Civil defence education: (Non)specific dangers and destabilisation of actorship in education

Abstract

This paper focuses on the push to stabilise society through civil defence education (CDE) in the changing context of nationalism and populism. We analysed the way in which justifications and criticism of civil defence education (CDE) have evolved as an ordering project intended to solve the problems with dangers that were variously defined. We identified two locations of the danger to be tackled by the new CDE – external and specific; and internal and general – which partly correspond to key political events: the migrant and Ukraine crises, and pre-election battles. Transformation of dangers stabilised education’s subservient role while destabilising educators’ position in the public debate. Drawing on relational sociology, qualitative analysis of the Czech media, and interviews, we show that the dangers defined by educational actors are circumvented to be replaced by populist and nationalist problems that were not the problems of the actors who would be most affected by the proposed curricular changes. We suggest looking at contemporary nationalists’ claims in education as a sign that topological arrangements are being reshaped among political, educational, and civic actors in terms of divides, externality, and irrelevance.

Absence of education in civil defence education: Nationalising education and its actors and knowledge

“…Findings from interviews and media content show that the various types of knowledge acted predominantly as stabilisers of positions for action. Thanks to its reputation for being objective and impartial, which, in the Czech context, is a strong positionmaker (Wirthová, 2022) this kind of knowledge was present in the legitimation practices, especially of critics, less of advocates. In other words, this kind of knowledge seems to be useful for any kind of goal, regardless of the social or historical context.…”

“…Forming and stabilising agential positions in educational governance is a process in which the politics of expertise intervenes. Informed by current studies of the politics of expertise (Fenwick et al, 2014;Rinne et al, 2018;Turner, 2015), we take into account the findings about the expertisation of educational legitimation in the European context (Grek, 2013;Hultqvist et al, 2018;Tveit and Lundahl, 2018), in which the Czech Republic has participated since at least 2004 (Wirthová, 2022). These research results demonstrate that (and how) expertise is a relational source that allows action, not essentially a true knowledge representation of reality.…”

“…Moreover, in the interviews, the actors provided us with their own perspectives on the legitimation of the new CDE educational practice in relation to other circumstances they consider important, including their personal position in the discussion. In analysing and coding our data, we draw on our previous research on aggregation of knowledge and patterns of actorship (Wirthová and Barták, 2022). This research provided us with two categories (patterns of action and knowledge regimes) that describe different ways to create evidence of the need for some educational change (such as renewing the CDE).…”