Decolonised Knowledge

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Start date: 2000End date: 2009

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    Seeing like a citizen’ re-claiming citizenship in a neoliberal world. November 28-29,2005
    (Institute of Development Studies, 2005-11-29) Gaventa, John
    What does it mean to be a citizen, and how is that meaning shifting under neoliberalism? In this paper, Prof. John Gaventa discusses how citizenship has increasingly moved away from a rights centered approach towards a more consumption-based approach. Depoliticised notions of citizenship have taken precedence under neoliberalism, where individuals are framed as consumers, users, voters, or beneficiaries rather than as rights bearing actors in their own right. He situates this shift within broader transformations of the state as well, which is not simply withdrawing but is being reconfigured to actively advance market logics, often weakening its role as a guarantor of rights. Through this paper, Gaventa proposes “reversing the telescope” by centering the perspectives of citizens as actors in development processes. This approach foregrounds what he terms thick forms of citizenship, where participation, contestation, and collective action are central. Moving beyond market, state and democracy first forms of citizenship, he argues that placing citizens first enables a re-politicisation of citizenship, strengthening claims to rights, accountability, and more meaningful democratic engagement.
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    An emerging global civil society? Implications for learning and work
    (2000) Hall, Budd L
    What role can adult education play in strengthening global civil society and democratic social change? In this paper, Dr. Budd Hall explores the meanings, uses, and utility of global civil society as both a concept and a lived political practice, tracing its emergence alongside the deepening contradictions of economic globalization. The author argues that global civil society is not an actor itself but a space where social movement organizations, international advocacy networks, non-governmental organizations, and citizen groups interact, resist, and reimagine world politics. Based on theorists including Lipschutz, Hyden, Boulding, and Gramsci, the paper examines why this concept has gained urgency now, pointing to the erosion of state sovereignty; the proliferation of NGOs across the majority world, the growing disillusionment with market-driven globalization, and the shipwreck, as Latouche puts it, of the grand society that has left hundreds of millions as castaways. Networking emerges as the defining practice of global civil society: informal, flexible, decentralized, and capable of rapid mobilization across borders. The paper then turns to adult education, arguing it has a distinctive and underutilized role in strengthening the learning dimensions of global civil society. Transformative adult education, the author contends, supports shifts away from consumerist growth models toward life-affirming, democratically produced visions of collective life, making it not peripheral to global civil society but central to its survival.