Lived citizenship as the locus of political agency in participatory policy |
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Authors: | Kirsi Pauliina Kallio Jouni Häkli Pia Bäcklund |
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Affiliation: | Space and Political Agency Research Group (SPARG), Centre of Excellence in Research on the Relational and Territorial Politics of Bordering, Identities and Transnationalization (RELATE), University of Tampere, Academy of Finland, 33014 Tampere, Finland |
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Abstract: | Participatory policies seeking to foster active citizenship continue to be dominated by a territorial imagination. Yet, the world where people identify and perform as citizens is spatially multifarious. This article engages with the tension between territorially grounded perceptions and relational modes of practicing political agency. Studying empirically the Finnish child and youth policies, we address jointly the participatory obligations that municipalities strive to fulfill, and the spatial attachments that children and young people establish in their lived worlds. To this end, we introduce the concept of lived citizenship as an interface where the territorially-bound public administration and the plurality of spatial attachments characteristic to transnational living may meet. We conclude by proposing a re-grounding of lived citizenship in both topological and topographical terms as an improvement in theoretical understanding of mundane political agency and as a step towards more proficient participatory policies. |
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Keywords: | lived citizenship topology topography participation political agency public administration child and youth policy |
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