Learning by dispossession: democracy promotion and civic engagement in Iraq and the United States

Abstract

This paper brings together two ongoing research projects on current citizenship learning programs in Iraq and the United States, both of which draw from the theoretical ground of Marxist-feminist perspective. A particular strength of this paper is its comparison between two American citizenship education programs in the context of neoliberalism, war and imperialism. Many claim that citizenship learning is always an ideological project promoting a particular set of beliefs or values. However, this research reveals that citizenship education programs are also ideological in their methods—a process Mojab has termed ‘learning by dispossession’—that serve to abstract learners from material conditions in order to promote a particular vision of liberal democracy that legitimates the very material conditions learners struggle to overcome.