Seminar Series: ‘The Critical Citizen?’

Responding to the widespread cynicism, disengagement and alienation that citizens across the world express towards official political cultures, this series examined the idea of the critical citizen. It asked what constitutes a critical citizen and whether a critical citizenry can be reactivated as an antidote to contemporary political crises. Recordings of some talks can be found below – most were not recorded at speakers’ request.

Becoming Your Own Boss in the Gig Economy: A Story of Disappointment

Speaker: Tim Christaens
Date: 6 April 2023

Labour platform companies such as Uber and Deliveroo often attract workers with promises of workplace autonomy absent in most low-paid jobs. Instead of working for a boss, workers can allegedly work with platform companies to establish their own small businesses. This supposedly answers workers’ critiques of domination at work. In practice, domination has not disappeared but become automated through digital technology. Tim Christaens discussed how algorithmic management limits worker autonomy and which institutions might enable the critical citizen to enhance it.

Watch the recording via YouTube

The Conditions of Planetary Citizenship

Speaker: Engin Isin
Date: 13 April 2023

Engin Isin outlined the conditions that have generated planetary citizenship movements in the twenty-first century. These planetary citizens are cosmopolitical, agonistic, solidaristic and disobedient. They act against injustice through abolishment, refusal and resistance, while states and institutions respond with strategies of incorporation and pacification. The talk explored this dynamic and its implications for global democratic life.

Watch the recording via YouTube

Citizens’ Voices, People’s News: Making the Media Work for Wales

Speakers: Donna Smith, Michelle Matheron and Dylan Moore
Date: 4 May 2023

How does the media help people to understand politics? What do citizens think about the news they consume - do they trust it, and how well do they understand it? In a devolved nation such as Wales, where many people receive media from England, what role should the media play in sustaining a healthy democracy? This event presented findings from a collaboration between The Open University and the Institute of Welsh Affairs, which convened a citizens’ panel on media and democracy. Over 19 hours of discussion, 15 citizens from across Wales analysed the media landscape and developed recommendations to improve journalism and democracy education in Wales.

Lurking, Close Looking

Speaker: Verity-Jane Keefe
Date: 11 May 2023

Artist Verity-Jane Keefe reflected on long-term creative engagement with communities undergoing regeneration. She discussed what happens when one stays in place - ageing with places - and the complexities of love, detachment and artistic responsibility that come with such commitments. The talk considered the role of the artist in regeneration, the potential for empowering residents and how experiential practice can challenge and expand community ambitions.

Time to Interrogate Banal Citizenism and Consider a Noncitizenist Politics

Speaker: Tendayi Bloom
Date: 18 May 2023

Contemporary politics often assumes that everyone has functional citizenship and that political life can be explained through the category of the citizen. Tendayi Bloom challenged this assumption by exploring noncitizenship as a substantive political relationship rather than its negation. She argued that a noncitizenist politics may be essential to address today’s intractable challenges, especially in the context of migration governance, where realities invisible to citizens become visible to noncitizens.

In Search of Kaaps: From Slavery to Linguistic Citizenship Futures

Speaker: Quentin Williams
Date: 25 May 2023

Kaaps is a creole language influenced by Khoe and San languages, Portuguese, Bazaar Malay, Dutch, Arabic and English. Originating in the eighteenth-century Cape Colony, it developed as the informal language of the enslaved and marginalised. Quentin Williams traced the transformation of these “peculiar noises” into a coherent linguistic system, arguing that understanding Kaaps is vital to envisioning linguistic citizenship futures for its speakers today.