Conference Agenda

Citizenship is understood and practiced differently across national, cultural, and political settings. The varied governmental interpretations of what constitutes “good citizens” shape how education is framed and how children and young people are expected to behave and participate in society (Lawy & Biesta, 2006). Yet, despite this diversity and growing attention to exploring the concept and practices of citizenship across various societies as well as in physical and digital spaces, much of the existing work has been developed and studied in European and other Global North countries. More scholarly attention needs to be paid to the non-European and Global South settings. This paper aims to address this gap by examining citizenship in Thailand, a Southeast Asian country with distinct social, cultural, and political conditions (Boontinand & Petcharamesree, 2018; Sattayanurak, 2019), yet facing challenges and concerns in youth civic participation and democratic engagement that resonate with those of European and other countries (Bacalso et al., 2023; Saat et al., 2025).

The guiding research question of this paper is: How is citizenship conceptualized in Thailand? It aims to critically examine how the Thai state interprets citizenship and how these interpretations inform citizenship education and framings of young people’s digital citizenship practices in Thailand.

This paper is primarily built on the concept of citizenship practice, which views citizenship as more dynamic than static. It emphasizes that citizenship is enacted through everyday practices rather than defined solely by legal status or formal institutional participation (Biesta et al., 2009; Isin & Nielsen, 2015). Individuals, including children and young people, perform and make sense of citizenship in diverse ways, shaped by their own interpretations and experiences in various settings (Biesta et al., 2009). The notion of citizenship, socialized through education, plays an important role in individuals’ understandings and practices of citizenship across different communities (Giudici et al., 2026). Thus, an understanding of how citizenship is governmentally conceptualized in Thailand and its educational implications could serve as a foundation for analyzing how young people in Thailand practice citizenship online.

The global context of the crisis of democracy has been recorded in recent reports by various international organizations (IDEA, 2024; 2025, Nord et al., 2025). Thus, the 2025 Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) report notes that the world has fewer democracies than autocracies for the first time in more than 20 years, with three out of four people living under authoritarian rule. Furthermore, it is reported that current average democratic levels are on par with those of 1985, with Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and South Asia being the most affected by a “wave of autocratization,” although there is also democratic weakening in Latin America, Western Europe, and North America. Likewise, the decline in freedom of expression in 44 countries during 2024 (Nord et al., 2025) is alarming, which is validated by the 2025 IDEA report that identifies freedom of the press and expression as the most affected rights in at least 25% of the countries participating in the study (IDEA, 2025). Faced with this scenario of democratic uncertainty, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has developed guidelines and recommendations for school communities to strengthen democratic and civic education (UNESCO, 2019). Specifically, one of the focuses is the implementation of education for global citizenship, within the framework of the 2030 agenda, which promotes a culture of democracy, human rights, peace, and non-violence (UNESCO, 2023). Thus, the main aim is for students to value human dignity, cooperation, and dialogue, with a focus on developing knowledge, skills, and attitudes that foster tolerance, empathy, and respect for the diversity of cultures and opinions. Achieving this goal requires teachers who are strongly committed to the exercise of democracy and citizenship education.

However, various studies have highlighted the importance of teachers' beliefs regarding teaching and learning processes, as well as pedagogical and didactic decision-making (Estévez-Nenninger et al., 2014). In this sense, what teachers believe and mean has a direct impact on their daily practices and, as a correlate, on student learning (Trigwell & Prosser, 1991). In the same vein, what teachers do—or teach—would be a direct consequence of what they actually think. This is where the importance of investigating the ideas and beliefs that teachers express about democracy lies: it allows us to better understand the practices and possibilities of approaching democratic education in schools in line with the urgency represented by the current context of democratic fragility. This presentation is based on the initial results of doctoral research that seeks to understand the conceptions of democracy and democratic education expressed by teachers of various subjects and school levels in two regions of Chile. On this occasion, the findings to be presented and discussed relate to the conceptions of the participating teachers regarding democratic education, with a focus on the use of dialogue in contexts of disagreement and conflict. Some preliminary results show that teachers conceive of democratic education as the daily practice of respectful dialogue about diverse and even antagonistic opinions, oriented toward pluralism with frameworks of respect based on human rights. In addition, conflict is conceived as a learning opportunity for democratic education, but in some situations, it can put teachers under stress and affect the way they manage pedagogical interactions.

In most democratic states today, initial teacher education (ITE) explicitly seeks to shape prospective teachers’ values, competencies, and identities to sustain and develop education for democracy. We conceptualize this as the conscious state effort to educate the ‘democratic teacher.’

The paper distinguishes between democracy as state governance (elections, rule of law etc.), an ideology (e.g., human rights), and a way of life (a democratic culture) in social, cultural and educational practice (Hansen, 2010). Correspondingly, education often differentiates between learning about democracy, learning for democracy, and learning through democratic practices (Lenz & Andersen, 2019)—a triad also used in international documents, including the European Council’s educational recommendations (Brander et al., 2023). We argue, however, that the content and emphasis of these three dimensions vary between types of democratic states due to distinct historical paths and political cultures.

Since the late nineteenth century, teachers in many Western countries have played central roles in the struggle for democracy—as educators, participants in civil society, and mediators between state and society (Holmén, 2018; Larsen, 2022; Lauglo, 1982). This historical inheritance continues to shape national ideals of the ‘democratic teacher.’ Consequently, national ITE programs aim to form teachers in line with these historically and culturally specific understandings.

We do not, however, regard the democratic state as confined to government. Rather, drawing on Norbert Elias’s concept of the survival unit and Thomas Højrup’s fission perspective, the state can be seen as a complex collective agent seeking to secure cultural and political cohesion in competition with other states (Elias, 1978; Kaspersen & Gabriel, 2008; Reeh, 2011). Reeh (2016) connects this view to religion, education, and nationalism, suggesting that long before the rise of ‘competition state’ discourse, religion, cultural nationalism, and mass education mobilized populations for state survival and war. Under democratic conditions, the state belongs to its citizens, who hold sovereignty and engage in the ongoing contestation that defines it. Images of the democratic teacher, we propose, form part of this contested self-definition, produced through interplay between internal power struggles and external relations (Reeh, 2016).

Research questions:

How has national-level governance guided teacher education regarding the education of democratic teachers in the four Nordic countries since 1940?

How have ITE programs in the four Nordic countries sought to educate the democratic teacher since 1940?

What specific national challenges have shaped these efforts, as seen through the theory of states as survival units (Elias)?

How can we assess the combined impact of global challenges, national political cultures, and local contestations on images of the democratic teacher?

In the context of widely shared diagnoses of a crisis of democracy across Europe and beyond (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018), citizenship and democracy education have become a central concern in educational research as well as in school policy and practice (Culp, 2021; Landreh, 2024; Pausch, 2016). This development is accompanied by a growing number of empirical studies that investigate democratic competencies, participatory school practices, and pedagogical formats of citizenship education (OECD, 2018; Schulz et al., 2025). At the same time, however, a systematic and self-reflexive analysis of the relationship between citizenship education and educational research itself remains largely underdeveloped.

We address this gap by focusing on a disciplinary and methodological problem that is highly relevant for research on citizenship education: the tendency of educational research to normatively identify with its object of inquiry. In the field of democracy education in particular, research is frequently guided by explicit or implicit commitments to democratic values, participation, and empowerment. While these commitments are politically and educationally legitimate, they raise the question of how educational research can maintain critical reflexivity without violating the principle of value neutrality or assuming an external position of critique; or, in other words: how can educational research critically investigate democracy education without unreflectively reproducing its normative assumptions?

Rather than treating this tension as a deficit or methodological shortcoming, we conceptualize it as a structural relationship. Drawing on social theory, educational research is understood as a reflexive moment of late modernity that operates through discursivity, plurality, and contingency (Reckwitz, 2021). These characteristics closely correspond to the normative and procedural logics of citizenship education itself, which likewise emphasizes openness, participation, and the contestation of norms (Friedrichs et al., 2025). As a result, a structural homology emerges between educational research and its object, producing what can be described as a “double identification potential”.

Against this background, we argue for a methodological reorientation based on immanent critique (Jaeggi, 2018). Instead of evaluating citizenship education against external normative standards, immanent critique seeks to reconstruct the constitutive tensions inherent in democratic educational practices themselves. These tensions – such as those between participation and institutional structure, autonomy and obligation, or openness and decision-making – are not conceived as deviations from democratic ideals but as integral features of democracy education (Helsper, 2010). The contribution thus does not aim to develop prescriptive models of ‘good’ democracy education, but to analytically reconstruct how democratic norms are negotiated, stabilized, and problematized in practice.

Empirically, the contribution draws on a qualitative case study of a German sociocratically organized school that has been awarded a national prize for its work in democracy education. The case serves as an exemplary field of research for examining how democratic norms are enacted and contested in concrete pedagogical situations (e.g. classroom deliberations and school-wide decision-making processes) and how educational research can reflexively engage with these practices without adopting a detached “theatre perspective” of critique (Balzer & Bellmann, 2019).

Against this backdrop, we address the following guiding question: how can educational research on citizenship education account for its own normative and affective involvement while maintaining a critical and empirically grounded perspective? In the presentation, this question is explored through the exemplary analysis of pedagogical and organizational practices in a sociocratically oriented school. By reconstructing how schools deal with the normative expectations they place upon themselves and how constitutive tensions are handled in everyday practice, the contribution illustrates both the challenges and the analytical potential of a reflexive approach to citizenship education research. Further details on the methodological design and empirical material are outlined in the subsequent section.