Experiences Of Citizenship Research Articles

Identity Matters: A Social Psychology of Everyday Citizenship

This paper takes as its focus the need for psychologists to take issues of culture seriously. In doing so, it is important that psychologists adopt a critical approach to many widely held and taken-for-granted assumptions about culture and cultural processes. In particular, there is a pressing need to explore the ways in which constructions of culture routinely feature in the marginalisation of minority group members. Using examples drawn from the UK, I explore how cultural diversity can be represented by majority group members to question others’ belonging within the national community. In turn, I consider the implications of this for minority group members’ everyday (informal) experiences of citizenship (e.g. their ability to be heard in discussions about the nation and the challenges it faces). I also consider minority group members’ experiences of such marginalisation and the various ways in which exclusionary constructions of culture and belonging may be contested.

"Returning to Ordinary Citizenship": A Qualitative Study of Chinese PWUD's Self-Management Strategies and Disengagement Model of Identity.

How PWUD (people who use drugs) live under drug governance is an important research question. This study adopts a qualitative research method to explore how PWUD in China self-manage after perceiving the dilemma of incomplete citizenship and the social pressure brought by drug control arrangements. Through analysis of 130 PWUD’s files and in-depth interviews with 10 interviewees (from the 24 preliminary interviews), this study found that PWUD developed action strategies of hidden mobility (spatial isolation), disconnection of past experiences (time isolation), instrumental actions, as well as narrative strategies of reframing themselves as ordinary citizens with attempts of reversing identity disadvantages. Further, PWUD’s self-management strategies manifest as a disengagement model in which the actors (PWUD, not rehabilitation agencies) do not intend to develop integrative positive identities through dispersed, practiced behavioral strategies, but attempt to return to pre-addiction, non-socially exclusionary citizenship experiences. The disengagement model and its negative effect on PWUD’s social integration help us reflect on the current implementation of rehabilitation projects and institutional settings of drug governance.

Theatre and Solidarity among the Transnational Alevi Community

The Alevi religious minority makes up the largest religious minority in Turkey, and their history of persecution dates back before the Republic of Turkey. The inception of the Republic of Turkey as a secular nation-state in 1923 was initially promising for the Alevis, but the regime remained implicitly Sunni Muslim. So, the community’s experiences of citizenship and belonging continued to be characterized by precarity as they occupied a category of national abjection. Beginning in the 1960s, the waves of migration from rural areas to urban Turkey and Western Europe gradually transformed the experiences of the Alevi community and they became more visible. With migration, Alevi people’s everyday experiences of oppression and discrimination as well as their need for community-building and solidarity intensified. In Europe, the Alevi diaspora was too often categorized simply as Turkish or Muslim immigrants. Many of them wanted to differentiate themselves from the Sunni Muslim Turkish majority in the diaspora and gain recognition as a distinct group. They organized in their new homelands and established formal and informal networks of transnational solidarity. In the formation and sustenance of these networks and solidarity, theatre has played a crucial role. The plays staged by Alevi community theatres and professional groups in Turkey and its diasporas have focused primarily on the histories of violence and persecution against Alevis. As such, theatre functions as a site for the constitution of public memory and the intergenerational transfer and transformation of trauma and serves the affective politics of community-building and solidarity among the transnational Alevi community. The political economy of these performances is a crucial element of the politics of solidarity, contributing to the sustenance of Alevi cultural producers and their communities.

Towards de-Westernism in citizenship studies: implications from China

ABSTRACT Modern citizenship is Western-centric, featuring Weberianism and Marshallianism as core paradigms. That orthodox view obscures the diversity of citizenship. Over the past three decades, three trends in citizenship studies have challenged this ‘orthodox consensus’: the diversification of the subjects and contents of citizenship rights; ‘citizenship after Orientalism’, which advocates bringing oriental societies into citizenship studies; and ‘acts of citizenship’, which shifts the core of citizenship from rights to acts. Sharing ‘de-Westernism’ as a goal, these approaches promote the study of citizenship from a wider range of perspectives. The Chinese experience of citizenship shows that de-Westernism needs to be taken further. We need to adopt even more diverse perspectives to further de-Westernise and enrich our understanding of citizenship. In this paper, ‘contextualism’ and the ‘tree of citizenship’ are advocated as more strongly de-Westernised perspectives.

The case for ‘public’ transport in the age of automated mobility

This paper highlights the extent to which a future mobility system dominated by Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) poses profound challenges to the ‘publicness’ of the transport and mobility systems of many cities. This is evident at different policy levels: the regulatory posture of governments, changing notions of the contributions of mobility to wider ‘public value’, and the underpinning shared experiences of urban life and citizenship or civitas. There is relatively little discussion of how widespread automation might reduce the ‘publicness’ of transport systems in terms of the range of mobility opportunities they offer, how changing patterns of mobility across neighbourhoods and social groups will contribute to urban restructuring, and the implications of this for public value and the character or civitas of cities. In particular, we note how the huge expansion in mobility choices made possible by CAVs might lead to circumstances in which the outcome of individuals exercising that choice is to change the nature of urban mobility profoundly. We identify a number of key challenges that policy makers will need to address in managing the introduction of CAVs in their cities, and how using the lens of ‘publicness’ might help them do so.

The Afterlife of Mass Incarceration, or What Does It Mean to Need a “Brute” in the Twenty-First Century?

The Afterlife of Mass Incarceration, or What Does It Mean to Need a “Brute” in the Twenty-First Century?

A Mixed Methods Study Examining Citizenship Among Youth With Mental Health Challenges.

IntroductionMultiple stakeholders have recently called for greater research on the barriers to citizenship and community belonging faced by people with mental health challenges. Citizenship has been defined as a person’s access to the rights, roles, responsibilities, resources and relationships that help people feel a sense of belonging. Factors that may impact citizenship include financial precarity; intersecting forms of marginalization and oppression (e.g., racism); and the mental health care people receive. Research has yet to examine experiences of citizenship among youth with mental health challenges. To address this gap, this study will examine how youth experience citizenship; predictors of citizenship; how citizenship shapes recovery; and the degree to which youth are receiving citizenship-oriented care.MethodsThe research objectives will be evaluated using a multiphase mixed methods research design. Quantitative data will be collected cross-sectionally using validated self-report questionnaires. Qualitative data will be collected using a hermeneutic phenomenological method using semi-structured interviews and focus groups.AnalysesMultiple stepwise regression analyses will be used to determine predictors of citizenship and if of citizenship predict recovery. Pearson correlations will be computed to determine the relationship between participants’ perceived desire for, and receipt of citizenship-oriented care. Phenomenological analysis will be used to analyze qualitative data. Findings will then be mixed using a weaving method in the final paper discussion section.ConclusionFindings from this study may support the development of citizenship-oriented healthcare in Canada.

Dirty work in the clean city: An embodied Urban Political Ecology of women informal recyclers’ work in the ‘clean city’

This paper investigates the ways that ‘cleaning up’ Indian cities impacts those who rely on accessing waste on city streets for their livelihoods. I focus on low-income Dalit women recyclers in Ahmedabad, India as they navigate material and discursive shifts in urban waste management emanating from the national Swachh Bharat Abhiyan and 2016 Solid Waste Management Rules, and the municipal privatization and mechanization of solid waste management practice. The study is informed by 10 months of ethnographic research and a series of interviews and group discussions with women recyclers between 2016 and 2018. Using a feminist embodied Urban Political Ecology approach, I suggest the imagining and production of the ‘clean and green’ world-class city is affecting Dalit women recyclers’ work in two ways. First, I argue that emerging cleanliness governance mechanisms and solid waste management practices are re-spatializing and masculinizing waste labour in the city. I show how spatial, discursive and temporal shifts in solid waste management are producing new challenges for Dalit women recyclers in accessing waste, intensifying their physical and financial burdens and requiring more precarious adaptations to generate daily incomes. Second, I explore women recyclers’ own clean city aspirations, expressing a desire to experience the ‘clean and green’ city and a simultaneous sense of betrayal as their livelihoods, communities and bodies are excluded from its imagining and material production. I suggest that an embodied intersectional analysis of waste labour reveals how the imagining and production of clean and sustainable ‘modern’ cities can cause damage to socially marginalized and gendered bodies as they are displaced from work and denied the substantive experience of urban citizenship in the ‘world-class’ city. Attention to embodiment thus deepens an understanding of the complexities and contradictions invoked in urban environmental governance and infrastructural transformations, informing the imagining and production of more equitable and reparative urban futures.

Overlapping consensus in the space of public morality (on John Rawls’s political constructivism

The article is focused on the overlapping consensus model in the space of public morality and possibilities of its practical realization for the development of public consent. In his search for reliable arrangement of public unity John Rawls defines comprehensive moral doctrines and political doctrines as beliefs within private and public spheres, respectively. Overlapping consensus provides public consent in the public space (concerning political doctrines), beyond beliefs of private sphere (comprehensive moral doctrines). Moral values of overlapping consensus form the sphere of public morality, effective in definite historic democratic society. Rawls called it a well-ordered society. Definite historic character of a well-ordered society is predetermined by corresponding background culture. The latter can be implied as the experience of citizenship, conditioned by peculiarities of social institutions of Modernity. It is immediate immanent axiological accompaniment of the public life, background one concerning explicit ethical normative programs and strategies of acting by individuals in public life, directed on optimization of public interaction. Moral values within overlapping consensus are minimalistic (because of their set able to unite all members of a society is the basic one for all of them, irrespectively to their comprehensive moral doctrines, i.e. poor in content, laconic one), contextual (module/ flexible, relevant to public spiritual requests, transforming during the search for integrity minimum) and universal in their imperative power. Overlapping consensus makes impossible transformation of any comprehensive moral doctrine into the regulative idea of public life and set formal horizontal social interaction, which is corrected in real time mode.

The Experience of Citizenship and Acculturation Among Slavic Migrants in Poland

This paper presents an excerpt from the results of research on the relationship between the experience of the legal and institutional environment by long-term Slavic migrants living in Poland and their acculturation process. It concentrates on the experience of citizenship and its connection to acculturation processes. Template analysis (TA) was conducted on data from (A) five in-depth expert interviews with migration professionals, (B) 20 biographical and narrative interviews with migrants from European Slavic countries who came to Poland between 1989 and 2010, and (C) legal and policy documents. The findings provide information about (A) migrants’perceived irrelevance of citizenship, (B) their perceived importance of citizenship, (C) the presence of formal and informal barriers to accessing citizenship status, and (D) the sense of obligation that citizenship evokes. The research argues that it is unjustified to treat citizenship uncritically as the main indicator of the effects of the acculturation process or only as an instrument that inevitably supports this process.

The Perception of Minorities toward the Turkish State: The Case of Ethno-religious Communities

The relationship between state and non-Muslim communities has been a delicate issue since the founding of the Turkish Republic despite the principle of secularism stated in its constitution. Against this background, the association of national identity with Sunni-Islam has been the main marker of inclusion/exclusion to the national identity. Especially since 2002 when the Justice and Development Party (JDP) came to power, the debates with regard to freedom of religion and the rights of religious minorities came to fore. Over the course of decades there have been numerous studies approaching the state’s perspective towards religious minorities. However, there are still scarce amount of academic studies that focuses on citizenship experiences of the members of these communities in their daily and social life practices. In this article, we first provide a historical perspective of the state towards religious minorities from the establishment of the Republic until today including the JDP period. In the second part of this study we aim to explore recasting perspectives of the non-Muslim minorities over the previous decade by taking the standpoint of the members of Greek Orthodox, Jews and Armenian communities. To this end, we conduct in-depth interviews with the members of these communities who are residing in Istanbul. Finally, new negotiation fields which have been flourishing among these communities will be addressed.

Temporalities of citizenship among Finnish Somali women: simultaneities, disruptions and accelerations along the refugeeness-citizenship continuum

ABSTRACT Time is central to both the regimes and the lived experiences of refugeeness and citizenship. Refugeeness as a spatio-temporal immobility and form of control is extensively studied. However, only a few works address the temporalities of citizenship comprehensively. This paper reveals lived temporalities of citizenship among a group of Finnish Somali women who hold various legal statuses. Building on the mutually constitutive nature of refugeeness and citizenship, I conceptualise these states as representing either end of a continuum along which people shift through time and space. Using the analytical perspective of lived citizenship, I identify various everyday dimensions of the women’s citizenship and their positionings on the continuum. My analysis illuminates how institutional and individual temporalities of citizenship can be aligned (e.g. in global mobility) or disordered (due to othering and loss of daily spatio-temporal agency). The results show how this group of Finnish Somali women negotiate mainstream linear temporalities and enact complex temporal strategies to advance both their own citizenship and that of their local and transnational families.

At the Margins of the State

Abstract How is Pentecostalism changing the notions and experiences of citizenship at the margins of the state? Addressing this question, the paper argues that in the context of south Rajasthan, the Pentecostal church has played a vital role in combining the values of both pedagogical and governmental paradigms of citizenship not just to fill in the absence of the state but also to create an alternative model of citizenship that goes beyond the mere political rights. This alternative model of ‘Christian citizenship’ has effectively combined development with Pentecostal moral values. Furthermore, the Pentecostal church, by acting as a pedagogical agent, by organising active social ministries, and by developing ethical subjectivities among the Bhils, has engendered new notions of agency, autonomy and citizenship at the margins of the state.

Mattering Mediates Between Fairness and Well-being.

Research has suggested a fundamental connection between fairness and well-being at the individual, relational, and societal levels. Mattering is a multidimensional construct consisting of feeling valued by, and adding value to, self and others. Prior studies have attempted to connect mattering to both fairness and a variety of well-being outcomes. Based on these findings, we hypothesize that mattering acts as a mediator between fairness and well-being. This hypothesis was tested through Covariance-Based Structural Equation Modeling (CB-SEM) using multidimensional measures of fairness, mattering, and well-being. Results from a Latent Path Analysis conducted on a representative sample of 1,051U.S. adults provide support to our hypothesis by revealing a strong direct predictive effect of mattering onto well-being and a strong indirect effect of fairness onto well-being through mattering. Results also show that mattering is likely to fully mediate the relationship between fairness and multiple domains of well-being, except in one case, namely, economic well-being. These findings illustrate the value of a focus on mattering to understand the relationship between fairness and well-being and to provide future directions for theory, research, and practice. Theoretical implications for the experience of citizenship and participation, along with cross-cultural considerations, are also discussed.

Citizenship as a caste marker: How persons experience cross-national inequality

Extrapolating a recent conceptualization of caste from India to the global level, this article argues that persons experience cross-national inequalities via their citizenship as a caste marker. Rather than imagine castes as features of the fixed pre-modern Hindu social order, the article posits that castes are variable modern ascriptive social hierarchies subject to contestation and change in which economic and social distinctions are maintained through physical and symbolic violence. The study shows how, globally, nation-states exert physical and symbolic violence to normalize cross-national inequalities instituting a global citizenship-based caste order. This approach recognizes the importance of both global material relations emphasized by world-systems approaches and of symbolic structures central to global institutionalist approaches. The study also underscores persons’ positions and experiences confronting nation-states’ might. Power struggles concentrated on nation-states result in variability of global relations’ mutually reinforcing material and symbolic dimensions. The author uses caste features that appear ‘essential’ (i.e. ascriptive social closure, ‘ethnic,’ ‘religious,’ and ‘purity’ distinctions) as heuristics for identifying possible locations of caste construction and contestation, and identifies citizenship rules, nation-states’ territorial nature, nationalism, and visa, border, and naturalization rituals as such caste development sites. Vulnerable groups (stateless persons, refugees, migrants) both challenge the citizenship caste order and experience viscerally its physical and symbolic violence.

Gendered Infrastructural Citizenship: Shared Sanitation Facilities in Quarry Road West Informal Settlement, Durban, South Africa

One significant component of the South African citizenship narrative is centred around the right to basic services and corresponding elements, including dignity and a healthy living environment. This paper employs the concept of infrastructural citizenship, which draws on both infrastructure and citizenship discourses to explore how participants experience and challenge public infrastructure and as such engage with questions surrounding citizenship on an everyday basis (Lemanski, 2019a). Adopting a gendered approach, this paper draws on the empirical case of Quarry Road West, an informal settlement located in Durban, and uses a qualitative methodology. Residents have access to Community Ablution Blocks, free shared sanitation facilities provided by the eThekwini Municipality. This paper argues that restricted access to the facilities undermines perceptions of privacy and health and negatively impacts women individually and in the community. Furthermore, this paper evaluates civic responses to inadequate infrastructure in the form of participation, protest and state-directed actions. As such, it examines how women-state relationships are embedded in public infrastructure, and limitations in regards to infrastructure shape interactions and engagements with the state, their experiences of citizenship, actualisation of rights and identities.

Experiences of citizenship in precarization: An ethnography from northern Colombia in the time of COVID-19

This article is the result of qualitative research on current ways of being a citizen in northern Colombia during the era of COVID-19. In a region characterized by impoverished communities, the study area becomes a privileged place in which to understand how communities in so-called “developing countries” face a pandemic with their local resources. To place the reader, we discuss the history of this place, the town of Taganga, located in the city of Santa Marta in northern Colombia. Likewise, its culture and social structure are described, as well as the current situation related to access to electricity, water, garbage collection, and food. The article shows how, through local means, today's communities seek to establish settlements with essential services, such as water and electricity, without any relationship with the state.

The role of occupational meaningfulness and citizenship as mediators between occupational status and recovery: a cross-sectional study among residents with co-occurring problems

Purpose Engagement in meaningful occupations and being included as full citizens of the community, is essential in everyday life, and may be of considerable relevance for recovery and quality of life. However, persons with co-occurring substance use and mental health problems experience extensive obstacles to engagement in occupations and citizenship. The relationship between objective measures of occupational status and subjective experiences of occupational meaningfulness, citizenship and recovery, is scarcely researched in the context of co-occurring problems. As such, the purpose of this study is to examine associations between occupational status, occupational meaningfulness, citizenship and recovery and quality of life and to examine the roles of occupational meaningfulness and citizenship as possible mediators between occupational status and recovery and quality of life. Design/methodology/approach The study used a cross-sectional design with a sample of 104 residents at supported housing sites across six Norwegian cities. Findings Linear regression analyzes indicated that occupational status was significantly associated with the citizenship domains caring for others and community participation and with the quality of life measure positive affect. Occupational meaningfulness and citizenship were significantly associated with different domains of recovery and quality of life. Furthermore, mediation analyzes showed that the relationship between occupational status and recovery and quality of life was mediated by caring for others and community participation. Originality/value The results suggest that emphasizing opportunities for occupational meaningfulness and citizenship in practice may have positive implications for recovery among persons with co-occurring problems.

Conceptualizations and experiences of citizenship among rural retirement migrants

This qualitative research explores how retirement migrants articulate and experience rural citizenship. In doing so, it examines the factors that influence the rights, responsibilities, and everyday practices of retirement migrants as rural citizens. Thirty-nine semi-structured interviews were conducted with people who had retired to rural communities within two local government areas in Victoria, Australia. Findings indicated that locality-based and sociocultural constructions of rurality impacted both positively and negatively on retirement migrants’ ability to claim their rights, fulfil their responsibilities and their everyday experiences of inclusion. However, the relative impacts of these elements of rurality on retirement migrants were mediated by expectations of rural community settings. These expectations were associated with motivations for relocation, lifecourse experiences, individual mobilities and resources. These findings highlight the differential, temporal and precarious nature of citizenship for rural ageing cohorts and contribute to our understanding of how rurality and individual determinants intersect to facilitate processes of inclusion or exclusion for diverse older people.

To Be or Not To Be A Citizen: Young People Talks about Everyday Experiences of Citizenship in Malaysia

Citizenship is generally understood as an adult experience. Being young is seen as a transitional stage between 'childhood' and 'adulthood ' where young people either learn about becoming adults or where they pass through certain 'rites of passage'. This paper draws on some of the findings from a larger project on citizenship and citizenship education experiences among student teachers in multi-ethnic Malaysia. This article attempts to explore the citizenship experiences through the student teachers participation during the community service placement and their understanding of good citizens in multi-ethnic culture. It also intends to explore the young generations’ point of view as being citizens of Malaysia, such as their rights and duties, how they perceived good and bad citizenship and how they understand the language of citizenship. In the spirit of ethnographic design, twenty eight multi-ethnic student teachers (year 2 and year 4) who enrolled into citizenship and citizenship education course in Sultan Idris Education University (SIEU) had been interviewed and observed at university and on placement. The data was analysed using a thematic analysis.The findings revealed that student teachers ‘lived citizenship’ marked comprehensive yet complex elements of citizenship. They have clear understandings of citizenship in ‘Malaysian way’ that pointed more towards communitarian than liberal or civic-republican citizenship paradigms. They drew clear distinctions between what it means to be a ‘good’ and a ‘bad ‘citizen’. They also underlined how everyday understandings of citizenship can have both inclusionary and exclusionary implications. Further study need to be done as some of student teachers faced difficulty articulating their rights than their responsibilities.