Lived citizenship and democracy in times of retreat and resistance

In this chapter, we explicitly carry the notion of “thin” versus “thick” democracy across to more complex understandings of different approaches of citizenship: “thin citizenship” versus “thick citizenship”(Carr et al. 2012; Westheimer and Kahne 2004) especially in these times of metaphorical, theoretical and actual retreats from democratic practices and institutions globally. As we explore various challenging and hopeful realities at the currently problematic nexus of democracy and citizenship, we additionally layer in our conception of “lived citizenship” as an extension of “lived curriculum” (Cary and Pruyn, n.d.) and, especially, what this messy melange implies for the Australian Curriculum and daily pedagogical practices in the humanities in schools here and around the world. These arguments are interspersed with the tentative findings from our ongoing international study of central scholars also working in these spaces. However, we will include hints of the democratic nightmare that is the present, and the ongoing need to historicize the present to reveal that the social construction of difference and the political exclusion of those seen as “Other” is a continuing and constant challenge. We aim to address the current citizenship crisis in the Australian Curriculum as a representation of the retreat that is historic and ongoing.