Making Citizenship Work: Culture and Community

Making Citizenship Work seeks to address questions of how a community reaches a place where it can actually make citizenship work. A second question addressed is "What does citizenship represent to different communities?"

Across thirteen chapters a collection of experts traverse multiple disciplines in analyzing citizenship from different points of access. Each chapter revolves around the premise that empowerment of communities, and individuals within the community, comes in different forms and is governed by multiple needs and visions. Authors utilize case studies to demonstrate the different roles that communities from a broad sector of our society adopt to accomplish constructing democratic processes that reflect their goals, needs, and cultures. Concurrently authors address the structural obstacles to the empowerment of communities, arguing that the democratic process does not and cannot accommodate the diverse communities of society within a single universalistic model of citizenship. They conclude that fundamentally citizenship is not simply a legal right, an obligation, a state of rights, but a practice, an action on the behalf of community.

Making Citizenship Work challenges conventional thinking about politics while also encouraging readers to go beyond the box that deters us from visualizing a human society. It is an ideal book for undergraduate and graduate courses in political science, sociology, history, social work and Ethnic Studies.

Rodolfo Rosales is a retired Associate Professor at The University of Texas at San Antonio where his teaching focused on political philosophy, urban politics, and ethnic politics. He has worked on questions of community, identity, and citizenship from a structure/agency perspective.