Liberal arts educated citizen: Experimentation, subjectification and ambiguous contours of youth citizenship

This paper draws on initial investigation into the relationship between liberal arts education in Asia and youth citizenship to examine the roles of the “institution” and the “student” in citizenship formation. The paper begins with a discussion of how emerging liberal arts education institutes in Asian cities incorporate notions of citizenship into their visions and curricular programmes, using selected cases of Shanghai, Hong Kong and Singapore. This is followed by a focus on the liberal arts college in Singapore to preliminarily analyse the ways in which a particular brand of citizenship is being produced and negotiated in/through campus space. The contention is that recent liberal arts initiatives in East Asia may be read as constitutive of higher education's ethico‐political experiment of youth citizenship, but one that produces ambiguous contours of a “liberal arts educated citizen.” The paper contributes to wider scholarship on citizenship education and institutional geographies of (youth) citizenship.