Imaginaries Of Citizenship Research Articles

Improvising Field Research in COVID-era Hackerspaces

Hackerspaces and makerspaces are community-oriented technology and art workshops facilitating new forms of public life and filling infrastructural gaps in cities (but for the sake of brevity, I refer to both as hackerspaces here). My dissertation project aims at understanding how hackerspaces relate to the built environment and how they create new imaginaries of citizenship in U.S. cities like San Francisco and Detroit. Here I reflect on some of the challenges I faced researching these spaces as they constantly adapted to unaccommodating city environments before and during the pandemic. During my field research, I had to learn to follow them through their various improvisational strategies.

The politics of hopeful citizenship: Women, counterinsurgency and the state in eastern India

Anthropologists have posited that citizenship takes on multiple meanings and forms based on citizens’ everyday engagements with state and non-state actors. This article examines forms of citizenship that materialize vis-à-vis the state. In particular, it deals with new imaginaries of citizenship that emerge through interactions between state actors and poor women in counterinsurgency settings. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the erstwhile Maoist zones of eastern India, I show that, despite knowing the violent face of the state, poor women nevertheless rely on the developmental face of the state to hope for social transformation and imagine better lives and livelihoods. I argue that in doing so they engender an idea of hopeful citizenship.

Citizenship’s Insular Cases, from Ancient Greece and Rome to Puerto Rico

Engaging equally with ancient Greco-Roman and contemporary Euro-American paradigms of citizenship, this essay argues that experiences of civic integration are structured around figurations of island and archipelago. In elaboration of this claim, I offer a transhistorical account of how institutions and imaginaries of citizenship take shape around an “insular scheme” whose defining characteristic is displacement. Shuttling from Homer and Livy to Imbolo Mbue and Danez Smith, I rely on the work of postcolonial literary critics and political theorists to map those repetitive deferrals of civic status to which immigrants and refugees in particular are uniquely subject.

On the death of mi madre, hauntings, and ethnic mourning

ABSTRACTMonths after mi madre died from breast cancer in 2005, she started haunting my dreams and this intensified my grief over her death. Fortunately, mi Mexican abuelita taught me to productively engage the specter by dialoguing with and not demonizing or colonizing mi madre’s ghost. In this performative essay, I re-member parts of my conversations with mi abuelita to argue that mi madre’s spirit represents an ethnic haunting that necessitates a process of ethnic mourning. Collective remembrance and mourning of indigena migrant bodies that roam along the border between Mexico and the U.S. challenge colonialist and national imaginaries of citizenship.

Imagining and practising citizenship in austere times: the work of Citizens Advice

This article explores the significance of citizenship for those working in Citizens Advice, a network of voluntary organisations in the UK that exists to provide peer-to-peer advice and support to those facing problems. Drawing on a recent research study, the article considers the ways in which the ‘citizen in citizens advice’ is imagined and translated into practice. Despite current political and policy moves to shrink citizenship (in terms of eligibility, access and substance), the ‘citizen in citizens advice’ is regularly thought about in expansive ways that draw on other imaginaries of citizenship. We suggest that these everyday discursive practices of citizenship are important both in analytic terms and in reinvigorating a political discussion otherwise focused upon restriction and exclusion.

The City as Borderland: Migrancy and Frontier Life in Johannesburg

What does it mean to ‘belong’ in an African city? And what does it mean to be ‘different’? How have contemporary South African – and wider global – discourses framed belonging and difference; and how is this framing encountered and altered by those who are positioned as ‘outsider’? Finally, how are notions of legality constructed by the state, and how are they contested by ordinary people? These are key questions for our imaginaries of citizenship in postcolonial Africa, where we deal with the legacies of colonialism and modernity through our somewhat arbitrarily constructed state boundaries, and these are the key concerns around which Caroline Wanjiku Kihato’s ethnography of migrant women in Johannesburg centres. This book is about Johannesburg’s in-between spaces, and the agency of the people who inhabit them and who, in so doing, change the face of the city. In South Africa’s current context of eversurfacing xenophobic sentiment, it is a book that matters to notions of the ‘local’ versus the ‘foreign’, and to our notions of the legal versus the illegal life in a city.

The deportation continuum: convergences between state agents and NGO workers in the Dutch deportation field

The social field in which deportations of illegalized migrants are operationalized is often perceived to be comprised of two opposing sides that together form a deportation regime: on the one side, street-level state agents, on the other side, civil-society actors. Focusing ethnographically on deportation case managers and NGO workers in the Netherlands, a country known for its consensus politics, our study reveals significant convergences in the manners that illegalized migrants are treated by both sides in usage of terminology, handling of face-to-face interactions and worldviews on issues like belonging and justice. Given these convergences, we argue that the field in which deportation is being negotiated and practiced amounts to a continuum formed by state agents and NGO actors. We argue that a deportation continuum is underlined by shared political subjectivities and creates a sealed-off political realm that restricts the initiatives of activist citizens, imaginaries of citizenship and alternatives for deportation policies.

Narratives and imaginaries of citizenship in Latin America

In Latin America, citizenship and the constitution of a ‘citizenry’ have been key elements of post-independence nation-building projects since the nineteenth century. Despite efforts to institution...

Two Imaginaries of Citizenship in Turkey: the Republican and “Ethical” Models

Notions of sovereign state-rule and citizenship which rest on the twentieth century epistemology of state centrism define the “right to have rights” in terms of a national, unified category of state membership. In its association of citizenship with state sovereignty, the republican citizenship model in Turkey allows the state bureaucracy to act with key unitary agency in managing the relationship between religion and politics. In contesting the republican model on both religious and civil grounds, a notion of “ethical” citizenship has emerged based on the extension of rights and freedoms through citizen activism. This paper illustrates this process through a comparative analysis of the religiously inspired demand by female students to remove the headscarf ban and by Alevi individuals to remove the designation of Islam from national identification cards.

Ethnolinguistic Racism

In late modernity, where the making of social worlds is governed by new media technologies, flexible systems of exchange, and an unprecedented traffic in money, markets, and people across sovereign borders, the problematic concept of the nation has been recuperated to fasten subjects to political space. In this context, the projected frontiers of the nation are increasingly mapped out through the medium of language, thereby producing new mechanisms for membership and exclusion. With a focus on German cultural politics, I examine how regimes of nationality and imaginaries of citizenship are forged by a racialization of language. Under the impact of global capitalism and European unification, ethnolinguistic racism emerges as a discursive medium for reconstituting subjectivities and sovereignties.