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This article attempts to understand how youth in contemporary India perceives, experiences and engages with the contestations around the ideas of citizenship and nation against the backdrop of the new citizenship policies. In December 2019, the majoritarian Hindu nationalist government in India enacted a Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) that purported to give citizenship to persecuted religious minorities from India’s neighbouring countries. But the Act crucially did not include Muslims in the list of oppressed minorities and created widespread anxieties about the possible loss of citizenship through the CAA and the National Register of Citizens. Millions of young people across Indian university campuses and neighbourhoods took to the streets to protest against the legislation. Drawing on the narratives of the young people who participated in these protests, this article highlights the youth’s conceptions of and negotiations with their identity and the use of different modes of resistance deployed in the anti-CAA movement. The article concludes by laying out the implications of these youth protests as a mode of ‘public pedagogy’ for citizenship education as an alternative to the statist models of citizenship education.

In this article, we review the process of building relationships around education and international development at IOE (Institute of Education), UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society (University College London, UK). The analysis looks at how hierarchies linked to colonialism were inscribed in initial structures, and unevenly and disparately contested by students, staff and a range of interlocutors around the world over one hundred years. The article considers how this history shapes practice in the present and perspectives on the future. In describing and reflecting on processes for change, the article considers some of the questioning, discussion and new forms of relationship that are emerging as part of trying to develop an orientation away from a colonial past. Efforts to decolonise education have raised questions and actions associated with reimagining practice. We reflect on what we have learned and unlearned from our efforts to promote decolonial, socially just alternatives.

In recent years, there has been increased interest in, and work towards, decolonising the curriculum in higher education institutions in the UK. There are various initiatives to review university syllabuses and identify alternative literature. However, there is an increasing risk of turning ‘decolonisation’ into a buzz term tied to a trend. We fear that decolonisation within academia is becoming an empty term, diluted and depoliticised, allowing for superficial representations that fail to address racial, political and socio-economic intersectionalities. In this article, we examine several initiatives to decolonise the curriculum with a focus on the field of education as a discipline and medium. Based on our analysis, we engage with three main themes: conceptualisation, positionality and conduct. The article concludes that decolonisation cannot happen in a vacuum, or as an aim disconnected from the rest of the structure of the university, which leads to diluting a wider movement and turns into a box-ticking exercise. We argue that there needs to be a deconstruction of asymmetrical power relationships within academic spaces to allow for meaningful decolonisation in practice. This requires a real political will, a change in the structure, and in the hearts and minds of those in decision-making positions, and a shift in the practices of knowledge production.

How does one make sense of the role of religion in social cohesion today? At least two key responses originate from different fields of inquiries. One camp maintains that religion and cultural diff...

This study explores young students’ negotiation of their citizenship identities at the intersection of their class, gender, religious and ethnic identifications in the conflict-affected setting of ...

The idea of citizen and the school discipline of civics, which is entrusted with the responsibility to create an ideal citizen, have colonial imprints. Both citizenship and civics have traversed through postcolonial histories of nation-building, state formation, modernity, and democracy/authoritarianism in South Asian nation-states of India and Pakistan. In the context of globalization, the idea of a citizen has also been marked with discourses of global citizenship, identity-based movements, and a reassertion of nationalism. This chapter situates civics in the context of these histories and transitions. Drawing on existing research, it also analyses the contestations over inclusions and exclusions from citizenship as represented in the school subjects of civics, social studies, and citizenship education. The dominant pedagogic practices of the subject and alternatives to them, along with a discussion of gaps in existing research and potential news areas of study are highlighted.

As the offshore mobility of higher education has increased in recent times, the question of how it interacts with the recipient cultures has become ever more significant. Using ethnographic methods, this empirical study examined the adaptation of the UK teacher education model – the Postgraduate Certificate in Education – to the context of Dubai. The study asks ‘how do students and tutors experience the adaptation of British education in the context of Dubai?’ This paper will argue that tutors and students in offshore Dubai teacher education are ‘selective cosmopolitans’ who negotiate cross-cultural influences pragmatically and ambivalently. The study addresses a significant gap in the literature, as there is little written on the internationalisation of higher education in the context of Gulf Cooperation Council countries. There is also an inadequate appreciation of the role of local culture and religion in offshore education and tutors and students’ role as active agents in negotiating cross-cultural dynamics in the offshore educational setting.