aspects of citizenship. It reveals how citizenship ideas are connected to particular sets of circumstances and geopolitical or ideological change. It underscores the truth that while “computer networks and capital are global, the people are local”, and thus, also, arguments in favour of “localization (. . . as) a radical alternative to neoliberal globalization” (Stevenson, 2011:68). And finally, it sheds light on the way that action and identity frameworks are shaped by the new mechanisms by which they are drawn and redrawn.
