Democratic citizenship education under constraint: a critical phenomenological study of teacher agency and everyday resistance

In contexts where democracy is politically constrained, how do teachers continue to teach democratic values without placing themselves or their students at risk? Drawing on a critical phenomenological study of two secondary social studies teachers in Thailand, this article examines how democracy is lived and interpreted in everyday teaching practice. Based on classroom observations, interviews, school shadowing, and analysis of teaching artefacts, the study shows that teachers approach democracy less as a stable political regime or the transmission of civic knowledge and more as a relational and temporally deferred practice. In doing so, they engage in navigational compliance and collective counter-conduct, alongside pedagogical subversion and constructive transformation, to manage institutional risk. Rather than framing these practices as democratic transformation, this article conceptualises them as democratic maintenance, understood as the ongoing work of keeping democratic imagination, participation, and ethical relations alive under constraint. The study contributes to scholarship on teacher agency, everyday resistance, and civic education by theorising democracy as a fragile practice sustained through teachers’ everyday labour.