Heterotopias of Citizenship

The study aims to reconstruct heterotopias of citizenship of selected Polish and Ukrainian youth organizations, and generate their analytical, critical, and comparative description. The project flows within the current of interdisciplinary research on contemporary forms and meanings of citizenship. At the theoretical level, it is inspired by the works of the so-called topographic turn, and in particular refers to Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia. Citizenship studied through the prism of this concept reveals its complex nature: concurrent projection of the past, present, and future, and simultaneous presence of different types and functions of spaces. In reconstructing the meanings of citizenship, we focus on two aspects: the structure and content of educational discourses and the pedagogy of youth organizations operating under different political and cultural conditions.