Paper short abstract:

This paper argues that the national development narratives presented in civic education spaces offer possibilities for second-generation diaspora youth to rework their liminalities and illuminate new possibilities for unbound futures

Paper long abstract:

Civic education spaces feature prominently in analyses of the mobilization of the second-generation. Often considered to be an identity-building pre-requisite for mobilization, such spaces are primarily used to transmit a 'decisive past' (Graf 2018). While the literature on civic education spaces of the second-generation justifiably continues to pay attention to how such narratives reproduce state ideologies, further research is needed to understand the importance of the second-generation’s socio-spatial positioning within diasporic civil society, as context for the reception and use of such narratives. The research presented in this paper is drawn from a participatory educational research project between 2019 and 2021. It finds that state-sanctioned versions of Rwandan history, ethnicity, and the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi although aimed at legitimating RPF rule also creates a liberatory pedagogy that speaks to conditions of young second generation Rwandans in diaspora, and to the intricacies of their relationships to the historical and political conditions they inherited from their parents and inhabit in their daily lives. It argues that in their encounters with civic society’s’ tools and methods of diaspora mobilisation, new possibilities for unbound futures liberated from such positionings can be opened.