Kesi Mahendran, Ima Jackson and Anubhuti Kapoor
Introduction
This chapter uses the ideational site of European Citizenship in contribution to
articulating the mechanisms of discursive governance. It focuses on one central
challenge, that is, the development of the substantial figure of a dialogical citizen,
embodied, relational, dynamic, and compelled to act. Understanding this figure
provides one answer to a key question for discursive governance – in what ways do
political discourses resonate within some quarters of the public sphere and in others
they are resisted. To answer this question, as this book is demonstrating, is a matter of
the bi-directional mechanisms by which political discourses move between political
actors, institutional scaffolding, policy implementation and the public sphere. Our
focus in this chapter relates specifically to examining the different ways the public
sphere can be understood. How are publics and their opinions conceptualised or
perhaps more critically – how do publics constitute themselves?
Following Beland and Cox who state, ‘there is no politics without human
agency’ (Beland and Cox 2012, 12) we privilege the microlevel choices people make,
their sense of agency and their identifications.
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