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.
Acknowledgements
Both authors would like to thank the participants of the Czech Sociological Association Conference’s session on Nation, State, and God at school (June 2021) for their valuable comments and discussion. Also, both authors would like to thank anonymous reviewers for their constructive critique and valuable comments on the main arguments of our paper.
Tomáš Barták received funding from the Institute of Sociological Studies of Charles University for his research assistance project: “New waves of Nationalism and the role of local and transnational knowledge: Civil Defence Education”.
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