Julian Culp
New Article on Multicultural Education for Transnational Democratic Citizenship

New Article on Multicultural Education for Transnational Democratic Citizenship

Published in Journal of Philosophy of Education. Abstract: On Will Kymlicka’s conception of multicultural citizenship, group membership enables personal autonomy by way of providing individuals with meaningful options. Many educational and political theorists have employed Kymlicka’s argument to defend a multicultural education as proper preparation for democratic citizenship in socially diverse liberal societies. Multicultural education includes the study of a variety of cultures and is meant to promote the development of a cultural identity, inter-cultural empathy and tolerance, and the cross-cultural construction of shared positions. Recently, however, Elizabeth Anderson has challenged multicultural citizenship and education on the grounds that they lead to the formation of group-specific biases, stereotypes, and inequalities in cultural and social capital. Therefore, she proposes an integrationist conception of citizenship education that requires citizens from different groups to collaborate within educational and public contexts. This article takes issue with the nationalist framing of this debate and Anderson’s integrationist conception because they neglect how large-scale social transformations like economic globalization and global governance have generated the need for transnationalizing democracy and democratic citizenship. Adopting a transnational perspective, this article ascribes an important role to multicultural education for learning the attitudes, knowledge, and skills that empower citizens to exercise democratic control both across and beyond national borders. The article emphasizes how the formation of intercultural empathy through multicultural education facilitates engagement in transnational social movements and political discourses. Finally, the article responds to objections concerning the lack of feasibility, cosmopolitan bias, and counter-productiveness of multicultural education and transnational democratic citizenship.

New Special Issue What Demos and Kratos for the 21st Century?

New Special Issue What Demos and Kratos for the 21st Century?

Echoes of the ancient Greek terms demos and kratos have been resounding among democratic theorists in recent years . The return to these ancient words connotes both a growing dissatisfaction with our democratic present and an unflagging hope that democracy and democratic theory still have much to offer. In search of notions that stretch beyond modern European and American (in the broadest sense) experiments with liberal democracy and even post-Cold War democratization, employment of these expressions has shed new light on and profoundly reframed pressing political questions. These include the nature of popular participation, scales of citizenship and political belonging, as well as the place of the European and Atlantic experience in our democratic future. While historians of ancient Greece have convincingly argued that a better understanding of both demos and kratos may illuminate democracy in the past and present , contemporary interest in demos, demoi, and kratos have implicitly pushed democratic theorizing to investigate novel forms of popular rule. By explicitly placing these terms at the center of its investigation, this special issue seeks to offer an early perspective on some principal directions of democratic theory beyond the post-Cold War imaginary.