‘Is this really Europe?’ Migration, social practice and the performance of global citizenship

Abstract

A socially engaged art project conducted in Malta in 2021 brought together a group of participants from different sub-Saharan African countries with artists and researchers to promote civic engagement and cultural inclusion and understand how participants’ ideas could be promoted and discussed beyond the workshop. This article addresses one of the project’s central themes – citizenship – and argues that democratic participation is enacted in the actual processes of social practice in art. Informed by the principles of Global Citizenship Education, the article highlights its references to human solidarity, empathy and sustainable development and distinguishes them from a notion of citizenship that is framed within the legal, political and physical boundaries of the nation-state. While the segregation of non-citizens in contexts like this can interfere with the development of voices of resistance and a sense of agency among migrants, the article explains how principles of Global Citizenship Education can enrich socially engaged practices in art and education by subverting fixed citizen identities in the performance of pedagogical processes and acts of presentation.