Editorial: Geography and the ‘European Year of Citizenship through Education’

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Acknowledgements

This editorial is based on a spoken paper presented and discussed at a conference of the European Geographical Educator's Network ‘HEROdot.NET’, which is organized by Karl Donert at Liverpool Hope University, Liverpool, England. This meeting was entitled: ‘The Europeanization of Geographical Education’ and held at the University of Tartu, Estonia, in June 2004. The author thanks the network for supporting travel and attendance at this meeting.

Notes

¹ Citizenship has been defined in many ways—as an institution, as a practice—and it remains an ongoing discourse (cf. Fernandez, 2004). It is sometimes expressed in terms of individual rights and responsibilities, sometimes in terms of participation in governance, and often in terms of a collective identity culture, tradition or genetic ancestry (Giesen & Klaus, 2001). The German concept, for example, emerging from its national history, emphasizes cultural and social aspects ahead of any political significance (Preuss, 2003). Lunt et al. (2002) evaluate concepts such as the military citizen, the worker citizen, the parent/birthright citizen, voluntary citizen and the environmental citizen for the context of New Zealand. Some focus on labour market inclusivity as a key element (Magalhaes & Storer, 2003) while others suggest that, today, the laws of the market have supplanted those of the state and so transformed ‘citizens’ into consumers in a world where corporations are more powerful than any other political construction (e.g. Bauman, 1999). Elsewhere, the term citizen has been abandoned, transmuted into ‘stakeholders’ by government rhetoric (Jarvis, 2002). In sum, the very concept of citizenship is both unclear and much contested.