Introduction: Society, Politics, and Education in Uncertain Times

This chapter makes a case for rethinking citizenship education at a time of global uncertainty and explores how concerns about belonging emerge worldwide. To provide the context to the rest of the edited collection, the chapter explores key challenges facing us today: challenges to the freedoms and purposes of education; international policies impacting public displays of engagement and citizenship; challenges to the position and saliency of democracy; the rise of neoliberalism, and the various global, local, social, climate, and health emergencies that we collectively face. The central focus is on citizenship, political agency and belonging and how they are experienced, expressed, practised, and conceptualised, with important implications for citizenship education. The chapter invites educators, teachers, activists, researchers, policy makers, and others engaged in education, inside and outside of traditional classrooms, to reimagine our responsibilities and shared obligations and to rethink what it means ‘to belong’ in uncertain times. The chapter, and the entire edited collection, also invite the reader to explore what it would mean to redefine citizenship so that greater solidarity and political agency might be forged. To that extent, the chapter, as well as the edited book, explores the hope inherent in our need to belong and how belonging may be realised through active citizenship.