ABSTRACT
Resource mal-distribution conflicts, including exploitation of the earth’s environment, are escalating. Experienced directly by local citizens, these conflicts often involve indirect transnational social structures that are masked from view and left unquestioned. The symptoms and anxieties arising from such social conflicts over resources and environmental (un)health are especially vivid in the lives of nonaffluent youth. Democratic citizenship and governance can—but often do not—address such conflicts inclusively, equitably, nonviolently, and transnationally. Similarly, citizenship learning opportunities in schools can—but often do not—connect youth’s lived experiences of resource conflicts with analysis of these conflicts’ transnational social-structural causes, consequences, and influential actors. This chapter examines the lived citizenship perspectives of economically marginalized youth, and their experienced classroom curriculum, in state-funded schools in economically marginalized areas in the Global South (México) and Global North (Canada). Students’ understandings of the environmental and economic resource conflicts they have experienced locally are discussed, as well as what students believe citizens like themselves could do to mitigate or transform the roots of those conflicts. Perspectives from students and teachers about social conflicts in which tangible material (resource) interests are prominent clearly illustrate the disjuncture between narrow neoliberal-individualist and broader critically global-minded dimensions of (peacebuilding) citizenship education.
