Citizen self-formation

Abstract

As an answer to the recent crises of and in democracy, recent approaches of citizenship education establish the idea of a strong socialization aiming to achieve a commitment to the democratic value community. With the idea of citizen self-formation, we aim to go another path. With self-formation we refer to both ends of the possible meanings of formation: (a) processes of education, mostly outside but also inside of institutional educational settings in which the subject is not "taught", but teaches itself in collective processes; (b) processes in which the subject is formed or forms itself. The subject was deconstructed from different angles, (post-)marxist, feminist, decolonial. What happens if we take these interventions as a starting point for citizenship education? Based on ideas of Judith Butler, we understand the subjectivation (assujetissement) as both, irreducibly connected to the structures of power and the emergence of agency at the same time, deeply interconnected. The rupture with unequal subject positions and the formation of the subject by itself is exactly where the political in the sense of Jacques Rancière emerges which could be the focal point of citizenship education, in order to recreate democracy by deepening it rather than trust in the model of strong socialization. In the panel, we would like to discuss the questions on theoretical and empirical based researches: How can we understand citizen self-formation? And where do we find it in society? What does that mean for citizenship education? How could citizenship education based on the idea of citizen self-formation look like?

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