This vital collection offers fresh insight into the nature of citizen engagement. Challenging liberal and universalist framings of democratic participation, the authors focus on peoples everyday habits, practices and experiences of cooperation for livelihoods and survival. Citizenship is repositioned as a gradual, learned and contextual process that spans public and private life. This highly empirical and theoretically innovative work by African and European scholars is essential reading.
Jethro Pettit, Emeritus Fellow, Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, UK
Practices of Citizenship in East Africa
Practices of Citizenship in East Africa uses insights from philosophical pragmatism to explore how to strengthen citizenship within developing countries. Using a bottom-up approach, the book investigates the various everyday practices in which citizenship habits are formed and reformulated. In particular, the book reflects on the challenges of implementing the ideals of transformative and critical learning in the attempts to promote active citizenship.
Drawing on extensive empirical research from rural Uganda and Tanzania and bringing forward the voices of African researchers and academics, the book highlights the importance of context in defining how habits and practices of citizenship are constructed and understood within communities. The book demonstrates how conceptualizations derived from philosophical pragmatism facilitate identification of the dynamics of incremental change in citizenship. It also provides a definition of learning as reformulation of habits, which helps to understand the difficulties in promoting change.
This book will be of interest to scholars within the fields of development, governance, and educational philosophy. Practitioners and policy-makers working on inclusive citizenship and interventions to strengthen civil society will also find the concepts explored in this book useful to their work.
Katariina Holma is Professor of Education at the University of Oulu, Finland.
Tiina Kontinen is an Academy of Finland Research Fellow at the Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy, University of Jyvskyl, Finland.
Routledge Explorations in Development Studies
This Development Studies series features innovative and original research at the regional and global scale. It promotes interdisciplinary scholarly works drawing on a wide spectrum of subject areas, in particular politics, health, economics, rural and urban studies, sociology, environment, anthropology, and conflict studies.
Topics of particular interest are globalization; emerging powers; children and youth; cities; education; media and communication; technology development; and climate change.
In terms of theory and method, rather than basing itself on any orthodoxy, the series draws broadly on the tool kit of the social sciences in general, emphasizing comparison, the analysis of the structure and processes, and the application of qualitative and quantitative methods.
Valuing Development, Environment and Conservation
Creating Values that Matter
Edited by Sarah Bracking, Aurora Fredriksen, Sian Sullivan and Philip Woodhouse
Engendering Transformative Thinking and Practice in International Development
Gillian Fletcher
New Donors on the Postcolonial Crossroads
Eastern Europe and Western Aid
Tom Profant
The Power of Civil Society in the Middle East and North Africa
Peace-building, Change, and Development
Edited by Ibrahim Natil, Chiara Pierobon, and Lilian Tauber
Global Business Cycles and Developing Countries
Eri Ikeda
Practices of Citizenship in East Africa
Perspectives from Philosophical Pragmatism
Edited by Katariina Holma and Tiina Kontinen
Political Financing in Developing Countries
A Case from Ghana
Joseph Luna
First published 2020
by Routledge
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2020 selection and editorial matter, Katariina Holma and Tiina Kontinen; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Katariina Holma and Tiina Kontinen to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Holma, Katariina, editor, author. | Kontinen, Tiina, editor, author.
Title: Practices of citizenship in East Africa : perspectives from philosophical pragmatism / edited by Katariina Holma and Tiina Kontinen.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019031767 (print) | LCCN 2019031768 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367232962 (hardback) | ISBN 9780429279171 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Citizenship--Tanzania. | Citizenship--Uganda. |Democracy--Tanzania. | Democracy--Uganda.
Classification: LCC JQ3519.A2 P73 2020 (print) | LCC JQ3519.A2 (ebook) |DDC 323.609678--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019031767
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019031768
ISBN: 978-0-367-23296-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-27917-1 (ebk)
We would like to acknowledge the funding received from the Development Research Programme of the Academy of Finland for the project Growth into Citizenship in Civil Society Encounters (GROW) for 20152019 (decision numbers 285812 and 285815), without which this collaborative endeavour would not have been possible. We thank Kone Foundation, Finland, for some financial resources. Moreover, we are grateful for the Department of Development Studies at the University of Dodoma and the Department of Adult and Community Education at Makerere University, which contributed significant amount of their staff-time and other resources for the successful accomplishment of the project. The biggest thanks go to the NGOs, the village leaders and inhabitants of rural areas in Tanzania and Uganda for allocating their time and providing numerous opportunities for learning for our research team. Finally, we thank our research assistant Henna-Mari Koskela for her excellent work in the technical finalizing of the manuscript.
Karembe Fabian Ahimbisibwe is a Lecturer and a Head of Department in the Department of Adult and Community Education in the School of Distance and Lifelong Learning at Makerere University, Uganda. He is also a PhD candidate at the University of Jyvskyl, Finland.
Henni Alava
