Critical Diversity Literacy: A framework for multicultural citizenship education

Abstract

We propose the Critical Diversity Literacy (CDL) framework for citizenship education in contemporary heterogeneous societies. It encourages an anti-essentialist, power-conscious awareness of difference beyond notions of citizenship that have been constitutive of the nation and tend to normalise masculinity, patriarchy, heterosexuality, able-bodiedness and whiteness. Using intersectionality and decoloniality heuristics, we approach multicultural citizenship from the multiple axes of our identities as we inhabit the world more complexly than mere belonging to the nation-state. The framework synthesises insights from contemporary social theory into a usable scaffolding for diversity capacitation. The ten principles focus on intersectionality, social identities and positioning, historical awareness, diversity vocabulary, the coded nature of hegemonic power and personal engagement. Taken together, they promote an approach to multicultural citizenship that focuses on social justice and pushes us to recognise the lived experience of citizenship ‘from below’. The framework has proved useful in designing curricula and interventions in different contexts and sectors and can be utilised to develop age-appropriate materials in schools.

Introduction

This article offers Critical Diversity Literacy (CDL) as an educational framework for the complex thinking about difference demanded by the heterogenous, fluid populations of the 21st century. As Sleeter (2014) puts it

For teachers in societies that are becoming increasingly diverse, the question becomes how to prepare their students as citizens who can engage with complex issues in a way that reflects equity and justice (p. 86).

Educational institutions and the general public are increasingly aware of the importance of preparing tomorrow’s citizens with the skills, knowledge, and attitudes crucial to thriving in a diverse, complex world (Banks, 1991). The framework through which this diversity is addressed in educational settings has generally been multiculturalism, which depoliticises differences (Bloemraad et al., 2008; Lewicki, 2014; Sleeter, 2014), thus falling short of producing social justice among different groups and individuals. This raises questions about the normative assumptions of what citizenship in multicultural education means. Citizenship is defined as ‘the set of rights, duties, and identities linking citizens to the nation-state’ (Koopmans, 2005: 7). However, these definitions do not reflect the complexity of citizenship in modernised nation-states, which has evolved since these definitions were written (Banks, 2021; Bosio and Schattle, 2021; Giroux and Bosio, 2021; Torres and Bosio, 2020; Veugelers and Bosio, 2021). A person may be a legal citizen, yet experience alienation on account of constructions of race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, age, and disability, or conversely, one may be positioned within society so that they ‘belong’ on grounds other than legal citizenship. For example, Rosaldo (1994: 57) found that in California, the enduring exclusions of the colour line often deny full citizenship to Latinos and other people of colour, regardless of whether they are illegal or legal immigrants. Exclusion endures across various spaces even when governments may claim to be pursuing collective social justice initiatives (Rawls, 1971). Hence, we agree with previous proposals (Rosaldo, 1994) that citizenship should be delinked from mere formal membership of the nation-state to an understanding based on how we belong in the world when we can fully express our selfhood and our dignity is respected. This requires a shift from framing belonging as national citizenship to belonging in the global commons (Torres, 2019; Torres and Bosio, 2020). Among other things the ‘global commons is predicated on the idea that global peace is an intangible cultural good of humanity with immaterial value’ (Torres and Bosio, 2020: 7). The CDL framework we propose should inform education for heterogenous citizenship to foster understandings of belonging and safety for all along various intersections of identification and to promote social justice.

Multicultural citizenship

The relationship between citizenship, multiculturalism, and multicultural citizenship has received a great deal of scholarly attention (Bannerji, 2000; Bloemraad et al., 2008; Bosniak, 2001; Gutmann, 1993; Isin, 2005; Johnson, 2002; Lewicki, 2014; Milani, 2015; Okin, 1999; Owen, 2005; Solomos, 1998; Soysal and Soyland, 1994; Tate, 2009; Teo, 2021). According to Bloemraad et al. (2008), multiculturalism can be employed as a demographic descriptor of society. For example, one can say that ‘the United States is a more multicultural society than Japan’ (Bloemraad et al., 2008: 159). Multiculturalism can also be used to refer to an ideology that individuals or governments use to elaborate on the idea that ethnic, racial, cultural, and religious diversity should be celebrated (Bloemraad et al., 2008). By incorporating policies and programmes that governments undertake, for example, multicultural curricula, multiculturalism ‘can refer to a specific normative political theory that lays out principles for governing diverse societies’ (Bloemraad et al., 2008: 159). Lewicki (2014) posits that:

The theory of multiculturalism emerged as a response to the failure of communitarian and liberal citizenship to address the growing cultural pluralisation of Western societies. Multicultural citizenship attends to the particular forms of exclusion faced by postmigration minorities (p. 485).

Multiculturalism advances an understanding of citizenship based not solely on the terms of the cultural majority but on cognisance of the cultural minority presence in majoritarian public realms (Lewicki, 2014: 485). Cantle (2014) posits that multiculturalism entails a positive view of diversity as increasing the possibilities for peace, tolerance and cohesion, by building relationships across many divides. Discourses of ‘peace’ ‘tolerance’, and ‘cohesion’, however, tend to cast difference as natural when the issue is how differences come to matter in the first place, a consequence of the operations of unequal power relations.

McLaren (1995) has categorised multiculturalism into conservative or corporate, liberal, and left-liberal multiculturalism. Together, these form mainstream multiculturalism. Conservative or corporate multiculturalism is a product of white supremacist ideologies which framed Africans as creatures. Despite their efforts to distance themselves from racism, conservative multiculturalists do not recognise the cognitive equality of all races and blame unsuccessful minorities for being ‘culturally deprived’ and lacking family orientation (McLaren, 1995: 92). This is based on racial stereotypes that essentialise underprivileged individuals and communities. Liberal multiculturalism argues that whites, African Americans, Latinos, Asians, and other racial populations all have the same rights. The problem with this approach is that it neglects the disparities perpetuated by racial inequalities. Left-liberal multiculturalists tend to represent difference as a form of signification that is independent of social or historical constraints (McLaren, 1995). They value personal experience as a legitimate point to make a political claim about the self or the other. The challenge with this approach is that it can be used to advance populist elitism through an authoritative voice based on personal history, class, race, gender, and experience. As a response to these three approaches, McLaren leans towards ‘critical multiculturalism’. Critical multiculturalism acknowledges that difference emerges from history, culture, power, and ideology.

We propose an understanding of the term citizenship where rights of belonging are understood broadly and are substantively realised regardless of factors such as place of birth, nationality, age, gender, sexuality, race, class, and disability. This is an approach that does not ‘celebrate’ difference but seeks to interrogate the material consequences of constructions of difference. Like El-Haj (2009), we propose that educators ‘stop thinking about citizenship primarily in relation to national identifications and begin to see it as a set of critical practices- practices that give young people the tools to understand structural inequalities and work for social change within and across the boundaries of nation-states’ (p. 275). By extending the concept of citizenship beyond the national borders, a globalised notion of citizenship invokes a more encompassing notion of democracy where the global is an opportunity to reaffirm civic courage, social responsibility, politics, and compassion for others (Banks, 2021; Giroux and Bosio, 2021). We use Decolonial and Intersectional theory to illustrate why we argue for the more complex CDL lens on citizenship education.

A decolonial perspective on citizenship

In current understandings, citizenship is often conceptualised as comprising four dimensions: legal status, rights, political and other forms of participation in society, and a sense of belonging (Bloemraad et al., 2008: 154). The first, legal status, involves formal membership of the state by birth and naturalisation of individuals as citizens. While frameworks for multicultural citizenship recognise group-specific rights, they focus only on citizens thus excluding the needs and rights of non-citizens (Teo, 2021). According to Bloemraad et al., the second dimension, the rights approach, is meant to guide full equality before the law for all members of a state. It does not, however, attend to how to transform formal into substantive equality (Bloemraad et al., 2008) affecting how people from non-normative groups may access rights fully. The third and fourth dimensions, the political and other forms of participation in society, and a sense of belonging, also have their limitations. For example, in the older western version of citizenship there was exclusion based on gender, race, ethnicity, religion, and class, and today ‘in practice, old exclusions continue to affect political participation’ (Bloemraad et al., 2008: 156). Formal citizenship is not a guarantee that one’s participation will extend to all dimensions; its inherently exclusionary tendencies (Bosniak, 2001) thus limit the fourth dimension, belonging. This shows that belonging and citizenship are not equivalent concepts (El-Haj, 2009: 276).

Decolonial scholars point out that conventional definitions of citizenship are rooted in neocolonialism, or coloniality (Grosfoguel, 2002; Mignolo, 2007; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2012; Quijano, 2000, 2007). The colonial roots of the notion of citizenship are informative. Western ideas of citizenship originated in the Athenian city-state, ‘a participatory model in which political engagement in a male-only public sphere was the highest form of activity’ (Bloemraad et al., 2008: 155). This citizenship excluded women, those without property, slaves and newcomers from participating in the affairs of the state. ¹ Weber (1981) posits that ‘the concept of citizen (civis Romanus, citoyens, bourgeois) can only be found in the Occident because only in the Occident does the city exist in the specific sense of the word’ (p. 232). The occidental city originally emerged as a war machine and owned the means of warfare (Isin, 2005). Whether present or absent, the king ruled the city, and his rule was reinforced by a monopoly over the military. Historically, the military and force have been used to impose the domination of others. According to Isin (2005), in the occidental tradition, the citizen is portrayed as a sovereign man (and much later woman) capable of judgement and being judged. This citizen is in a direct contractual relationship with the city (and much later the state). Both the city (a contractual organisation) and the citizen (as the standard of ideal humanity), have a link to the exploitation of those who, in this worldview, could never achieve full citizen status and were thus limited to labour.

Historically, then, the image of the virtuous citizen as represented by Aristotle, Cicero, St Augustine, Locke, and Rousseau was connected to Occidental tradition. While one may think that this representation has changed over the years, decolonial perspectives point to the continuities. The city, and by extension, the nation-state, ² can be recognised as a colonial site where occidental assumptions of citizenship, oppressive of difference, still endure ‘in the production and reproduction of material existence and its cultural expression’ (Tejeda et al., 2003: 5). The binary of the Occident and the Orient still informs current local and global power relations. Because the Orient was not simply represented but was produced through ‘orientalising practices involving both occidental and oriental subjects and spaces’ (Isin, 2005: 34), it can be argued that for as long as coloniality prevails, those othered by modern colonial logic will never completely be afforded full human status.

Isin (2005) argues that in our contemporary societies, ‘liberalism, republicanism and communitarianism are really different ways of telling the same occidental narrative’ (p. 35). Ultimately, cities/nations should be viewed as force fields that work as difference machines rather than merely material places (Isin, 2005: 40). Citizenship is an entitlement that citizens – as distinguished from strangers and outsiders – have given themselves, without evaluating the different orientations, strategies, and technologies that are deployed in producing solidaristic, agonistic, and alienating multiplicities (Isin, 2005: 40).

Decolonial heuristics are useful in contextualising the colonial nature of domination, including domination based on the construction of both national and local/internal borders. The assumption that we now live in a postcolonial world where human rights characterise citizenship is a central Eurocentric myth of the post-war period (Grosfoguel et al., 2015). Grosfoguel et al. (2015) show how the nation state may use left-liberal multiculturalism to suggest that every legal citizen is born with equal dignity although some occupy lesser positionalities and spaces due to their gender, sexuality, levels of ability, race, and class. These differences are used to enforce inequality and justify the privilege of certain groups over others. The assumption of ‘post’ in ‘postcolonial’ in itself can be seen as an act of erasure, enabled by the persisting colonial condition, intertwined with contemporary neocolonialism (Hall, 1996). To Bhabha (2012), neocolonial relations persist through multinational division of labour. This division of labour also determines where different groups of people are positioned within the class ladder. On a global scale, black people are structurally disadvantaged to occupy spaces of underprivilege, disease, violence and impoverishment.

Hence, in the absence of colonial administrations, the hierarchies created in the global South during the 450 years of colonial rule are still here with us (Grosfoguel et al., 2015). These hierarchies still inform the ‘international division of labour (core-periphery), the racial/ethnic hierarchy (West and non-West), the Christian-centric patriarchal hierarchy of gender/sexuality and the interstate system (military and political power)’ (Grosfoguel et al., 2015: 641). This system of hierarchies is referred to as the coloniality of power (Quijano, 2000, 2007), a phenomenon where conventions of citizenship pretend that all is well while power structures at a global and national level are still informed by racist/sexist colonial ideologies/discourses and power structures that go back several centuries (Grosfoguel et al., 2015: 641). The ‘coloniality of power’ maintains the same colonial subjects categorised as the ‘Other’ in the zone of non-being at the bottom of the urban racial/ethnic hierarchies even though they may be formal citizens of the metropolitan country in which they reside (Grosfoguel et al., 2015). Examples in Western Europe and the USA include African-Americans, Native Americans, Afro-Caribbeans, Indo-Caribbeans, Puerto Ricans, Mexican-Americans, Asians, North Africans, Turks, etc. This means that other factors apart from formal citizenship are actively shaping people’s experiences, still shaped within the coloniality of power. As Yuval-Davis (1997) puts it:

in order to be able to analyse adequately people’s citizenship, especially in this era of ethnicization on the one hand and globalization on the other hand, and with the rapid pace at which relationships between states and their civil societies are changing, citizenship should best be analysed as a multi-tiered construct which applies, at the same time to people’s membership in sub-, cross- and supra-national collectivities as well as in states (p. 24).

Our article aligns with the project of reimagining multicultural citizenship in ways that would create inclusive societies that take seriously the lived experiences of the ‘the standpoint of the excluded’ (Kabeer, 2005: 1) and acknowledges cross-cutting intersections, to which we now turn.

An intersectional perspective on citizenship

Intersectionality, a theory that shows how our experiences and lived realities are shaped, not by a single, but by multiple axes of difference (Bowleg, 2008; Collins, 1998; Crenshaw, 1989, 1997, 2005), fleshes out the boundaries created by different positionalities, potentially leading to indefinite exclusion. Intersectionality has been one of the most important interventions in the understanding of how formal citizenship may not translate into substantive citizenship (Cherubini, 2011). In Bosniak’s (2001) account, ‘many of the people who have been characterized as second-class citizens are subordinated or marginalized notwithstanding their formal citizenship status’ (p. 500). These include women, gays and lesbians, the disabled, and ethnic minorities. While they hold passports, such people are outside the sphere of full and meaningful citizenship (Bosniak, 2001). As Lister (1997) points out, at the heart of citizenship is a universalism that needs to be reconciled with the politics of difference. Traditional accounts of citizenship that rely on masculinist constructions of rights have been shown by feminist scholars to be deeply disenfranchising of women, whose participation in citizenship has been misrecognised through the private-public dichotomy. Deconstructing this binary and gender-neutral notion of citizenship has been an important outcome of intersectional understandings of citizenship, advancing concepts of gender-pluralist citizens (Lister, 1997).

Decolonial scholars (de Sousa Santos, 2007, 2017; Grosfoguel et al., 2015) also show the shifts that the privileged and disadvantaged undergo across time and space. For example, queer citizens become sub-citizens in heteronormative spaces on account of their gender and/or sexuality. van Zyl (2011) posits that ‘despite living in the first country that constitutionally guaranteed equality for citizens on the basis of sexual orientation, LGBTIQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, intersex, queer) people in South Africa “belong” differently to the national polity than heterosexuals’ (p. 335). We can refer to this erasure of queer citizenship as part of sexual citizenship/ cityzenship (Milani, 2015), a queer way of looking at the relationship between sexuality and citizenship. The term, cityzenship, ‘is a queer, anti-normative linguistic tactic [. . .] that seeks to capture the spatial nature of sexual politics, as conveyed through different forms of meaning-making’ (Milani, 2015: 433). Similarly, disability has been largely absent from discussions on citizenship, yet people living with disabilities (PWDs) struggle for recognition of the right to be different and belong (Lister, 1997). Citizenship should therefore be understood as dynamic and ‘not just about who is to be recognised but about what is recognition, about the terms of citizenship itself’ (Modood, 2008: 549).

While non-citizenship is influenced by different forms of legalities and discourses surrounding birth and naturalisation, the political and socio-economic processes mobilised in the construction of non-nationals are similar to those used to construct the indigenous ‘Other’. Teo (2021) therefore questions multiculturalism’s reliance on citizenship as a default condition of inclusion because formal citizenship itself fails to include everyone. Hence, while Teo (2021) writes to show the limitations of multicultural citizenship in its failure to expand its compass to include non-citizens as multicultural subjects, we argue that the marginalisation of black people, queer people, PWDs, immigrants, the homeless, the aged and children is evidence of citizenship’s failure to be conscious of the differences in and among those it even considers legal citizens. Much like most concepts of belonging, multicultural citizenship and the rights associated with it are selective, resulting in a denial of rights to certain groups and individuals who have a higher chance of never being recognised as citizens of the world throughout their entire lives.

This creates a need for educational approaches that make citizens aware of the dynamics of belonging beyond conventional multicultural citizenship. While we do not downplay the importance of legal citizenship and the opportunities it creates for people, we also see conservative descriptors of citizenship normalise the masculinity, patriarchy, heterosexuality, able-bodiedness, and whiteness which have been constitutive of the nation (see, e.g. Goldberg, 2002). This is despite the fact that people can be national subjects and ‘at the same time claim other identities, including those based on racial and ethnic heritage, gender, and sexual preference’ (Owen, 2005: 2). Yet these ‘other’ identity markers like race or social location alter or influence whether people experience a sense of belonging and feel equal to other citizens (van Zyl, 2011: 336). These considerations push us to recognise citizenship as involving dynamics ‘from below’ that take into account the plural and agonistic positionalities of members of society (Mouffe, 1992) and also to recognise what has been referred to as ‘lived citizenship’ (Lister et al., 2003, 2005). There is a need for citizens to develop loyalties that extend beyond the nation-state, beyond a theoretical distinction mediated exclusively by national boundaries between friends and enemies (Appiah, 2006; Giroux and Bosio, 2021). The CDL framework makes it possible to incorporate such revisioning into Multicultural Education.

Teaching and learning citizenship through a critical diversity lens

Previous sections have shown historical and current dynamics that reveal unevenness within citizenship. This section introduces the Critical Diversity Literacy (CDL) framework (Steyn, 2015) that has been used in educational contexts in several national contexts (Germany, Switzerland, Australia, and South Africa) and has proved robust as a framework for capacitation in relation to diversity (see, e.g. Dankwa et al., 2021; Klingovsky and Pfruender, 2017; Reygan et al., 2018; Steyn et al., 2018). We propose that the framework can be used in citizen education to foster a more complex understanding of citizenship that is better aligned to the heterogeneous societies of the 21st century, where awareness of the rights and belonging of those from less powerful, non-normative positionalities have been raised.

As education is part of the ideological apparatuses that shape individual and group attitudes, it is important in the formation of democratic communities (Mitchell, 2001). Our article argues for an approach to understanding citizenship that moves beyond a liberal conception of citizenship that is based on ‘individualism and a simplistic analysis of how power works’ (Sleeter, 2014: 85) towards an understanding that better recognises how social positionalities operate in creating (un)belonging. The aim is to develop multiliterate citizens who can be border-crossers that can interact with, learn from, understand, and engage with differences in a responsible manner (Giroux and Bosio, 2021). The CDL framework consists of 10 educational principles that capacitate people to read and respond to these power relations. Internalising the CDL principles is also a way of recognising our implications in power relations, preparing students to engage with issues of citizenship, belonging, equity, and justice. Each principle is briefly discussed below.

• 1. Power constructs the differences that make a difference

This is the first principle of CDL and underpins the others. In learning for citizenship, one would want to impart an understanding of how groups are produced within unequal power relations. Powerful interests frame understandings of self and other so that those who can, centre themselves and construct ‘others’ as less deserving of social value. They are outsiders, or lesser citizens, because they are different from those that are regarded as the norm. This happens along multiple lines of difference. Social power is largely maintained through such ideological binaries of ‘us’ versus ‘them’. While multicultural citizenship challenges the cultural assimilation traditionally demanded by nation-states of migrants and minorities (Modood, 2008) it can be charged with not adequately paying attention to the power relations that shape the lives and livelihoods of the unassimilated groups and their access to the benefits of citizenship. According to Modood (2008) ‘multicultural citizenship is based on the idea that citizens have individual rights, but citizens are not uniform, and their citizenship contours itself around the varied identities of citizens’ (p. 549). Homogenised notions of citizenship neglect the fact that power shapes different experiences of being, mattering, and membership within the collective. Because citizenship involves a tension between inclusion and exclusion (Bloemraad et al., 2008), it needs to be framed as both individual and collective and implicated in power relations.

A CDL understanding of difference is cognisant of the fact that the social categories that organise society and shape identities are not fixed but constructed within power relations. This addresses the limitations of many liberal and neoliberal conceptions of multicultural citizenship that rely on fixed racial/ethnic and gender categories, which are perceived as natural, and essentialise ‘the culture’ that is connected with these different categories (Sleeter, 2014). Educating people on the role of power in social relationships can help individuals realise how the benefits of citizenship come to be unequally distributed along the fault lines of power, the first step towards understanding self, other and belonging.

According to Cantle (2014), multiculturalism has failed to incorporate super-diversity and ‘the multifaceted aspects of difference and “otherness”, including those based on disability, age and gender’ (p. 312). A citizenry grounded in CDL principles would be alert to the dynamics of power in creating and entrenching difference that makes a difference, and thus also be alert to how these dynamics play out on any variation that may become marked by powerful interests.

• 2. Different social locations have unequal symbolic and material capital. Hegemonic positionalities and concomitant identities, such as whiteness, heterosexuality, masculinity, cisgender, able-bodiedness, middle-classness, etc. have power by virtue of being regarded as the norm, and these dominant orders position those in non-hegemonic spaces

Mainstream multiculturalist efforts have placed more emphasis on the characteristics of non-dominant groups than on the role played by dominant and hegemonic groups in producing the social outcomes multiculturalism seeks to address. Multiculturalism means living, working, and learning together with and through difference (Mitchell, 2001) and it ought to bring the privileged to the table because it is their locations that position those in non-hegemonic spaces (Steyn, 2015). In a diversity literate citizenry, those socialised into positions of privilege and access need to acknowledge how their privilege shapes both their own experiences as well as those in non-hegemonic spaces. By their participation in heterosexual privilege, for example, straight people hold heteronormativity together. This enforces homophobia, a system that makes queer people become non/second-class citizens. Heteropatriarchal notions of masculinity constrain feminine expressions as well as queer ways of presenting (Steyn, 2015). Recognition of the role the normative plays in social relations opens the space for solidarity from the position of privilege with those disadvantaged along the diversity dimension in question. Those inhabiting privileged positions in the global North need to acknowledge how colonialism not only strengthened their national economies but how it also led to the impoverishment of former colonies that they now see as producers of undesirable immigrants. As Sleeter (2014) observes, debates about citizenship and the law need to incorporate why people migrate without papers and the realities they find themselves in as a result.

It is often painful for people to recognise how deeply they may be disadvantaged by the mere fact of the circumstances of their birth, and also difficult for others to recognise how they may be benefitting from being positioned as the norm within a social relationship. In general, however, those who face disadvantage by virtue of their social location along an axe of difference are more likely to recognise this social reality and are less likely to be in denial of how the odds are stacked. In educating for multicultural citizenship, one would encourage participants to think of how they may be positioned as advantaged in some aspects of social arrangements and disadvantaged in others. The approach is also endorsed in Stein and Andreotti’s (2021) ‘global citizenship otherwise’, an approach to global citizenship education (GCE) that aims to teach learners how to (co)exist differently on a shared planet by decentering themselves, deepening their sense of responsibility, and disengaging from harmful desires.

• 3. Systems of oppression intersect, interlock, co-construct, and constitute each other. While these systems reproduce themselves, it is possible to resist and reframe them.

This criterion teaches an intersectional reading of social relations. Class, gender, nationality, race, masculinity, sexuality, age and disability are implicated in one another in different permutations and interactions (Steyn, 2015). According to Bosio and Schattle (2021), ‘an engaged global citizen is both a member and a participant situated within a number of different communities, some of which overlap: local communities, regional ones, national ones, and multinational ones’ (p. 6). Lived experiences are shaped by how multiple identity markers interact. Women who are migrants, for example, often have especially difficult experiences with the health system in the host country by their need for reproductive care when they do not have citizen status (Mutambara and Naidu, 2021). Bosniak (2001) found that a noncitizen is more likely to be passive and uninvolved hence the non-citizen is to some extent a non-participant in mainstream economic, social, and political activity. PWDs face challenges obtaining recruitment into a productive workforce and by capitalist standards, they are ‘unsuitable’ for citizenship status. Capitalism, therefore, helps to create/constitute the group of people regarded as ‘disabled’ and enforces their marginality.

Given the operations of intersectionality, legal status and formal citizenship may not map onto participation (Bloemraad et al., 2008) as other identity markers may enhance positions of belonging. There are incidences where naturalised citizens benefit less from local economies than some migrants. By participating in the labour market or business sector, payment of taxes, local schools, and raising families, immigrants can practice citizenship without legal citizenship status or legal residence (Bloemraad et al., 2008). The religious landscape in South Africa is an example of how immigrant men privileged by class have lived ‘citizen-like lives’. Some South Africans have questioned why immigrant prophets and church leaders like Malawian-born Prophet Bushiri are richer than local South Africans and ‘comfortable’ to the extent of engaging in criminal activities like abuse of congregants and tax evasion! Essentially the question they have asked is why Prophet Bushiri is ‘more equal’ than local-born South African citizens. This example shows how other identity positionings like social status interlock with citizenship. Bloemraad et al. (2008) observed how the racial and economic positions of immigrants intersect to create three distinct incorporation pathways:

traditional assimilation into the white middle class; selective integration when immigrants of color retain ethnic ties and culture to facilitate upward socio-economic mobility; or “downward” assimilation into a racialized urban minority with limited economic opportunities (p. 163).

Black African diaspora communities might have different opportunities compared with white immigrants from Africa migrating into the same countries. Due to their race, they have different levels of economic and social capital. Participants in education on citizenship should have no difficulty in contributing examples from their own experience of how intersectionality complicates and changes the lived experience of citizenship.

• 4. Oppressive systems such as racism are current social problems and (not only) historical legacies.

This criterion applies to all the diversity dimensions that have long histories as tools of oppression. While much has been achieved in the struggle for the liberation of women, it is simply not true that this struggle has been won. Oppression through the infliction of violence – physical, emotional, economic and symbolic – is evidenced in the lives of women within and across national boundaries globally. It accompanies women migrants from Central America at every stage (departure, transit, and arrival) of the migratory experience (Willers, 2016). Even women who migrate within a nation-state may be at greater risk of intimate partner violence (IPV) and less likely to access help, as a recent study from China shows (Hu et al., 2022).

Similarly, race as a current social problem can be seen in global geographical and structural designs that position black bodies as lifelong subalterns. While it is likely to hear some people say we now live in a post-race society and we should forget about the past and focus on the future (Steyn, 2015), evidence on the ground suggests that the structural and epistemic injustices of the past are still perpetuated, as argued in our previous discussion on coloniality. In the current discourse of migration and citizenship, the past discourses of Africa and its inhabitants as ‘dark’ still shape current policies and attitudes towards the continent and its people (Steyn, 2015). Europeans denied the very existence of African cities before colonisation. In these narratives, Africans were constructed as incapable of creating sophisticated collectivities and organisation, or of the agency that creates history. By definition, Africans lacked the attributes needed to qualify for citizenship, not possessing the subjectivities that could become the bearers of rights and rendering them suitable for colonial subjugation and slavery. Using this criterion to teach citizenship, participants can develop insight into how such disinformation still insinuates itself into the discourses that make not only black people but also the African continent the ‘Other’ in contemporary global citizenship arrangements. More generally, it promotes recognition of how denial of the importance of a proper account of history on the part of dominant groups is one of the processes by which inferior citizen status is entrenched. In one of their dimensions for global citizenship education, Bosio and Schattle (2021) encourage an intergenerational mindset that calls upon global citizens to consider current challenges in the context of insights from the past as well as future obligations that span generations.

• 5. Social identities are learned and are an outcome of social practices

One of the limitations of liberal and neoliberal conceptions of multicultural citizenship is the overemphasis on the primacy of national identity and the nation-state, marginalising those who have faced oppression historically (Sleeter, 2014). Powerful groups often equate national citizenship with their own racial or ethnic identity and this excludes both marginalised groups and immigrants (Sleeter, 2014). When educating on citizenship it is important to emphasise that national, ethnic, racial, and other identities are not ‘natural’, but an outcome of learning and practicing various hegemonic social scripts. Therefore, no one is naturally straight or Zulu, but people live the effects of internalised, learned scripts that have them believe in the facticity of their identity. Using this criterion, people can be taught to understand how the categories used to construct ‘self’ and ‘other’ are cultural constructions, ‘imagined communities’ (Solomos, 1998: 50), not essential, biological determinations.

Cantle (2014) posits that in multicultural societies, there has been little development of cultural navigational skills that assist people to endorse change processes or to eliminate the structural and institutional barriers that promote separation and lead to inequality. There are scarcely spaces and opportunities to learn about each other through educational, experiential, and routine intercultural contact (Cantle, 2014). Instead, communities are encouraged to see their identities as special and fixed (Cantle, 2014: 313) and this illusion of ‘unique identity’ sustains conflict and violence in our present-day societies (Sen, 2007). In his book titled Do Zimbabweans exist? Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2009) elaborates on the exclusion of Matebeleland and the Ndebele from ideal ‘Zimbabweanness’. Hence, while the Ndebele are formal citizens of Zimbabwe, they are, by their ethnic affiliations, considered perpetual second-class citizens and have been subjected to genocidal violence. In the case of the Turks, Baris Unlu shows that Turkishness is a world of naturalised privilege that sidelines the Kurds and other non-Turks living in Turkey (Ünlü, 2016).

To achieve citizenship that is aware of how difference is mobilised to sustain privilege and oppression, there is a need for spaces that educate people on how social constructions that inform ‘fixed’ identities along racial, ethnic, national, and class lines are accomplices to such problematic processes, and that encourage understandings of identities as fluid, multiple, complex and structured through discourses that circulate in cultural contexts. By recognising the socially constructed nature of identities, people are better equipped to realise that identities are fluid and that there is a possibility for movement across cultures.

• 6. One needs a diversity grammar and a vocabulary that facilitates a discussion of privilege and oppression.

One of the objectives of citizenship education should be the development of language to talk about and dialogue on the sometimes difficult discussions that emerge around questions of difference within and among societies. Having a CDL vocabulary facilitates a grasp of what we cannot otherwise name, allowing us to see the strategies and effects that power’s operations have on differences (Steyn, 2015). Concepts that are salient to such discussions of privilege and oppression name systems of oppression like heteronormativity, misogyny, apartheid, and xenophobia and the dynamics that support them, such as ‘blaming the victim’ and hate speech. With these conceptual tools, people can understand how these systems work and how to best call them out. Within citizen education, participants should be encouraged to recognise how different approaches to race, such as colourblindness and anti-racism, are vested with interests in the politics of knowledge. They are part of different social ‘projects’ – the ‘culture wars’ that demonstrate different orientations towards differences within society and often agonistic positions on who should belong and how various groups should share in citizenship. Who speaks, what may be spoken about, and how, is linked to political voice and visibility. As an example, participants may consider clusters of terms used to describe those who arrive in a country such as ‘foreigners’, ‘aliens’, ‘settlers’, ‘migrants’, or ‘makwerekwere^3’ and think about what is at stake with these different namings. Participants in CDL for Multicultural Education classes may similarly consider the effects and value of neologisms that are coined to capture specific diversity dynamics or relationships. The discussion above on the notion of queer cityzenship or the use of the spelling ‘womxn’ would be examples of such linguistic innovations.

• 7. Hegemonic practices may be coded and must be decoded or ‘translated’ if one is to see through them.

In teaching this principle of CDL, participants should be encouraged to ‘see’ the norms that obfuscate how the powerful maintain their power in societies. Power never names itself as such. Hence some systems of power do not manifest in the name of exclusion, yet they achieve exclusionary outcomes. These discourses feature strategies of deflection, ambivalences, and minimisation of the struggles of those at the receiving end of injustice (Steyn, 2015). For example, neoliberalism may not explicitly be labelled racism, yet it serves and protects racist outcomes through privatisation and the protection of property rights for properties that were attained through a history of imperial domination. Neoliberalism prioritises the market over citizenship and democracy. As a result, ‘the market itself becomes democracy’ (Macedo et al., 2015: 114) ‘and shopping is equated with voting’ (Sleeter, 2014: 86).

Speaking to the coded hegemonic practice that invisibilises racism, Grosfoguel et al. (2015) argue that the denial of racism is a common feature of metropolitan discussions about minorities. The prevalent ideology is that racism and the colonial relations it produces are a thing of the past. This invisibility leads to a shift in racist discourses from biological racist discourses to cultural racist discourses (Grosfoguel et al., 2015: 645). In other words, multiculturalism becomes the manner through which all different experiences of difference, inferiority, and superiority are acknowledged as important for the nation as so-called ‘cultural attributes’, without necessarily addressing some of the structural differences that cause differences in consumption, food, gender, and sexual relations. By avoiding the word ‘race’, cultural racism claims to be non-racist (Grosfoguel et al., 2015: 645). Reading through coded hegemonic practice is the literacy to read what has been framed in the Netherlands and Great Britain metropolitan centres as a ‘minority problem’ or the ‘immigration problem’ in France and the United States as a ‘racist problem’ (Grosfoguel et al., 2015) that needs to be dealt with for what it is if a more egalitarian society is to be achieved.

• 8. Diversity hierarchies and institutionalised oppressions are inflected through specific contexts and material arrangements.

This criterion involves realising that constructs leading to inclusion or exclusion differ and also change over time and that even the ‘same’ construct can have different outcomes, depending on context and social power. For example, South African women who lived in exile during apartheid reported finding difficulty in re-adjusting to more traditional understandings of gender and women’s roles within their families upon return to the country (Steyn and Grant, 2007). But the point can be well illustrated by noting how contextuality influences the ‘mattering’ of the materiality of bodies. Body weight may be read differently for people depending on how they are situated; ‘obesity’ amongst the poor, women and ethnic minority groups are likely to be moralistically interpreted as ‘failing society and future generations through their body size’ (Broom and Warin, 2011: 461). The size of a woman’s feet is not generally life-defining today, though it was in China for a 1000 years, linked to patriarchal notions of sexual pleasure (Dworkin, 2018). Some scholars have argued that even within the (western) disability community, a hierarchy of disability exists, in effect creating a caste system of disabilities (Hayward, 2005).

Neoliberalism, as a system, can also be seen as a caste and racist system that cuts across national boundaries, policed by migration regulations that restrict the movement of bodies from the Global South. Numerous developments in communication, technology, and mobility have ushered in a new era of globalisation and super-diversity (Cantle, 2014: 313), which earlier understandings of multiculturalism failed to address. The complexity presented by movements of people flows of commodities, and cultural artefacts that take place during this era of global interconnection has led to the emergence of other binaries that seem to overtake the majority/minority markers of difference that are centred on people’s relationship to the nation-state.

But such a focus on movement should not blind us to how what may seem fixed and even neutral also are part of the systems that create, maintain and, once reframed, may contribute to changing hierarchical arrangements of difference. Imposing official colonial buildings were designed to inspire awe and communicate the authority of those whose bodies seem to fit naturally into the environment built around them and for them. Spatial arrangements reflect social hierarchies and contribute to inclusions and exclusions and changing spatiality in turn contributes to changing sociality. Undoing the apartheid city planning in South Africa and building more integrated housing is a slow, but important, intervention in breaking with the stark race and class divisions of the past. In teaching this criterion, educators may encourage participants to think of how particular ‘things’ such as items of clothing may be part of marking inclusion, exclusion, belonging, or alienation.

• 9. Emotions play a role in all of the above, and we need to recognise our own emotional investments in these social dynamics.

Emotions play a crucial role in determining social groups and how they belong relative to each other. According to Steyn (2015) ‘The social construction of our emotions schools us into systems that tie in our affect in patterned ways: who should we move towards; who away from’ (p. 387). For example, if we are conditioned to feel ‘hate’ towards queer people, we tend to adopt the same emotional stance whenever we see feminine presenting men. Hence, if that is our prejudice, we will hate and exclude all queer people regardless of what passport they carry. Migration prejudices in Germany provide a good example of the pitfalls of emotions of hate towards migrants. The example shows how such hate can end up excluding those naturalised as citizens, who become perpetual outsiders. Talking about contemporary racism in Europe, Gutiérrez Rodríguez shows how in Germany racism is kept alive through the framing of the ‘refugee crisis’ in public and political debates (Gutiérrez Rodríguez, 2018). The ‘refugee crisis’ results from an ‘asylum-migration nexus’ that operates within the logic of coloniality of migration (Gutiérrez Rodríguez, 2018) and is sustained by contemporary debates on the need to control the entry and settlement of ‘refugees’ as a consequence of moral panic (Gutiérrez Rodríguez, 2018). Thus, the image of the ‘refugee’ is a ‘floating signifier’ representing the anxieties and fears of what the media conceived as most of the population, regularly imagined as white, German, abled, cis-gendered, national bodies. Because this fear of refugees also assumes an ableist and cisnormative stance, PWDs and trans people may also be deemed foreign to the German nation – people to be hated or feared. Through this example, we also see how gender non-conformity and disability become (non)citizenship through affect. Through using CDL to educate about citizenship, people can be encouraged to realise that affect operates within systems of power and it has social effects (Steyn, 2015). We can also think of how social arrangements can lead to various internalised feelings along continua of superiority and inferiority, entitlement, feelings of worth or lack of it, optimism and hope, apathy, despair and nihilism, alienation or belonging, legitimacy, disregard, contentment with status quo and restlessness – just to name a few. Structured along lines of difference, these emotions, in turn, act into society and contribute to structuring it.

A crucial aspect of teaching this criterion is encouraging participants in citizen education to reflect on their own participation in how and which emotions circulate in relation to ‘self’ and ‘other’ within their communities and to become aware of their investments in these patternings of affect.

• 10. An engagement with issues of the transformation of these oppressive systems towards deepening social justice at all levels of social organisation

The 10th CDL criterion is concerned with the question of praxis and how people translate educational principles into practical action. In educational contexts, this involves asking participants to think about their daily lives, and recognising what their CDL might mean for how they approach issues, what they participate in, and how they may do things differently. It may involve discussions about such issues as allyship, and how one may move beyond performative gestures towards more substantial solidarity in everyday life even if in quite unassuming ways. This criterion challenges students to apply the capacity to analyse social problems, learn the tools of democracy and make a difference in their life as social agents (Giroux and Bosio, 2021). It may also incorporate discussions about the difficulties of standing up to the status quo and why we may tend to rather avoid taking action, but also why we should do so. While this education is focused on individual consciousness, it raises awareness of how the individual is implicated in the system and how structures can be changed when individuals learn to decide differently as they move through their social, civic, economic, and political roles. Unless the other nine criteria are integrated into this final criterion, little will change towards creating affirming citizenship at the level of lived experience for all members of society.

Conclusion

Multiculturalism has been a great advance on views of the nation as homogenous, where citizenship and belonging are fixed on those who traditionally ‘own’ discrete nation-states. However, conventional understandings of multicultural citizenship are still held back by an overreliance on the nation-state as the only unit of belonging and still tend to naturalise differences in ways that are power-evasive. We have argued that citizenship as belonging can only be achieved as societies are educated into more sophisticated understandings of social differences. Indeed, we are not only individual citizens but our positioning within various power relations creates and maintains differences that matter and change our experiences and fortunes. By understanding inclusive citizenship not only through nationality but through our gender, sexuality, age, disability, race, class, ethnicity, and other relational social markers, we are better equipped to understand the limitations of conventional understandings of citizenship. We also become better at using an intersectional understanding to critique normative ideas of who belongs where based on the historical legacies that have influenced which bodies can fit and sit in the world as actual ‘citizens’. In sum, CDL is important in multicultural education, given its focus on how power operates on difference and on how individuals are implicated in multiple power relations. CDL is an important intervention in teaching and learning on citizenship, and because it is a framework that can be fleshed out at lesser or greater levels of complexity, educators can utilise examples and activities in line with the level of the group, providing the literacy and fluency to engage with the way differences are deployed in society. It can be used along with existing other critical teaching and learning pedagogies that expose how the concept of citizenship needs to incorporate belonging, respect, and safety for all.