Capacity Building for Citizenship Education: Global Hegemony and the New “Ethics of Civilization”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The concept of capacity building has seen a swell of support in recent years. Many, varying from community-based practitioners to multinational institutions, have leveraged the concept in their work. By investigating the ethics (the normative positions), the explanations (the explanatory positions), and what evidence people use to measure capacity (the empirical positions), this research uses a Critical Discourse Analysis to investigate the relationships that are formed by employing capacity building for citizenship education. After investigating multinational policy documents and interviewing participants in Jamaica and Canada, I argue that capacity building for citizenship education has vastly disparate and contrasting manifestations. While Capacity Building is widely understood as an effort to emphasize local agency, it becomes quickly evident that the nature of that agency is often circumscribed by dominant institutions of the global market economy. Take, for example, the World Bank, which propagates crippling structural adjustment policies in Jamaica, but at the same time is also one of the most active policy makers in the field of capacity building. There are, however, many voices that appear through the interviews that are critical of this process. These voices question the ability, and appropriateness, of capacity building when used by many policy makers, and the resulting intervention into people’s lives. This disparate condition of capacity building has been brought about by the articulation of three conjoined processes: The first – my critique of the explanatory position – is that the emphasis on the capacity for action unrealistically privileges agency at the expense of our understanding of social structures; the second – my empirical argument of the nature of capacity building – is that the movement has become intertwined with global political economic discourses thereby providing the “spirit” of global capital; the third – my critique of the normative position – is that capacity building has attempted to provide an ethical project which stresses incorporation, as opposed to exclusion, as a form of hegemony. When these three positions are read together, I argue that capacity building has provided a complex policy matrix in forming the hegemonic relationship of global capital; what is referred to here as the new ethics of civilization.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.140 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".