Experiences Of Citizenship Research Articles

Thinking citizenship through lived experiences of highly skilled migrants in Budapest

This study aims to understand and explain the concept of citizenship by analyzing the lived experiences of highly skilled migrants reflecting on their everyday transnational lives in the urban setting of Budapest. Based on the discourse analysis of 30 semi-structured interviews conducted in Budapest in the Fall of 2022, the study thinks through lived citizenship experiences to understand how and why these experiences matter for the formation of subjective citizenship understanding. This study suggests that the concept of lived citizenship embodies a complex narrative of everyday socio-economic, socio-cultural, and emotional experiences that go beyond what the legal status depicts. Citizenship experiences of highly skilled migrants present a process of negotiating cultural and moral cosmopolitanism with constructive patriotism in everyday lives in the urban context. The study advances the thinking on the foundation, manifestations, and operationalization of lived citizenship as experiences of belonging and coexistence, presenting a unique contribution to the production of knowledge on highly skilled migration in Hungary. This article proposes that citizenship entails a complex relational dimension and includes a life-long learning process with continual meaning-making through life experiences that transcends the consequences of the legal status within a given nation-state.

Inclusive servicescapes: the imperative of universal design principles

Purpose This study aims to explore the transformative potential of universal design (UD) principles in changing servicescapes to enhance consumer experiences and foster inclusive practices across various sectors. Design/methodology/approach Drawing from existing literature and research findings, this study offers a review of inclusive servicescapes and service practices through the lens of UD. The investigation spans multiple domains to highlight the impact of UD principles on inclusivity and societal welfare. Findings This research delves into the theoretical and practical contributions of UD principles, showcasing their application in diverse sectors to enhance citizenship experiences. This study presents valuable insights for businesses and service providers, emphasizing the significance of UD in improving societal well-being and fostering inclusivity. Research limitations/implications This study broadens the theoretical framework of UD, showcasing its versatility across various sectors and reinforcing its contribution to enhancing societal inclusion. By analyzing the interplay between UD principles and inclusive servicescape practices, this study highlights UD’s transformative impact on enriching citizenship experiences and fostering a deeper sense of belonging. Drawing from seminal works, this research not only adds to the understanding of UD’s role in promoting inclusivity but also strengthens the linkage between UD and inclusion theory, advancing the discourse on design's pivotal role in facilitating societal participation and crafting inclusive environments. Practical implications The findings of this study provide practical guidance for businesses and service providers to incorporate UD principles into servicescapes and service practices, enhancing consumer experiences. By referencing examples from education, retail and digital domains, this study offers insights for organizations seeking to create more inclusive and accessible environments. Social implications The societal implications of incorporating UD principles into marketplace practices are significant, promoting societal inclusivity and acceptance of diversity. By emphasizing the role of UD in fostering inclusive servicescapes, this study contributes to societal initiatives to ensure inclusivity and accessibility in the marketplace, ultimately enhancing the well-being of individuals with diverse abilities and promoting a more equitable society. Originality/value Building on existing literature, this study expands the understanding of UD and its potential impact on citizenship experiences. By anchoring the research on established perspectives and incorporating practical examples, this study offers original insights into the transformative power of UD in creating more inclusive and equitable societies.

Hacia una convivencia democrática: El desafío de repensar ciudadanamente la formación y gestión de dos escuelas chilenas

Purpose. This article analyzes and discusses the scope, in terms of citizenship learning, that stems from the definitions of ‘management’ provided by two public schools in Chile. Method. The research employed a quantitative methodology with a descriptive scope. The sampling was intentional, involving 73 students, 28 teachers, and 6 assistants. Data were collected through a survey and documentary analysis and were analyzed using SPSS software. Results. Schools primarily based their decisions on a bureaucratic and total quality management approach. Meanwhile, they declared a maximalist conception of citizenship education, but its pedagogical implementation was reduced to fragmented actions with limited participation and an emphasis on results. Conclusions. It is proposed to rethink and transform management processes at both micro and macro levels to facilitate the formation and experience of democratic citizenship in schools. Since these processes mutually influence each other, it is recommended to design proposals with the educational community rather than distancing from it.

Young People’s Diversity and Digital Media: A Systematic Review (2010–2022)

Youth is not a homogeneous group. With this motto in mind, YouNDigital aims to study youth, their engagement with news, and digital citizenship dynamics. One of the core elements of the project is a digital newsroom, a space for meeting and exploring digital citizenship and news, considering the significant disparities that characterise individuals in this group. In order to better understand the target groups and to support the decisions regarding the development of the youth-led digital newsroom, the research team carried out a systematic literature review focused on youth, digital citizenship, diversity, and different methodological approaches. This article explores the outcomes of the systematic literature review, particularly delving into the data gathered in one of the subclusters (Diversities). Findings underscore the challenges of inclusivity and diversity and the need for tailored media and digital literacy interventions that consider cultural differences, socioeconomic factors, and evolving technological landscapes. They also highlight the difficulties, as well as the positive results, of using digital tools and strategies to trigger learning and motivational processes for diverse audiences—digital tools that rely on media creation, creativity, critical thinking, and collaboration can promote the empowerment and inclusion of youth from distinct backgrounds, bridging the gap between their realities and citizenship experiences. For research teams, the findings point out that involvement in collaborative, immersive, and participatory processes anchored on sustained literature review processes can encourage distancing preconceptions while bringing them closer to research participants. The article contributes to discussions regarding the potential and the challenges of considering youth’s diverse backgrounds through pillars such as co-creation or inclusive design, and the urgency of mitigating youth social and digital exclusion in order to enhance democratic participation.

Windrush Members’ Encounters with the ‘Hostile Environment’ and a Deficit of Citizenship: Centring an Agentive Citizenship Experience

This article is part of a broader, collaborative Oral History project working with members of the Windrush community to explore their experience of the ‘Hostile Environment’ and their own reckoning with a historical injustice, beginning pre-2012. This article focuses on the experience of three Windrush members and their encounters with the ‘Hostile Environment’ regime from 2012 onwards, particularly the actualisation of their exclusion from British citizenship as a denial of access to ‘everyday’ citizenship. Citizenship is interpreted from a grassroots level, through the individual’s lens on how their life was uprooted in terms of their livelihood, security, wellbeing and social connection through encounters with the ‘Hostile Environment’ regime. During the data gathering process, a shared understanding of the activist nature of this research was established, creating a space within which participants were asked to reflect on and critique the state’s bordering of British citizenship and the participants’ identification as illegal within this. This article defends an agentive interpretation of citizenship as an experience that is holistically felt and made meaningful, consciously negotiated within state-imposed structures of law, enforcement and entitlement access, and then wielded as a subjectivity whereby individuals claim a more dignified existence. For members of the Windrush Generation who were left de facto stateless due to a lack of sufficient legal identification in the eyes of the state, their deficit of citizenship experience from the margins of British citizenship leaves them well positioned to critique and challenge the entrenched form of citizenship expressed through the ‘Hostile Environment’ regime.This article is part of a broader, collaborative Oral History project working with members of the Windrush community to explore their experience of the ‘Hostile Environment’ and their own reckoning with a historical injustice, beginning pre-2012.

Enabling spaces for (varied) co-existence.

For people in homelessness, access to social services may appear difficult and alienating, which often contributes to poor health and a risk of accelerated marginalization. Historically, day centres for people in homelessness have been characterized by an emphasis on providing refuge and momentary restitution, accommodating urgent basic needs. In this article, we present a case study of the design of a new day centre in Denmark that aspires to move beyond the historical place-for-being. Rather, the new day centre is to be a place-for-being-and-becoming, focusing on bridging the varied needs of people in homelessness with easy access to social services at the day centre. This article explores the creation of new behaviour settings along with the challenges and considerations in designing enabling spaces for people in societally marginalized positions, concurrently offering and supporting a sense of inclusion, the possibility to develop one's agency and experience of lived citizenship. This article is part of the theme issue 'People, places, things, and communities: expanding behaviour settings theory in the twenty-first century'.

Enhancing consumer well-being through the citizenship experience

Enhancing consumer well-being through the citizenship experience

Future research directions: Enhancing the citizenship experience

This article explores the emerging concept of the Citizenship Experience (CZX), which encompasses the interactions individuals have with public services and infrastructure. Synthesizing insights from the recent literature and findings from our Special Issue, we highlight key areas, including public services, urban mobility, healthcare digital transformation, urban design, and taxation. We propose a future research agenda focused on integrating technology, applying user-centered design, evaluating digital government initiatives, enhancing transparency in policies, and fostering community engagement through urban design. This framework aims to enhance CZX and contribute to citizens’ overall well-being.

The household, the citizen and the city: towards a social history of urban politics in the late Middle Ages

ABSTRACT Histories of politics in the late medieval European town present a struggle between town oligarchs and town citizens. While the conclusions that historians draw differ, the stakes of politics are the same: exclusion, participation and representation in town government. Politics is the ‘public’ domain of officeholding, elections and voting, its actors exclusively male, its locations the council chamber, the craft guild, the workshop. Starting and ending with the evidence of a 1532 ‘insurrection of women’ in the English city of Norwich, this article seeks to reconceptualise town politics in the late Middle Ages. Its premise is that urban citizenship was a social and performative practice as much as a formal legal and political status. It argues that the relationship between home, household and family was fundamental to the lived experience of citizenship. The urban household was a complex source of political agency, where the official separation between citizen and non-citizen was difficult to sustain. The 1532 insurrection of women allows us to connect the politics of the household to the politics of the town hall and to write a social history of town politics, in which women were political actors.

Citizen labor

AbstractIn the last two decades, India's system of agricultural land management has been transitioning from paper to digital records. In effecting this shift, engineers and bureaucrats in the city of Bangalore, India's “Silicon Valley,” have tacitly and invisibly shifted the responsibility for maintaining data from the state to individuals. Moreover, the new digital databases of land records have fragmented offices and dispersed data across new sites and actors. Under these transformed conditions, people can access services only through what I call citizen labor. That is, when digitization is applied to land and property—which are quintessential sites for the making and unmaking of citizenship—people are interpellated into laboring on their own data. This shows that the digitization of government extracts a form of labor, one whose benefits accrue to groups and organizations beyond the laboring individual. As a result, people have an increasingly degraded experience of substantive citizenship.

Do the right thing: Vigilant citizenship and the surveillance of race in Miami

Public vigilance campaigns and lateral surveillance programs in the USA have mobilized citizens for a broad range of security concerns: from post-9/11 perceived terrorist threats to more domestic forms of crime. Scholars have explained such efforts as an extension of state and police power, while others have shown that state surveillance reifies a broad range of historically racist and violent practices. This article brings together these explanations through a focus on vigilant citizenship: an ideal type of citizen who is watchful and reports anything suspicious to the authorities. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with police officers and citizens in Miami, my work demonstrates how the policing of Blackness also involves more quotidian experiences and articulations of rights, responsibilities, and belonging. The empirical cases discussed here demonstrate how vigilant citizenship cultivates distrust, fear, and alienation, feeding into racist and violent practices by police officers and neighborhood watches. The conclusion suggests that the policing and surveillance of race become encoded in acts and experiences of vigilant citizenship, blurring the boundaries between the police and citizens.

“There’s No Connection Plugging Me Into This System”: Citizenship as Non‐Participation and Voicelessness

The small and remote island community, the Faroe Islands, has experienced a vast increase in immigration recently. In the space of a decade, immigration has risen from 1.5% of the population to 5.5%. The island community, previously ethnically and culturally homogenous, is now facing growing diversity. The Faroese context is characterised by its small size and a micro‐administration that is ill‐equipped for the complexities of immigration. Previous research has found that underlying the Faroese language and identity is a pervasive ideology of who is considered to “authentically belong.” Furthermore, the small population is strongly connected through multiple relations, and navigating formal and informal life depends on social/family networks. In this small island community context, this article examines immigrant citizenship experiences, drawing on qualitative data collated between 2016 and 2023. Citizenship is here understood as everyday relational and spatial experiences at various levels of society. From the analysis, two central values of citizenship emerged as key to entangled citizenship experiences: (non)participation and (mis)recognition. The analysis finds that Faroese society, both formally and informally, is highly inaccessible to immigrants, rendering them voiceless and marginalised. Furthermore, immigrants experience misrecognition for the resources they bring and find themselves on the margins of the labour market and society in general.

Dose Online Brand Community Help Brands Increase Loyalty? -The Impact of Customer Citizenship Experience

Dose Online Brand Community Help Brands Increase Loyalty? -The Impact of Customer Citizenship Experience

Understanding the impact on children’s citizenship of participating in community-based action research

ABSTRACT This paper explores the lived experience of citizenship of working-class girls from a marginalised ex-mining town in northern England engaged as community researchers in participatory action research. The research aimed to better understand the relationships within their local community. Qualitative methods were used to examine the girls’ experience of the research and its impact on their sense of community, which is discussed using the lens of ‘lived citizenship’ (Kallio et al. 2020). We conclude that children’s experience of participatory research approaches can be understood as subjective or lived citizenship. This contributes to understanding how they perceived their acts of citizenship, particularly in relation to others in their community. Supporting the international literature on subjectivity in citizenship studies and the critical appreciation of intersectionality in in participatory research, this paper demonstrates how such involvement can lead to positive subjective outcomes in groups experiencing marginalisation, such as working-class girls.

Whose water crisis? How policy responses to acute environmental change widen inequality

AbstractPolicy responses to the challenges associated with environmental change, including more frequent and severe climatic events, have interlinked environmental and social impacts. Less attention has been afforded to the latter, and specifically to the question of not just whether but how such responses create or entrench inequality. This paper examines policy responses to drought events in California, United States, and the Western Cape Province, South Africa, in terms of their effects on inequality, revealed in relationships to water access networks. We use concepts of water justice and hydraulic citizenship to evaluate how and why these policy responses reproduced water injustices in the two settings. We focus particularly on two mechanisms linking responses to widened inequalities: values‐reinforcement and strategic communication. Using interviews, policy documents, and media reports, we employ process tracing methods to illustrate these mechanisms through which drought policy impacts hydraulic citizenship experiences, manifesting water injustice. We contribute to emerging examinations of environmental policy responses and maladaptation by demonstrating how concepts of hydraulic citizenship and an emphasis on mechanisms can help us better understand and identify experiences of water injustice. We note policy implications and areas for future research, highlighting droughts as consequential policy sites for advancing social and environmental justice.

Water Entrepreneurs, Infrastructural Citizenship, and State Power in Nigeria

In today’s world, entrepreneurialism is frequently promoted for its potential to address major global social problems. Entrepreneurs are often celebrated for their ability to achieve what governments and development programs commonly fail to do: deliver sustainable economic and social benefits to poor people in the Global South. Typically, entrepreneurship is seen as bypassing the state. This essay offers a different perspective, showing how, in Nigeria, entrepreneurial enterprises geared to provide access to potable water because the government fails to do so paradoxically serve the interests of those who control the state. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in southeastern Nigeria, and using examples of private borehole vendors and “pure water” sachet manufacturers, I argue that ordinary people’s infrastructural entrepreneurialism not only requires regular engagement with government officials. It also contributes significantly to the experience of citizenship and the exercise and consolidation of state power.

Transformative places and the citizenship experience: A dynamic perspective of disasters, transitional servicescapes, and place attachment

A city can be regarded as a servicescape, serving its citizens by providing the opportunity to co-create and experience services, such as in the retail or hospitality sectors. In case of a disaster and the collapse or (partial) destruction of a city's servicescape, the connection of citizens to place, i.e., their place attachment might be impeded, transformed or lost as might be their usual citizenship experiences. The present paper fuses the domains of Transformative Service Research (TSR), environmental psychology, disaster science, and citizenship experiences. Via an exploratory qualitative investigation it finds that transitional, i.e., temporary servicescapes which are put into place until more permanent servicescapes can be rebuilt, can be transformative places in regard to co-creating novel citizenship experiences to “re-attach” residents to their city.

Migration, abjection and visibility: the photographic projects of Sam Ivin, Melanie Friend and Yetunde Adebiyi

ABSTRACT This paper examines the work of three photographers addressing the experiences of migrants awaiting decisions upon, or denied residency applications by the UK government. While Sam Ivin’s Lingering Ghosts portraits convey the emotional and embodied impacts upon migrants awaiting notification of asylum requests, Melanie Friend’s images of Immigration Removal Centres (IRCs) investigate the spaces of exclusion and detention within the UK border control system. The paper concludes by examining Yetunde Adebiyi’s images of protests outside Yarl’s Wood IRC, Bedford and alternative communities for “non-legal” migrants in Liverpool. These images are put in the context of a process of “social abjection” , whereby migrants have been increasingly marginalised through negative media and government policy, ultimately diminishing or denying citizenship to certain groups within society. This raises issues of mobility justice , in that individuals’ experience of mobility is in sharp contrast to that of UK citizens and impacted by multi-scalar entanglements of other (im)mobilities. Individuals’ bodily and spatial experience of, and agency over (im)mobility is related to their visibility, and agency over being visible. By exposing the relative experiences of mobility and visibility the photographs provide a potential site of advocacy for mobility justice but can also draw attention to the unequal experiences of citizenship of subject, photographer and viewer. By suggesting that photographs constitute and engender a social relationship between these parties, the paper proposes that photographic projects might offer a potential “civil contract” between those with very different experiences of mobility, visibility and citizenship.

Seventh-Grade Students’ Perspective on Non-Governmental Organization

Individuals can encounter non-governmental organizations (NGOs), one of the most significant experiences of citizenship, during the early stages of their education. Individuals with foundational experiences at the primary school level, as they reach the middle school level, gain the opportunity to better understand the meaning and importance of NGOs through social studies and equivalent courses. Determining how students perceive NGOs at the end of this educational period is crucial in shaping education about NGOs and citizenship education. This study aimed to reveal the middle school 7th-grade students’ point of view on the NGO and NGO-citizen relationship. The study was carried out as a qualitative study. The qualitative study sample consisted of 39 (20 females, 19 males) 7th-grade students selected with purposive sampling methods. The data collected with open-ended questions were analyzed with content analysis. As a result of the study, it was determined that the students considered NGOs in terms of helping people and volunteerism. On the other hand, it was also seen that the students did not mention the political characteristics of the NGOs. It was found that students have a perspective of looking out for mutual benefit in the relationship between the NGO and the citizenship. In addition, all the students emphasized the responsibility to support the NGOs. Nevertheless, this mentioned support was more financial, and there was not enough emphasis on the support provided by social and political participation

‘Actualiya learning’: a bottom-up construction for civic education in two of Israel’s ‘educational Islands’

ABSTRACT Contemporary literature reveals that many educators, especially those in elementary schools and in conflict-effected societies, are reluctant to engage in the teaching of current public issues, even more so social controversies. However, this qualitative study examined the successful experience and the perspectives of educators from two elementary schools in Israel who avoided the tendency to bypass these issues and instead embraced them within the framework of ‘Actualiya’ learning. They also trained their students to search for controversy, to identify its rational and emotional origins, to spend time seeking their own opinions and to accommodate the tensions it evoked. The cumulative effect of containing the tension the controversy evoked fostered a complex experience of democratic citizenship with particular and universal affinities. This research enabled us to learn inductively about the pedagogical principles required for an updated civic education instruction in politically challenged societies.