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The Academy of Finland Development Research Funding

Funding period: 1.9.2015-31.8.2019

Growth into citizenship in civil society encounters is a consortium project which combines the expertise of development ethnography and philosophical pragmatism and joins the Ä¢¹½Ö±²¥ and the University of Oulu (University of Eastern Finland in 2015-2016). The project collaborates with the Makerere University in Uganda, and the University of Dodoma in Tanzania.

The main objective is to develop a new theoretical framework of growth into citizenship for development research in dialogue with philosophical pragmatism and  development ethnography. This objective is divided into three subtasks: 1) to investigate the theoretical conditions of growth into citizenship in the context of philosophical pragmatism; 2) to explore the processes of growth into citizenship in the encounters within civil society development interventions in selected cases in Uganda and Tanzania ; and 3) to experiment with methodology where pragmatism informs ethnography and ethnographic findings facilitate the construction of new theory. In the dialogical methodology used, pragmatism informs the fieldwork focus and the ethnographic findings contribute to the theory development. Each case provides a vignette of changing citizenships interpreted through John Dewey’s notion of learning as growth, in the context of value pluralism, and citizenship mainly conceptualized as learned abilities and habits of participation. Moreover, the construction and negotiation of the notion of citizenship is investigated within the contexts of civil society interventions explicitly addressing citizenship. The areas of interests include different perceptions of citizenship and their transformations along the negotiations, characteristics of different societal contexts, different patterns of social memberships, and political peculiarities of African political societies, as well as their potential implications to the conceptual understandings will be examined.