Ordinary Citizenship

我们经常问是什么造就了一个好公民，却很少问是什么造就了一个普通公民。普通公民是“不太好的”公民，对他们来说，政治和政治参与不是极大热情的对象。我们常常贬低他们：我们为他们对时事的无知、冷漠和自私感到遗憾；我们为他们所代表的更广泛的公民衰落感到惋惜。我们也试图通过把他们变成更好的公民来“修复”他们：更了解情况，更有可能投票和做志愿者，更有礼貌和公益精神。2018年英国政府的一份报告将促进一个“鼓励并使成员能够作为积极公民参与”的社会的必要性确定为一项核心挑战（公民身份和公民参与特别委员会）。但我们在做这一切的时候，并没有仔细思考普通公民是什么，以及它在民主中扮演什么角色——我们只考虑普通公民缺乏什么，以及我们如何改善他们。这种疏忽不仅仅是一个理论利益问题：民粹主义政治运动利用了普通公民的耻辱，这些运动通过战略性地（往往是玩世不恭地）将自己定位为普通民众的捍卫者，以对抗更精通政治的精英，从而助长了社会分裂。该项目的中心目标是抵制这些趋势，通过表明普通公民在政治生活中发挥重要作用，创造和维持一个更健康的民主。该项目将询问普通公民的真正含义，并提出对那些没有达到我们公民理想的人进行重新评估。我们不应该诋毁他们，而应该设法适应他们，同时学习如何培养他们的角色所要求的独特品质和性格。为了实现这些目标，我们需要更好地了解普通公民是如何认识自己的。这需要一种不同寻常的方法，与传统政治哲学的抽象方法不同。通过与当地民主活动家和普通公民一起实地工作，并将这些活动与广泛的跨学科日常公民研究相结合，该项目将对普通公民的处境经验进行丰富的描述。然后，该说明将为项目中心的概念和规范调查提供信息。与实践者密切合作，该项目将激发超越正式民主制度的理解和培养公民意识的新方法。它将通过一系列知识交流活动来实现这一目标，旨在开发一款智能手机应用程序，以评估用户的公民参与度，生成“公民得分”和相关排名。首先，通过与公民自己合作，随后与在线学习平台（项目合作伙伴，Hive learning）和民间社会组织（如Notwestminster和Democratic society）合作，活动将探索企业的道德和技术缺陷。通过这样做，该项目将产生新的见解，即作为公民意味着什么，以及为地方民主服务的技术的可能性和局限性。

We often ask what makes a good citizen, but we rarely ask what makes an ordinary citizen. The ordinary citizens are the 'not-so-good' citizens, citizens for whom politics and political participation are not objects of great enthusiasm. We often disparage them: we regret their ignorance of current affairs, their apathy, their selfishness; and we lament the wider civic decline they are seen to embody. We also try to 'repair' them by making them into better citizens: better informed, more likely to vote and volunteer, more polite and public-spirited. A 2018 UK government report identified as a core challenge the need to promote a society 'whose members are encouraged and enabled to participate as active citizens' (Select Committee on Citizenship and Civic Engagement).But we do all of this without thinking carefully about what ordinary citizenship is and what role it plays in a democracy - we think of ordinary citizens only in terms of what they lack and of how we might improve them. This oversight is not just a matter of theoretical interest: the stigmatisation of ordinary citizens has been exploited by populist political movements which have fostered social division by strategically and often cynically positioning themselves as defenders of the ordinary people against a more politically savvy elite. The central aim of this project is to counter those tendencies and to create and sustain a healthier democracy by showing that ordinary citizenship plays a vital role in political life. The project will ask what it really means to be an ordinary citizen and will propose a re-evaluation of those who fall short of our civic ideals. Instead of denigrating them, we should seek to accommodate them, whilst learning how to foster the distinctive qualities and dispositions their role demands. To achieve these goals, we need to understand better how ordinary citizens understand themselves. And this requires a somewhat unusual approach that departs from the often abstract methods of conventional political philosophy. By working on the ground with local democracy activists and ordinary citizens themselves, and by combining those activities with an extensive interdisciplinary study of everyday citizenship, the project will develop a rich account of the situated experience of ordinary citizens. That account will then inform the conceptual and normative enquiry that lies at the project's centre. Working closely with practitioners, the project will inspire new approaches to understanding and cultivating citizenship beyond formal democratic institutions. It will achieve this through a sequence of knowledge exchange activities aimed at the development of a smartphone app to evaluate the civic engagement of users generating a 'citizen score' and associated ranking. By working, first, with citizens themselves, and subsequently with an on-line learning platform (project partner, Hive Learning) and civil society organisations like Notwestminster and Democratic Society, activities will explore the ethical and technical shortcomings of the enterprise. In so doing, the project will generate fresh insights about what it means to be a citizen and about the possibilities and limitations of technology in the service of local democracy.