ABSTRACT
This chapter returns to his arguments about young people's engagement and activism and push them outward beyond the schoolyard to the possibility of rights, civic empowerment, and different notions of citizenship. It also focuses on the sense that local spaces are as important in understanding new immigrants' civic participation as are community and family dynamics. The author wants to situate the work and advocacy of women and children within a larger context of citizenship and difference elaborated through feminist theory. Jane Flax weaves a concern for a reduction of relations of dominance with a post-structural concern for the play and poetics of difference to argue against objective and mechanistic legal practices. There is a fundamental distinction in how people understand the rights that children have under law and how people understand their moral rights. Legal rights are determined judicially and factually through court records.
