ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the ways in which black women’s participation as both mothers and educators sheds new light on traditional conceptualisations of citizenship. First, it is argued that their active engagement in black supplementary schools demonstrates the paradoxical relationship between individual educational achievement and collective community commitment that characterises black female citizenship. Second, in their gendered/ racialised version of citizenship the women combine their social capital and emotional capital skills of resourcefulness and networking, enabling them to become collective transformative agents. Finally, the women’s radical forms of ‘giving back’ and quest for educational desire open up a ‘third space’ of strategic engagement. This ‘third space’ has hitherto remained invisible as the traditional gaze on the public and private dichotomy in current citizenship theorising has obscured ‘other ways of knowing’ and thus ‘other ways of being’ a citizen.
