new citizen practices (IIIG)
Last week I was invited to teach a 5 hour class on “new citizen practices” at the:
Diplomado “Atención a la diversidad, equidad de género y no discriminación” Belonging to the UNESCO chair on “equity and no discrimination” organized by the Instituto de Investigaciones en Innovación y Gobernanza (IIIG) from the mexican Universidad de Guadalajara (UdG).
Things went really well and, indeed, we were in need of some extra time. LOL. In any case, some questions and doubts were raised on specific topics or notions. So it made me think that prehaps it was worth sharing some aditional info here.
citizen? from "Veinte Centavos Blog"
One of the first distinctions we wanted to establish was between the notion of a citizenship based on representation versus one based on affirmation. That is to say, between a liberal idea of a small group of representatives that will enact the will of millions of citizens and a more pragmatic turn that will consider how citizenship is enacted by the actions of citizens (being the vote only one action, and not the most relevant, to them). This last conception of the citizen resonates with the Lefebvre – Harvey idea of a right to the city.
Of course, to label oneself as a citizen is not self-evident. It implies a web of meaning as well as a need to use the label “citizen” where many conflicts or disagreements may arise depending on who is asking, who is naming, what for… This is also part of the pragmatic turn in so far it asks for the uses and effects of assuming or qualifying something as citizen (such as the need to talk about citizen participation). Which is highly opposed to more substantive definitions which seek to define the essence of the citizen as it could be the case in legal documents. We could trace a parallel with the notion of gender here.
Anyway, another notion that was left aside was net neutrality. When speaking of neutrality amongst social scientist, one must be extremely careful. For we know that nothing is more intended and potentially harmful than labelling something as neutral 
But with the term network neutrality, what one really wants to explain is how people should be free of any artificial or imposed limitations on which webpages or search engines or services should they use. Limitations that can (and are) used by some Internet Service Providers (ISP). A quick look to wikipedia is enough to grasp a quick definition:
Net neutrality: “Is a principle proposed for users’ access to networks participating in the Internet. The principle advocates no restrictions by Internet service providers and governments on content, sites, platforms, the kinds of equipment that may be attached, and the modes of communication”
RAX!
