Performing teaching, citizenship and criticality

In this chapter, we explore our work as teacher educators who examine the philosophies, meanings and enactments of citizenship in our personal and professional lives and as members of the various communities we inhabit. We do this autoethnographically via various critical analytical lenses in an attempt to self-reflect in a way that helps us to connect more deeply with our university students as we investigate the interconnected and power- and meaning-laden concepts of citizenship, belonging, identity, oppression and empowerment. We see epistemological spaces as discursive productions from post-structural/post-modern and critical perspectives. These positions draw upon the notion of discourse as an absent power that can validate/legitimize or negate/de-legitimize. We present and critique the current literature and juxtapose this with a presentation and analysis of three different “citizenship identity” ethnographic vignettes in an attempt to explore the realms of epistemology through the study of exclusion/inclusion. Specifically, the authors present snippets of their own narrative migration stories, in two instances, and an incident of cross-border identity exploration, in another.