This groundbreaking book describes theory, research, and practice that can be used in civic education courses and programs to help students from marginalized and minoritized groups in nations around the world attain a sense of structural integration and political efficacy within their nation-states, develop civic participation skills, and reflective cultural, national, and global identities.

Transnational skilled migrants are often thought of as privileged migrants with flexible citizenship. This book challenges this assumption by examining the diverse migration trajectories, experiences and dilemmas faced by tertiary-educated mobile Malaysian migrants through a postcolonial lens. It argues that mobile Malaysians’ culture of migration can be understood as an outcome and consequence of British colonial legacies – of race, education, and citizenship – inherited and exacerbated by the post-colonial Malaysian state. Drawing from archival research and interviews with respondents in Singapore, United Kingdom, and Malaysia, this book examines how mobile Malaysians make sense of their migration lives, and contextualizes their stories to the broader socio-political structures in colonial Malaya and post-colonial Malaysia. Showing how legacies of colonialism initiate, facilitate, and propagate migration in a multi-ethnic, post-colonial migrant-sending country beyond the end of colonial rule, this text is a key read for scholars of migration, citizenship, ethnicity, nationalism and postcolonialism.

"What is the state of the field of immigration and ethnic history; what have scholars learned about previous immigration waves; and where is the field heading? These are the main questions as historians, linguists, sociologists, and political scientists in this book look at past and contemporary immigration and ethnicity"--Provided by publisher.

In the United States, it is quite common to lay claim to the benefits of society by appealing to "taxpayer citizenship--the idea that, as taxpayers, we deserve access to certain social services like a public education. Tracing the genealogy of this concept, Camille Walsh shows how tax policy and taxpayer identity were built on the foundations of white supremacy and intertwined with ideas of whiteness. From the origins of unequal public school funding after the Civil War through school desegregation cases from Brown v. Board of Education to San Antonio v. Rodriguez in the 1970s, this study spans over a century of racial injustice, dramatic courtroom clashes, and white supremacist backlash to collective justice claims. Incorporating letters from everyday individuals as well as the private notes of Supreme Court justices as they deliberated, Walsh reveals how the idea of a "taxpayer" identity contributed to the contemporary crises of public education, racial disparity, and income inequality.

Many localities in America resisted integration in the aftermath of the Brown v. Board of Education rulings (1954, 1955). Virginia’s Prince Edward County stands as perhaps the most extreme. Rather than fund integrated schools, the county’s board of supervisors closed public schools from 1959 until 1964. The only formal education available for those locked out of school came in 1963 when the combined efforts of Prince Edward’s African American community and aides from President John F. Kennedy’s administration established the Prince Edward County Free School Association (Free School). This temporary school system would serve just over 1,500 students, both black and white, aged 6 through 23. Drawing upon extensive archival research, Resisting Brown presents the Free School as a site in which important rhetorical work took place. Candace Epps-Robertson analyzes public discourse that supported the school closures as an effort and manifestation of citizenship and demonstrates how the establishment of the Free School can be seen as a rhetorical response to white supremacist ideologies. The school’s mission statements, philosophies, and commitment to literacy served as arguments against racialized constructions of citizenship. Prince Edward County stands as a microcosm of America’s struggle with race, literacy, and citizenship.

While white residents of antebellum Boston and New Haven forcefully opposed the education of black residents, their counterparts in slaveholding Baltimore did little to resist the establishment of African American schools. Such discrepancies, Hilary Moss argues, suggest that white opposition to black education was not a foregone conclusion. Through the comparative lenses of these three cities, she shows why opposition erupted where it did across the United States during the same period that gave rise to public education. As common schooling emerged in the 1830s, providing white children of all classes and ethnicities with the opportunity to become full-fledged citizens, it redefined citizenship as synonymous with whiteness. This link between school and American identity, Moss argues, increased white hostility to black education at the same time that it spurred African Americans to demand public schooling as a means of securing status as full and equal members of society. Shedding new light on the efforts of black Americans to learn independently in the face of white attempts to withhold opportunity, Schooling Citizens narrates a previously untold chapter in the thorny history of America’s educational inequality.

In The Quest for Citizenship, Kim Cary Warren examines the formation of African American and Native American citizenship, belonging, and identity in the United States by comparing educational experiences in Kansas between 1880 and 1935. Warren focuses her study on Kansas, thought by many to be the quintessential free state, not only because it was home to sizable populations of Indian groups and former slaves, but also because of its unique history of conflict over freedom during the antebellum period. After the Civil War, white reformers opened segregated schools, ultimately reinforcing the very racial hierarchies that they claimed to challenge. To resist the effects of these reformers' actions, African Americans developed strategies that emphasized inclusion and integration, while autonomy and bicultural identities provided the focal point for Native Americans' understanding of what it meant to be an American. Warren argues that these approaches to defining American citizenship served as ideological precursors to the Indian rights and civil rights movements. This comparative history of two nonwhite races provides a revealing analysis of the intersection of education, social control, and resistance, and the formation and meaning of identity for minority groups in America.