WORKSHOP FOUR
The
Rights and Responsibilities of Transnational Citizenship
March 11-13, 2004
The
ideas and
identities that emerge in response to emerging and historical transnational
dynamics, and the values and responsibilities associated with them,
are not well understood. Yet they have tremendous implications
for scholars
of communities and practitioners working to improve them. While it
is clear that many aspects of contemporary life transcend national
borders,
it is not clear what affect this has, if any, on the kinds of communities
with which individuals and institutions identify. As people increasingly
live their lives in multiple settings within multiple communities,
do they also adapt multiple identities? How do these identities
relate to
each other?
A workshop was held in March 2004, bringing together scholars
and practitioners representing various fields to examine the ideas
and identities associated
with transnational citizenship. Our conversations and conference sessions
focused on the following questions:
How do people articulate or
express how they value transnational belonging and what values are
associated with belonging in a global context?
Who is a transnational
actor? Under what circumstances? With what consequences? What do these
individuals say about their rights and
responsibilities?
Who doesn’t identify transnationally?
How are transnational values
agreed upon and transmitted? How do individual actors learn about
them? To what extent do people see themselves
as creators as opposed to receivers of global norms and practices?
What are the
characteristics of the institutional arenas in which transnational
belonging is expressed? How are ideas, norms, and practices negotiated
both within and between these institutions?
How does transnational
belonging conflict with other types of membership and how are these
conflicts managed? Are there instances when global
citizenship is untenable?
Is there anything really new about transnational collective
action or are these just different forms of what we have always done?
Is
it possible to agree on a set of basic rights? Are there certain areas
around which consensus is achievable and others that are not?
Are rights possible outside of legal frameworks? How can we synthesize what
philosophers, human rights and legal scholars, civil society activists,
scholars of religion, and other social scientists have to say about
these questions?
What new epistemological categories do we need to analyze
global activism? Are new methodologies required? How has the nation-state
lens shaped
knowledge production? How do power relations shape knowledge creation and
management?
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