Geographies of citizenship and everyday (im)mobility

Abstract

This introduction and the collection of papers it introduces seek to progress debates on the intersections between citizenship, practice, materiality, and mobility. In contrast to more static framings of formal citizenship where subjects are considered equal in terms of enjoying the same safeties and freedoms, in this introduction citizenship is conceived of as a set of processual, performative and everyday relations between spaces, objects, citizens and non-citizens that ebbs and flows. Through the papers that comprise this collection we see the process of citizenship becoming fragmented in both urban and rural mobility spaces. We also see it as being shaped by particular technologies and artefacts which construct and relate mobile subjects to each other and the state in particular ways. Our key contribution lies in outlining three related areas where work informed by the mobilities turn could focus: Firstly we seek to demonstrate that far from being a product of citizenship status, mobility must be seen as actively constituting citizenship relations. Secondly we seek to demonstrate the roles that styles of movement and the ‘stuff’ of mobility play in shaping the extent of citizenship for particular mobile publics. Thirdly we illustrate the ways in which cross-border flows relating to concepts such as cosmopolitan and ecological citizenship can act through mobility practices to challenge locally held notions of appropriate mobility and inevitably citizenship. Ultimately what we argue and intend to demonstrate is that mobility is such an important, pervasive and politicised element of late modernity that the ways in which we move and confer meanings on movement, cut across and even over-ride more established relationships between social and cultural identity, citizenship and the state.