Acts of citizenship in citizenship education

This presentation expands upon the concept of acts of citizenship introduced by Engin Isin (Isin 2008, Isin 2015) and discusses the implications of this expansion for citizenship education. Isin defines an act of citizenship as a rupture in the given, in sharp contrast to the preservation of the status quo and, thus, remains dualistic. However, the interpretation offered in this article defines the concept of acts of citizenship as answerable narrative practices in the sense of the ontology of ’dialogics’ of Mikhail Bakhtin, within which both change and reproduction are mutually constitutive moments in a broader process of becoming (Bakhtin 1981). This extension of the ontology behind the concept of acts of citizenship has important implications for understanding and studying of the aims of citizenship education, which will be outlined in the paper.