ABSTRACT
The question of what it means to be a learner and a citizen has become rapidly individualized in Ireland in recent decades. Policy emphases on individual responsibility, marketization, and securitization have wreaked havoc on the development of anti-racist education solidarity with racially minoritized communities. But at the same time, internationally there are new, fluid affiliations and resurgent understandings and contestations of the relationship between rights to education, to formal political citizenship, and to civil rights, such as freedom of speech and association (Marshall 2009). The goal of this chapter is to outline a political philosophy of citizenship in the Irish context, particularly in the sphere of formal education, that deeply engages questions of racisms, anti-racist resistance, and plurality. The chapter examines everyday racisms and anti-racisms in Irish education settings themselves as practices and acts of learner-citizenship. The purpose of this analysis is to understand the most mundane, everyday work that racially minoritized learners do to belong, to articulate erased identities, to claim spaces, to resist racisms, and to engage plurality as significant, necessary forms of civic action that can affirmatively challenge institutionalized racisms.
