Competing and Contested Discourses on Citizenship and Civic Praxis

In this paper, I utilize complementary features of critical discourse analysis (CDA) and Actor-Network Theory (ANT) to trace and investigate issues of power, materiality, and reproduction embedded within notions of citizenship and civic engagement. I interrogate the often narrow and conservative political and public discourses in Arizona that inform civics education policy. To these, I juxtapose the enactment of citizenship by youth who use, produce, and share language materials and counter authoritative citizenship and civic discourses, especially, but not exclusively, in online contexts. I explore the questions: In what ways are discourses of civic engagement and citizenship assembled, interpreted, understood, enacted, and contested in Arizona? What are the relationships between civic education policy, discursive enactments of citizenship, and Latino youth’s online civic practices? I draw on a mixture of textual (language materials) and discursive (events, acts, and practices) data collected in Arizona to argue that youth are doing critical, Education Policy Analysis Archives Vol. 25 No. 28 SPECIAL ISSUE 2 yet unrecognized and undervalued, forms of civic engagement online, which could be incorporated in the formal civic education curriculum.


Introduction
Democracies, like the United States (US), rely on an informed and engaged citizenry to contribute to politics, local governance, and community initiatives.Civic participation takes many forms, including volunteering, canvassing, petitioning, and voting.Undergirded by the rights and responsibilities associated with citizenship, civic actions, such as boycotting and protesting, can also reflect the freedom to dissent.Civic involvement, thus, represents a complex enactment of discourses, where discourses refer not only to ways of constituting knowledge through written and verbal communication, but also to various forms of power that are distributed and circulate across social fields "and [that] can attach to strategies of domination as well as those of resistance" (Diamond & Quinby, 1988, p. 195).Civic learning, identity formation, and participation can, thus, be examined as a "discursive field" (Foucault, 1972), in which competing and contradictory discourses inform and organize social practices through which citizenship identities are made sense of and performed.In the US, public schools are tasked with formally cultivating knowledgeable, competition, and active citizens.All 50 states and the District of Columbia have some civic education requirement as part of their education policy.
However, formal civic education in schools often emphasizes "social initiation" by focusing on knowledge, skills, and values needed to fit into, and be productive members of, a society worthy of reproduction (Clark & Case, 1999).Such education stresses teaching students a common body of knowledge about U.S. history and government structure.The content and pedagogy of civic education in school is often disconnected from contemporary issues relevant in students' lives (Campbell, 2007;Levine, 2010).Levine and Lopez (2004) report that when 1,000 youth, ages 15-25, were asked to pick the theme that had been most emphasized in their social studies or American history classes, their most frequent choice was "the Constitution or the U.S. system of government and how it works" (p. 1).Just 11% selected "problems facing the country today" and 9% chose "racism and other forms of injustice in the American system" (p.1).Further, traditional civic education is especially poor at engaging ethnic, racial, and linguistic minority students and helping them form civic identities and skills that will guide their future political involvement (Reimers, 2006).
In my research, I look specifically at how Latino high school students, mostly of Mexicandescent, engage civically and develop their identities as citizens, both in and out of school civics classes.Previous studies show that Latino youth, in particular, have lower civic knowledge and expected participation than their non-Latino peers (Torny-Purta, Barbara, & Wilkenfeld, 2007).Compared to their non-Latino peers, Latino youth are more likely to view voting participation as a choice or preference rather than a right or responsibility, and they are less likely to state that voting is an important activity in which to participate (Lopez, 2003).Yet, the Latino youth studied by Torny-Purta et al. (2007) do report having social concerns, especially about issues affecting their daily lives.They expressed more positive attitudes toward immigrants and immigrant rights, for instance, than non-Latino youth.These findings resonate with the findings of a survey I conducted in 2015 with 857 high school students in a district where 83% of the students are Latino, and where the study in this paper is situated.
In my 2015 survey, all of the students reported using online resources and Social Network Platforms (e.g., Twitter, Facebook) to gather information about, discuss, and act on social and political issues.Recent research supports these findings, showing that youth access and create electronic resources and pathways (Bers, 2008), and, in the words of Coleman (2008), engage in "ecitizenship" by utilizing information technology (IT) to participate in society, politics, and government.Youth, as e-citizens, "despite their limited experience or access to resources… possess sufficiently autonomous agency to speak for themselves on agendas of their own making" (Coleman, 2008, p. 191), as well as on established, long standing cultural controversies.Further, they connect their online activism to offline actions, such as protests, so that the online practices become additive in their sphere of civic involvement (Gil de Zúñiga, Jung, & Valenzuela, 2012).Importantly, ecitizenship is not limited to middle and upper class white youth; racial, ethnic, and linguistic minorities actively use technology tools and platforms to address social issues that affect their daily lives (Kahne & Sporte 2008).
In this paper, which emerges from an ongoing ethnographic study of Latino high school students' civic and political engagement in Southern Arizona, I utilize complementary features of critical discourse analysis (CDA) and Actor-Network Theory (ANT).Drawing on survey, interview, observation, and document data, I trace and investigate issues of power, materiality, and reproduction embedded within notions of citizenship and civic engagement, in and out of the civic education program, in one school district with three traditional high schools.I juxtapose the discourses of formal civic education and the enactment of civic engagement by Latino youth who use, produce, and share language materials and counter authoritative citizenship and civic discourses, especially, but not exclusively, in online contexts.I explore the questions: In what ways are discourses of civic engagement and citizenship assembled, interpreted, understood, enacted, and contested in Arizona?What are the relationships between civic education policy, discursive enactments of citizenship, Latino high school students' online civic practices?

The Contestations and Conundrums of Citizenship and Civic Involvement
Citizenship is a contested and fluid concept in increasingly ethnically and culturally diverse nation-states like the U.S. legal citizenship is, indeed, deeply regulated and tied to nations.At the borders between nations, however, "the jurisdiction and authority of nations are teased and tested not only by neighboring states, but also by those within a nation's borders who feel inadequately defined or made illegitimate by them" (Koyama, 2015, p. 6).Banks (2008) explains that citizenship in a stratified society, such as in the US, often "result[s] in the treatment of some groups as secondclass citizens… as citizenship is determined, defined, and implemented by groups with power" (p.132) who determine the parameters of citizenship and civic engagement according to their own values and interests.
The limits of citizenship and civic participation are enacted unevenly and do not always correlate to legal citizenship status.This is the case in my study, situated in Southern Arizona, near the U.S.-Mexico border, where the rights of Latinos are often challenged.Recent Arizona legislation, Senate Bill 1070 (SB 1070), allows law enforcement to determine the immigration status of an individual during a routine stop, detention, or arrest.Nill (2011) reports that such legislation "has had the effect of rendering all brown-skinned Latinos suspects" (p.54), who are unfairly targeted.Some research suggests that SB 1070 has increased fear among the state's Latinos, even among those who are citizens (Toomey et al., 2014).Studies of Latino youth in Arizona report that the youth's awareness of SB 1070 is related to a diminished sense of self-esteem and a weaker sense of an American identity (Santos, Menjivar, & Godfrey, 2013), as well as increased school disengagement (Orozco & López, 2015).

Formal Civic Education
Disputes over the meaning of citizenship carry over to debates about civic education.Westheimer and Kahne (2004) note that there is a "spectrum of ideas about what good citizenship is and what good citizens do that are embodied by democratic education programs nationwide" (p.237).Civic education, after decades of dismissal or neglect, has gained favor in schools (Galston, 2001;Winton, 2010).However, it typically emphasizes an adaptive, normative, and conditioned, rather than active and critical approach to civic involvement (Westheimer, 2015).Most are replete with passive, narrow, and often dull curriculum that is disconnected from students' real lives (Bennett, Wells, & Rank 2009;Tully, 2008).I am particularly interested in how the normative discourses in policy and legislation influence the pedagogical practices and textual materials associated with formal civic education.
The gaps between civic education and the lives of young people are greater for racial, ethnic, and linguistic minorities, as curricula, textbooks, and lessons (language materials) continue to provide a distinctly Eurocentric perspective that supports limiting discourses on the parameters of citizenship and civic practice (Banks, 2008;Koyama, 2015).Less than one fifth of the youth surveyed in my 2015 survey identified any connections between their civic education and their personal civic activities.Strikingly, most students indicated that The American Civics Act (HB 2064) exam, which they must pass to graduate from high school, had no connection to their concerns about social issues.
Further, the communities to which these youth belong, are frequently the targets of ill considered "community projects" and the youth are often the subjects of school dropout and crime prevention programs rather than invited participants in democratic activism (Ginwright & Cammarota, 2002).Immigrant youth can be further conflicted when required to pledge allegiance to the U.S. flag or participate in other American-centered rituals.Those who are undocumented may feel even greater dissonance with traditional citizenship education because of their legal status and broader anti-immigration discourses.This is particularly true in Arizona, where an estimated 325,000 undocumented immigrants, mostly from Mexico, live (Pew Research Center, 2016).

Online Civic Engagement
Immigrant youth, who scholars (Abu El-Haj, 2007;Cammarota, 2007) have demonstrated are often conflicted between wanting to belong in America and maintaining their connections to ethnic, linguistic, religious, cultural, and national groups, adopt digital technologies that allow for transnational relationships and a building of intentional learning communities (McGarvey, 2004).Through "civic praxis," defined here as theoretically informed, reflective, risky, and creative practice committed to the well-being and freedom for all, these young people create semi-autonomous networks of action, often, in the US, beyond direct governmental and corporate power.Engaging in praxis utilizing digital technologies helps youth traverse social, cultural, institutional, linguistic, racial, ethnic, and religious borders that might otherwise impede civic engagement (Castells, 2015).It also allows youth without legal citizenship status, such as undocumented Mexican migrant youth in Arizona, to participate politically and civically.They engage in what I refer to specifically as "epraxis," in which individuals utilize the Web to participate in collective action around public issues, such as global warming, which may or may not be tied to citizenship.
The role of the Web in youth activism and social movements via diverse digital technologies, including blogs, websites, and social network platforms, highlights the ways in which individuals and groups target and use social network sites to gain information about political and social issues (Earl, Kimport, Prieto, Rush, & Reynoso, 2010;Garrett & Jensen, 2011;Pasek et al., 2010).Increasingly, youth are utilizing and creating online language materials across a combination of Social Networking Platforms (SNPs), such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, and Reddit, to articulate their identities (de Hann & Leander, 2011), to widen their social linkages and share ideas (Earl & Schussman, 2008), to enrich their academic learning (Erstad, 2012), and to raise their political awareness and engage civically (Pasek et al., 2010).In the U.S., this targeted use of the Web has been shown to be correlated with individual's civic and political participation, both on and offline (Zúñiga, Jung, & Valenzuela, 2012).However, in general, studies of the impact of online civic engagement on sustained offline civic and political actions have offered mixed results (see Garrett, 2006 for a review), and unlike the current study on which this paper is based, few studies have taken an ethnographic approach to the understanding of Latino youth's civic participation.

Theoretical and Methodological Considerations of CDA and ANT
While little discursive research exists on discourses of citizenship and civics, Bora and Hausendor (2006) bring together scholars in an edited volume to examine citizen participation by looking at how citizenship is communicated.They theorize citizenship "as an ongoing communicative achievement" (p.3), and challenge normative expectations of civic involvement.While their volume centers on the case of civic involvement in Europe's licensing of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), their theoretical conceptualization can inform studies, like mine, that look more broadly at social, political, and legal framing of citizenship and participation through a discursive lens.They suggest to: look at citizenship as social communication allows us to focus not only and primarily on the legal conditions and administrative direction, but firstly on the empirical ways by means of which these condition and directions are manifested and communicated within the participation process itself.(p.24) Fairclough, Pardoe, and Szerszynski (2006) add that examining citizenship as a communication achievement requires us to move "away from preconceptions about what citizenship is" and forces us "to look at how it's done-at the range of ways in which people position themselves and others as citizens in participatory events" (p.98).Specifically, here, I focus on how youth position themselves through their online civic actions or e-praxis, and how they are simultaneously situated by, and push back against, dominant and authoritative discourses of citizenship and civic engagement.I follow Fairclough (1993Fairclough ( , 1995) ) in approaching critical discourse analysis (CDA) from the perspective that language, an irreducible part rather than an encompassing equivalent to social life, is dialectically linked with other elements of the social.Through this lens, language is a situated social practice, a mode of action that mutually shapes and is formed through the social.CDA encourages the exploration of the ways in which language is histopolitically and socially constructed and also how it acts to constitute social identities, social relations, and systems of knowledge, meaning, and belief.Informed by Foucault (1972), I pay attention to the "relationship of language to other social processes and how language works within power relations" (Taylor, 2004, p. 436).Linkages between texts or language materials and social practice are mediated by discourse.In this study, "the communication of citizenship cannot be separated from the social arena in which it actually takes place" (Bora & Hausendorf, 2006, p. 27).In fact, the discourses of citizenship and civic practices both reflect and are constitutive of the Arizona context in which my study participants act.
While CDA is heterogeneous, the various approaches share a central tenet: "[C]ritical analysis raises awareness concerning the strategies used in establishing, maintaining and reproducing (asymmetrical relations of power as enacted by means of discourse" (Tenorio, 2011, p. 184).CDA brings to the analytic fore, the tensions between dominant ideologies that undergird societal norms, mandates, and laws, and also the competing and contradictory ideologies that emerge, coexist with, and challenge the dominant beliefs and principles.CDA-inspired studies are "designed to question the status quo, by detecting, analyzing, and also resisting and counteracting enactments of power abuse as transmitted in private and public discourses" (p.187).They tease apart and interrogate the interactions between hegemonic social practices and discourses, and "expose the manipulative nature of discursive practices" (p.188) by explicitly demonstrating how certain beliefs and ideas become legitimized and authorized through discourses.CDA informed studies probe the persuasive and pervasive potential of discourse to set norms that can result in acceptance and complicity.
CDA examines multiple elements of discursive events, including most prominently, the language materials, the practice including the production, distribution, and interpretation of the materials, and their participation and constitution of social practice with an attention to context.Fairclough (1993) summarizes: [CDA] aims to systematically explore often opaque relationships of causality and determination between (a) discursive practices, events and texts, and (b) wider social and cultural structures, relations and processes; to investigate how such practices, events and texts arise out of and are ideologically shaped by relations of power an struggles over power; and to explore how the opacity of these relationships between discourse and society is itself a factor securing power and hegemony.(p.135) Those putting CDA to work share a curiosity into what language materials do, how they are generated and used by human actors, and the ways in which they are made to move across multiple power differentials.
Despite applying a broad lens to the study of discourse, Fairclough (2003) reminds us that CDA is "one analytical strategy amongst many, and it often makes sense to use discourse analysis in conjunction with other forms of analysis, for instance ethnography or forms of institutional analysis" (p.2).I do combine CDA with ethnography.Specifically, my approach to the study of discourse is heavily influenced by my understandings and use of Actor-Network Theory (ANT).My goal in this piece is not to reconcile the different treatments of language materials, discourses, and social practices by ANT and CDA, but rather to draw on the commonalities of the two approaches to offer a reasoned discourse analysis.I utilize the CDA terminology throughout the paper and use ANT as a supportive approach; however, in the next few paragraphs, I discuss the relationship between main components and concepts in CDA and ANT.
Briefly, ANT can best be understood as a related set of material-semiotic frameworks, rather than a singular theory that focuses on how disparate human actors, their material objects, and discursive practices become linked to perform actions.Network thinking aims to describe "the messy practices of relationality and materiality of the world" (Law, 1986, p. 2).There is great variability in connections between elements of the social, including discursive ones.In the words of Law (1999), networked "elements retain their spatial integrity by virtue of their position in a set of links or relations" (6, italics in original) rather than because of some inherent form.
CDA also emphasizes the understanding of the iterative relationships and positioning of social actors during discursive events, which include three dimensions: "it is a spoken or written language text, it is an instance of discourse practice involving the production and interpretation of text, and it is a piece of social practice" (Fairclough, 1993, p. 136).In their analysis of discursive citizenship enactment, Fairclough,Pardoe,and Szerszynski (206), highlight the ways in which discursive events are not isolates but rather "part of an intertextual chain or network of texts and events" (bold in the original, p. 106).As is done in ANT-inspired studies, these authors aim to trace the interconnections, the interactions, and the ongoing relationships between various actors, their textual language objects, participatory events, and broader discourses.In studies informed by ANT and CDA, particular events, individual utterances, and forms of action are treated explicitly as interconnected.
In discursive events framed by CDA, actors draw on, and respond to, other events and texts, and language materials become saturated with references to other texts, discourses, and social practices.They are involved in an interdiscursive process of creatively drawing on the potential range of [already] established" (Fairclough et al., 2006, p. 107) discursive events and also emergent forms of discourse.Bits and pieces of text and practice are selectively integrated, or appropriated, in new discursive events, and through this process, they are often not reproduced intact.Rather, as is the case in an ANT analysis, these things are circulated, and embedded in new texts and practices in new forms.They are morphed, changed, transformed or in ANT terminology, "translated." In ANT, a network or assemblage develops, expands, and contracts through translation.Acts become "dislocated"; they are "borrowed, distributed, suggested, influenced, dominated, betrayed, [and] translated" (Latour, 2005, p. 46).According to Fenwick and Edwards (2010), "when translation has succeeded, the actor-network is mobilized to assume a particular role and perform knowledge in a particular way" (p.10)-in this study, the enactment of citizenship and civic engagement.Krieger and Belliger (2014), note that through translation, actors become aligned "into heterogeneous, hybrid, and scalable associations that can be termed networks" (p.57).In CDA, this process, when applied to texts, discourse practices, and social practices is often referred to as "recontextualization" (Fairclough et al., 2006, p. 108) However, in ANT, texts, as material objects, ideas, and discourses, are viewed as actors, or more precisely "actants."In ANT, the human actor is purposefully displaced from the center of research to examine the temporal unfolding of the network of actants, where an actant is "any independent entity that, at any time, can acquire the ability to make things happen with the actornetwork" (Cerulo, 2009, p. 534).Actants, including language materials, can, according to Latour (1994) be of two types-"intermediaries" that transport meaning as they circulate in a network and "mediators" which "transform, translate, distort, and modify the meaning of the elements they are supposed to carry" (39).It is likely that most researchers utilizing CDA can agree that texts and other language materials are intermediaries, and also that they can mediate information and knowledge for human actors.Yet, scholars employing CDA do not directly position texts as actors.
In CDA, language materials, especially texts, are examined for their roles in the sense and meaning making done by human actors in the social world.Human actors create, interpret, challenge, and utilize texts within structural constraints, and language materials mediate actions.For instance, in this piece, the civic experience of a youth who posts ideas about deportation and answers others' questions on a blog is different from that of a youth who reads about citizenship rights in a textbook.Interacting on the blog brings the first youth into contact with a myriad of ideas and people.The blog itself influences how the youth spends time, how she expresses her ideas, and with whom she interacts.According to Fairclough (2003): Texts as elements of social events…have causal effects-i.e. they bring about changes.Most immediately, texts can bring about changes in our knowledge (we learn things from them), our beliefs, our attitudes, values and so forth…In sum, texts have causal effects upon, and contribute to changes in, people (beliefs, attitudes, etc.), actions, social relations, and the material world.(p.8).
In CDA, language is frequently regarded as a somewhat abstract social structure.CDA oscillates between the examination of specific texts and "the relative durable structuring and networking of social practices" (Fairclough, 2003, p. 3) of which the structuring of language is one element.CDA, like ANT, refuses the micro-macro binary.

Applying ANT-Influenced CDA to an Arizona Study
Data presented and analyzed in this paper emerges from an ongoing ethnographic study of high school students' civic engagement in a Southern Arizona School District, which began in the fall of 2014.The author of this piece is the Principal Investigator (PI) on that study, which centers on the overarching question: How do high school students, especially Latinos, assemble networks of civic and political engagement around issues of immigration and citizenship?To begin the study, the PI and a collaborator, Sumaya Frick, developed and administered the 2015 survey, already introduced in this paper, online during a technology course common to the three high schools in the district.Survey findings (N=857) indicate that the youth were concerned with multiple issues, including immigration and citizenship rights.They unanimously reported using Web resources and SNPs, more often accessed by hand-held mobile devices than computers, to gather information about, and act on, social and political issues.However, when asked how they most frequently engaged with these issues, the youth reported that they discussed them with friends, families, and at school.They also participated in clubs and groups associated with individual causes and issuesespecially those relating to immigration and citizenship.
The survey findings led to the second phase of the study, in which the PI collected interview, observational, and online and offline documents, between June 2015 and August 2016 (See Table 1).The second phase of the study is best characterized as a pilot for a three-year study of Latino high school students' civic engagement projected to begin in the summer of 2017.In phase two, I explored, more deeply, the findings of the survey through interviews, participant observation, and document analysis, in order to inform the development of the three-year study.Participants in the second phase of the study were recruited by what is often referred to as "snowball" or "chain" sampling, in which one participant-in this case, a student who had taken the initial surveyrecruited other another, and so on.This is typical of ANT-informed studies, in which the researcher aims to trace interactions and relationships between actors.Each additional participant was asked to suggest Web sites and SNPs from which I should collect information.The teachers, community members, and government officials in this phase were recruited directly by the PI who has a collaborative working relationship with the school district, and who has attended many community activities and events associated with citizenship and immigration rights in the past three years.The data from the 2015 survey were analyzed with the co-researcher with whom I developed and administered the survey.I transcribed all of the interviews, which I alone conducted.Pseudonyms and generic titles are used, and some identifying information has been slightly changed, in an effort to maintain confidentiality.Actual names and addresses of websites and SNPS that are public and open-access are used, but member-only online groups and individual online accounts of youth are assigned pseudonyms.All data has been coded and managed using NVivo qualitative data analysis software.So far, data has been gathered topically, and analyzed under first level codes, such as "immigration," "civic action," and "e-praxis."

Talking and Doing Citizenship and Engaging Civically
In the findings, which are organized into two interrelated themes, I "examine underlying issues of power, social inequality, (re)production of dominance, as well as the formation of identities within policy 'talk' and/or legislative texts" (Lester, Lochmiller, & Gabriel, 2016, p. 2).In the first theme, I focus on how discourses at the state level, across governing bodies and related organizations, impact social practices in schools.In particular, I discursively analyze how The American Civics Act (HB 2064), which was legislated in 2015, aims to test the civics knowledge and identities of Arizona high school students.The second theme aims to demonstrate how social practice-in this case, the students' online civic participation-influences discourse.It illuminates how youth practice or "do" citizenship through their online civic activities or "e-praxis."I demonstrate the ways in which "dominant ideologies are adopted or challenged, and in which competing and contradictory ideologies exist" (Tenorio, 2011, p. 184) by analyzing how youth's actions become part of a discourse on citizenship that differs from those set forth in state legislation and education policy centered on civic education.Findings and analysis in both sections address the research questions: In what ways are discourses of civic engagement and citizenship assembled, interpreted, understood, enacted, and contested in Arizona?What are the relationships between civic education policy, discursive enactments of citizenship, and Latino youth's online civic practices?

The Impact of Dominant Discourses on Civic Education
Civics education serves as a socially sanctioned way in which youth gain knowledge about national and state organization and governance, and become acquainted with structured government procedures.In Arizona, it has become situated by governing bodies and educational institutions as one of the only ways for the State to ensure the wellbeing and integrity of democracy.The Civics Education Initiative, an affiliate of the Arizona-based Joe Foss Institute, began, in 2014, to draw attention to the dire need for civic education.On its website, the text of the Initiative states the youth need to have: civics and lessons on the Bill of Rights, Constitution, and how our government works are being left by the wayside.Students are not learning how to run our country, how government is meant to operate as outlined in the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and more importantly, the history behind how our country came to bethe philosophy behind America's values.(http://civicseducationinitiative.org/aboutus/) The message of the Initiative, which has targeted programs and lobbying efforts in Arizona, is that students are citizens in waiting.Its discourse centers on creating patriots by "educating young people for citizenship [as] an intrinsically normative task" (Levine, 2010, p. 115).Students need to be initiated into their role as citizens through learning-usually memorizing-a canon of facts about history, legislation and government.In such education, notions of citizenship that emphasize the relevance of the nation-state are reproduced.Effective civic education in schools, then, in this discourse, should produce the kind of knowledgeable citizens that those in the Institute value.
The call for students to get a better civic education by the Civics Education Initiative was not new.An earlier study of civic education in Arizona claimed: "Arizona has pushed civic education to the back burner… [and]…civic education is not being effectively delivered" ( (Haas, Elliott, Hinde, Kaplan, & Schrade, 2009, p. 2).The report's authors expressed their conviction that "[c]ivic education can turn young people into fully-engaged citizens" (p. 2), and encouraged Arizona policymakers to use their report to inform future decisions about civics education in public schools.Since its publication, government officials, and lobbyists, including those associated with the Civics Education Initiative have integrated the findings of this 2009 study into a discourse supporting more robust civics education in public schools and The American Civics Act, even though the first author, Haas, was not in favor of the Act (Dale, 2015).
Leading up to the passage of The American Civics Act, portions of other studies, reports, and documents were also circulated and became embedded in the discourse surrounding the need for schools to place more emphasis on civics education.These bit and pieces of previous discursive events became taken up in an interdiscursive process that can be understood as an assemblage.In particular, the statistic that nearly two-thirds of Arizona high school students tested below proficient on the civics portion of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in 2006 was cited not only in the 2009 report by Haas et al., but also in at least two reports from The Civics Education Initiative, which was partially credited, through their lobbying efforts, for Arizona's adoption of The American Civics Act.On its website, the premise underlying the Act is offered: "It requires high school students, as a condition for graduation, to pass a test on 100 basic facts of U.S. history and civics, from the United States Citizenship Civics Test -the test all new U.S. citizens must pass…" (http://civicseducationinitiative.org/).The Initiative presents the concept as set of simple and commonsense facts-without room for argument.The hegemonic message is this: If we want youth to be capable citizens, they need to know a set of standardized facts about the US, which should be taught in civics.
However, the discursive rationale for formal civic education represents not a set of circulating facts, but rather can be best understood as group of "factishes," convenient and necessary combinations of fact and fetish, which are embedded in sense making and evaluation (Latour, 2010).These factishes found their way into textual materials circulated by groups, such as The Civics Education Initiative, and were used to influence and persuade Arizona lawmakers and the public, to support The American Civics Act and civic education.The reports and websites became important elements in the discourse, and in translating or transforming legislators and laypersons into civic education supporters.From an ANT perspective, the "human and nonhuman alike become interlocking units-parts that, together, form a coherent whole" (Cerulo, 2009, p. 534), and that, here, contribute to the functioning and distributed action of a normative discourse.
All seven of the government officials interviewed in the study espoused the authoritative discourse.They reiterated the importance of civics education as the main avenue through which youth become "good and productive members of our State."According to a state official who serves on a regional education advisory board, "civics helps kids see themselves as citizens and get their place in the working of the state."He explains: Civics, like we're now doing it in Arizona, makes it clear that we have expectations of citizenships…Arizona doesn't suffer slackers lightly.It's not a free ride.Do your part.That's not us.Not American….We teach them how a democracy works and what they can do to be part of it.(Interview, February 11, 2016) In fact, the seven officials placed great emphasis on the responsibility that youth have to the State and, to quote a regional official, to the "laws of our land."The same authority suggested that while it is important for youth to "volunteer for politicians or causes and canvass or do phone banking or whatever," it is even more critical that they learn the laws and underlying reasons why Arizona works as it does (Personal communication, September 22, 2015).The discourse running through the interviews of the seven officials centers on preparing the "right" kind of citizens-ones who know, uphold, and if necessary, enforce the laws.What was absent in the narratives of the officials was the possibility that there are multiple ways to enact citizenship, including dissent and resistance.In fact, one official repeatedly coupled "citizen" with "good" and "Christian."He stated that the aim of a good civic education "was to make good Christian citizens like we've had through history in this great land" (Interview, May 14, 2016).
A staff member of one civic advocacy organization explicitly revealed the antiimmigrant/anti-Mexican sentiments that some suspect undergirds the push for the Act.She explained: Look, we've got lots of immigrants here, and I'm not saying they shouldn't be here.
No one is saying the legal ones shouldn't be here.They're Americans….They've got to act American.They need to just be like responsible citizens, do their part, and everything goes well….Their kids have to learn early on this is how we do it in our country… It's better if we just teach them.(Interview, November 6, 2015) In her explanation, responsible citizens are those who "act American," which is a thinly veiled code for those who "act White" rather than Mexican.Further, "we"-those of us who do act like Americans-should be the ones to teach immigrants' children how to act, presumably so they don't act like their parents.This teaching is best done, according to her and the other adults interviewed in the study, through formal civic education.Five of the other adults interviewed stated that, for Mexican youth, who are not "legal," or lived with family members who are undocumented, having civic education helps them understand the importance of citizenship.One regional official stated that "by delivering these kids a strong civics curriculum, we'll help them see why being illegal is not the way to go" (Personal communication, August 11, 2015).For Arizona youth, especially those who are not, because of citizenship status or age, allowed to vote, there are, according to the discourse examined in this section, limited ways to enact their civic responsibilities.The slots for participants to act as citizens are premised upon youth being provided civics education in schools.All of the potential ways in which youth can engage, as suggested by the adult study participants, center on actions perceived essential to good citizenship and governance, which depend on compliance and consensus through conventional channels.Youth's participation is narrowly defined through legal and social notions of well-established civic practices.Youth are to "just act like citizens," remarked an Arizona elected official.
The discourse that youth-especially immigrant youth, and even more specifically, Latino youth-need a formal civics education in order to act like citizens, whether or not they have been granted legal citizenship status, permeates much of Arizona.This discourse reflects the solidification of knowledge and guides discursive and social action.It enables a particular reality that fits with the nationalist tendencies of Arizona law.It becomes "defined by the activities participants engage in [namely, civics education], and the power enacted and reproduced through them" (Tenorio, 2011, p. 187).The discourse, or a combination of related discourses, which we can call a nationalistic discourse, serves the particular histopolitical and social context of Arizona.One result of such discourse is The American Civics Act.
The American Civics Act.The American Civics Act requires high school students to correctly answer at least 60 out of 100 questions on a multiple choice exam based on the civics portion of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services' naturalization test, which is passed on the first attempt by 91% of immigrants taking it to gain citizenship.1According to the Civics Education Initiative website: "[It] is a first step to ensure all students are taught basic civics about how our government works, and who we are as a nation…things every student must learn to be ready for active, engaged citizenship."Next steps, according to a civics education advocate, who volunteers for We the People, a network of state and national organizations the offers civic textbooks and resource materials for public schools in Arizona, are for the "State to update its civic education materials and offer updated professional development to social studies teachers…Everyone must get on board and wise up to civics" (Personal communications, January 15, 2016).
A government official added that "schools needed to reorient [themselves] to the significance of civics" (Interview, June 9, 2015).Certainly, schools will need to attend to the legislation, which imposes onto high schools new discursive practices that will ultimately alter some of the work done by administrators, teachers, and students, just as the high-stakes testing in English and mathematics demands of No Child Left Behind did.One high school history teacher, who uses a pseudonym, wrote on an invite-only Facebook group for Phoenix teachers: "Now my principal will care more about what is going on in my classroom…I might even get better supplies, some new texts…I'll definitely see my value rise…" Others responded that they would need to "step up their game" in teaching civics, but that they looked forward to the challenge.
Infusing state government discourse into public schools via The American Civics Act is a good example of the iterative relationship between the government and the populace, especially in matters of civics and citizenships.It is also reflective of the ways in which private interests, like those of The Foss Institute, whose motto is "Patriotism Matters," circulates in discourses and then becomes embedded in government practices.Public schools are often positioned as the mediators between those governing and those being governed-as the arbitrator of discourse and practice.Fairclough et al. (2006) summarize that: the ways in which conceptions/preconstructions of citizenship may be very implicit and highly embedded within social practices.The discourses, practices, and materialities of governance inevitably make available to people from a range of resources out of which specific instances of 'citizenship' can be assembled.(p.100) For youth who are required to pass the civics examination, one way-perhaps, the most important way as evidenced by the data in the last section-the government expects them to form their identities as citizens is by demonstrating their knowledge on a standardized multi-choice exam.With some irony, even youth who do not hold legal citizenship are expected to pass the examination.The test serves as a material correlation of citizenship; as a text, it is embedded with what Billing (1995) has referred to as "banal citizenship," characterized by an agreed upon set of information, which the accumulation and mastery of signifies that one is, indeed, a citizen.The examination's limited attributes are a result of "qualculation," a process described by Callon and Law (2005) through which arithmetic and qualitative elements are latched together in acts of calculation.Through qualculation, variable, and somewhat abstract phenomena, such as citizenship identity and civic engagement, are rendered coherent and calculable.The mandated exam is part of a national, if not international, discourse on education and accountability, in which exams are part of what Suchman (1994) refers to as "technologies of accountability" (p.188), in which accountability can become an evaluation or calculation-a measured way of categorizing, classifying, and reckoning knowledge and practice.Gorur (2011) notes that "'accounting for' involves explanations-making connections between events to explain (or explain away) situations" (p. 6).In this case, the civics exam is enacted as the necessary governmental intervention in an educational, and societal, crisis discursively portrayed and performed as a threat to the well-being of the republic in Arizona.As an accountability tool, crafted from intersecting texts, discourses, and practices, the test privileges a certain form of citizenship and civic knowledge, while ignoring others, such as the online engagement of youth discussed in the next section.

The Potential Impact of Youth's Social Practices on Discourse
While The American Civics Act was supported, by many teachers and politicians, as an important accomplishment toward creating a more engaged citizenry, others, like Arizona State Senator David Bradley, the lone Senator who opposed the Act, notes that that simply passing another graduation requirement does not equal equals greater civic involvement.In an interview in Truth Revolt, he states: "My point now is tests don't make citizens, citizens are tested by their actions" (O'Connor, 2016).Others have opposed the exam because of its reliance on multi-choice questions, the answers to which are often memorized (Greenblath, 2015).
Citizenship is participatory, and the youth in the study demonstrated through their actions that they understand that citizenship is all too often a "membership category, which is bound to the legal-administrative framing and its communicative realization in terms of social positioning" (Bora & Hausendorf, 2006, p. 26).Being civically engaged and the ways of enacting citizenship are intricately dependent on the interactional social positioning between participants, where participants include the state, lesser governing bodies, policies, institutions, groups, and individuals.As described by Alejandro, an 18-year-old high school graduate, "being a citizen, or doing what's right, cuz we aren't all citizens, means having an opinion, taking a stand, and doing something about it…not waiting for someone else to do it" (Interview, March 8, 2016).The other 11 youth interviewed echoed Alejandro's vision of citizenship-one of being civically active.All of them relied on some combination of Web resources and personal contacts, including those at home, schools, and churches, to get information about protests, rallies, and petitions related to immigration, deportation, and citizenship.However, nine of the 12 youth noted that they relied on the Web, mostly SNPs like Facebook, Twitter, Vine, and Tumblr, to "spread the word" and to set up face-toface civic actions.
Combining online and offline actions was exemplified by Cynthia, who posted, on her Tumbler page, the caption "Sí, se puede" under a protest flyer after Obama's DAPA (Deferred Action for Parental Accountability), a program intended to keep undocumented adults with U.S. born children in the U.S., was legally blocked (May 19, 2015).Cynthia, like nine of the other youth interviewed, purposefully uses a combination of SNPs and face-to-face actions to exert her rights as a citizen, the rights denied her parents because they are undocumented.She explains: It's like not enough to blah, blah, blah on twitter or whatever.You like need to set it up [online] and then go do it….I use Tumblr, Snapchat, Twitter, Vine to get out the word-to say, like this is going on, here's the info, now get there and do it.(Interview, April 17, 2016) According to James, an 18-year-old who graduated in 2016, going back between online and offline spheres is "just totally normal…not something to be made a thing of…it's what we do."(Personal communication, June 15, 2016).Most of the youth in the study agree, noting that they wouldn't necessarily know how to become involved civically without SNPs, but admit that they become more excited by offline pro-immigration activities and events.
Assembling both online and offline elements into a larger network of civic engagement, these youth proposed a discourse about citizenship and participation quite different from the one reified in government documents and education policy.Instead of discussing citizenship as a status one achieves by having particular (tested) knowledge, the youth all agreed that "doing something" was inherent to their understandings of citizenship.Cynthia summarized the tensions between the official status of citizenship and her approach to citizenship: It can't be like they [the government] say.It's like not about knowing who was the president back then or who sits on the Supreme Court…It's about using that info, or challenging that that is the info…I'm definitely like about putting what I know to action, to doing things…that's being a citizen.(Interview, April 17, 2016) Cynthia and other students' discourse around what being an engaged citizen is differs most dramatically from the authoritative discourse in its emphasis on action, on actually doing things to demonstrate, or enact, your citizenship.For the Latino youth, knowing information about the government, the country's history, and politics is not sufficient to render you a citizen.Citizenship, for them, requires acts.
Even the three students in the study who were undocumented, or who lived with undocumented family members, placed emphasis on action.They stated that they mostly used SNPs to take action.One, Jessica, said she is "into creating petitions on sites like Care2Care" because there she can see how many people her petitions reach.She explains: I like seeing the numbers grow and well, then I don't have to let my family [who has undocumented members] know what I'm doing.They're scared I'll get caught or something and ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] will show up at our door.But, I'm not doing nothing wrong…I'm exerting my rights…I'm scared, but it's my right as a citizen.(Interview, July 13, 2016) In fact, Jessica and five other students declared that they were afraid of getting arrested or drawing ICE attention to their families and friends.One, Pablo, succinctly summarized the fear: "Miss, I have two people talking in my head when I do something.One says, 'you better do this,' and the other says, 'you better not do this or else.'" (Interview, July 13, 2016).He said the first voice usually wins because what are at stake are not only his rights, but his friends, his families, and all the people of Mexican-descent.
The youth take action, sometimes at some personal risk, to dismantle the structures and practices around citizenship, freedoms, and rights that they deem unfair.Fairclough's (1993) discussion of the bounds of discursive practice, in general, illuminates the narrow discourse surround formal civics education, and also speaks to the limits the youth aim to subvert with their actions.He explains: The seemingly limitless possibilities of creativity in discursive practice suggested by the concept of interdiscursivity-and endless combination and recombination of genres and discourses-are in practice limited and constrained by the state of hegemonic relations and hegemonic struggle.Where, for instance, there is relatively stable hegemony [like schools], the possibilities for creativity are likely to be tightly constrained.(p.137) The youth, because of the constraints, and the dangers of participating in more traditional forms of civic engagement, such as canvassing and volunteering, that can prompt unwelcomed inquiry into their and their family's citizenship statuses, opt to use online avenues, to exert civic force on issues that matter to them.
Javier, a 17-year-old high-school senior, started two Facebook groups, one devoted to opposing the deportations of Mexican parents and the other tracking the abuses of SB1070, a 2010 piece of Arizona legislation that allows police offers to determine an individual's immigration status during a lawful stop, detention, or arrest.At the time of his interview, 3,549 people followed his SB 1070 page.When asked about why he started the pages, he outlined his thoughts on activism and civic praxis: Anglos don't post about the abuses of laws, I mean the illegalities and all.They post cute little kitties and comics and shit that makes them look like dumb asses, dumb asses with too much time….I'm Chicano.I'm angry.Sometimes out of my head angry, Miss.I'm political, you know.Call it civically engaged or whatever.I call it woke…Can't be sitting on my ass, waiting for someone to make my situation better, to get my parents back into this country, to keep my sister safe, to know the law inside and out…It's up to me…I am up to it.(Interview, May 9, 2016) Javier understands the stratifications along racial, ethnic, class, and linguistic lines in Arizona, and his e-praxis serves to disrupt those lines, if only among limited networks.His online discursive practice and the language materials he produces and shares online aim to change social practice."I just want," he says, "to make a difference, to make it okay to be Mexican in America."Because hegemony, enacted, reified, and challenged through discursive acts "is a more or less partial and temporary achievement, an 'unstable equilibrium' which is a focus of struggle, open to disarticulation and rearticulation" (Fairclough, 1993, p. 137), we can imagine that the actions of Javier and other youth may make a difference.Again, the structure of the youth's responses stand in contrast to those of the adults in the study.The students' focus on how they are putting knowledge to work, in efforts to make change.They do not talk about a particular canon of knowledge related to citizenship and they do not, like the adults, suggest that formal civic education in schools, is what makes a difference in the way they take action civically or politically.Instead, they center their discourse on how they can work for change, "make a difference," or "put what they know to work."The youth talk about how they exert their rights.
One tangible way in which the youth's e-praxis is obvious is in the way their online activities supplement their formal civics education.Ten of the youth stated that what they read and did online around issues of immigration, DAPA, and DACA, helped them understand some of their civics lessons.Pablo makes the connection clear.The online information, or texts, accessed by Pablo and the other youth in the study are important as they are "the semiotic dimensions of [discursive] events" (Fairclough, 2009, p. 164), in which are embedded differing discourses and traces of contrasting ideologies (Weiss & Wodak, 2003).They are appropriated and interdiscursively "put into practice by enacting, inculcating, or materializing them" (Tenorio, 2011, p. 186).In textual form, the discursive event is demystified and made accessible to wider participation.The online texts become part of intertextual chain or assemblage, in which the youth engage in the interdiscursive process of selectively and innovatively drawing together multiple elements to inform their discourses.More broadly, though, it is still unclear whether, over time, the civics classes at schools might come to better reflect what youth are actually doing, if they might integrate ways of acting civically online into the lessons and assignments.The survey findings indicate that prior to the taking of the exam, the youth did not know information they would be expected to recount.When asked what they thought would be on the new civics exam and given eight possible answers, 47.6% or 308 youth replied "I do not know;" 38.49% responded "social issues" and 32.46% chose "current events."The students were also able to provide additional comments on this question.Of the 20 comments, three stated that what was to be tested was irrelevant to civics; one of them noted; "Nothing relevant to what's important."Another replied: "A single test should not define us, because anyone can fail the stupid ass test.School isn't for the kids anymore, it's more for the government."(Survey, May 13-15, 2015).To further probe any connections between what youth are doing and what is being taught in civics classes, the next phase of data collection will include an examination of the civics curriculum, interviews with the teachers, observations of civic lessons, and civic exam results.

Reconceptualizing Civic Engagement
The ways in which the Latino youth in this study engage civically are exciting.They draw together their online and offline networks, and allow them to participate, and potentially direct, discourses around contemporary issues, such as immigration.The online spaces of activity, especially SNPS serve as portals into the youth's ideas and feelings.According to Rosa, a high school senior, "on Facebook, I can express my true feelings about my family's suffering and my fears about deportation" (Personal communication, August 25, 2016).Importantly, although in need of further analysis, youth in the study also interacted online with those with more diverse views than those held by their friends and family.For instance, on a Webpage that retold the story of an undocumented mother's fear for her U.S.-born children if she were deported, Cynthia commented that "the destruction of Mexican families is the real crisis, not illegal immigration."The post made directly after hers, read: "So she [the mother in the story] has been in the US illegally for 17 years without bothering to file for citizenship-not much sympathy from this end…" Cynthia showed me the online conversation thread on her smart phone.She then explained how that and other posts help her realize how angry people are at "my people," and it convinced her to become involved with Keep Tucson Together, a legal clinic that aids people completing immigration applications.
The civic actions taken by youth, especially online, need to be recognized as crucial participation, and more must be done to understand how, for instance, Cynthia, uses what she learns in the online platforms, to develop as a citizen.I encourage research on citizenship and civic involvement to include formal public participation and well-established practices, but also studies that explore the enactments of citizenship and engagement outside of institutions.I look forward to more scholarship centered on the ways in which various forms of participation intersect, conflict, and create a dialectic process of citizenship.As demonstrated in this paper, these forms are often in response to the others, and therefore need to take into account the dialectic between the formal and informal practices of citizenship and civic engagement.In particular, for youth of Mexican-descent, who are all too often disregarded in discourses of civic engagement in Arizona, and for others who experience exclusion from governments, documenting what they actually do civically is important to our understandings of civic practice.
To further theorize and study citizenship discursively, researchers can explore in detail the social positioning and network building inherent in the enactment of citizenship.As Fairclough et al., 2006) remind us: "the empirical analysis must explore the dynamic relationship between normative, social, institutional and theoretical pre-constructions of citizenship and what is communicatively achieved in participatory events" (p.102).The tensions between authorized categories of citizenship and civic practice and varied participatory forms of these categories must be illuminated.The discourses or ways of representing particular views of citizenship and civic engagement can be examined in a combination of macro and micro analysis.For me, despite the differences between ANT and CDA, considering the assemblage of discursive events adds not only methodological direction, but also more explicit linkages between texts, discursive practices, and social practices.education policy analysis archives editorial board

Table 1
Summary of Data Collected during the Second Phase of the Study He explains: I didn't know why I should care about the Electoral College….Miss, I don't mean to be disrespectful.I just didn't get it.No one in my family can vote [because of their immigration status] and I'm too young.Then, I started following Mi Familia Vota [a national non-profit civic engagement organization that advocates on social and economic issues that impact the Latino community] (http://www.mifamiliavota.org/).I started seeing how voter redistricting and new voter laws were hurting my people, and I paid attention…to both sides, I got to see the big debate.(Interview,April 20, 2016)