Citizenship: what does it entail and can it be global? With Mark Allinson

At the start of this course, we are encouraging you to consider in what ways you feel yourself to be a ‘global citizen’. Before we go deeper into the many complex ideas around global citizenship today, it’s first important to reflect on what the idea of citizenship actually entails.

Here, Dr Mark Allinson introduces some of the big questions we will be considering throughout this course, and gives some examples of organisations or projects which work on an international level. These main examples, including the UN and the Sustainable Development Goals, international organisations such as Engineers Without Borders and Médecins Sans Frontières, or initiatives like city twinning, will be explored in more detail through this week’s activities.

But when we consider these examples, we are also considering these more fundamental questions:

• What does it really mean to say that you are a ‘global citizen’?

• What responsibilities does that come with?

• Can global citizenship sit alongside national citizenship?