Margins Of Citizenship Research Articles

Examining narratives of Swedish care-leaving bureaucracy from a lived citizenship perspective: framing the problem in political terms

ABSTRACT The transition to young adulthood is a complex process for all young people, but especially those leaving care who are at high risk of social exclusion. The adverse living conditions of young care leavers have been well documented in recent decades and constitute an established point of departure in the political discourse on care leavers, as well as within the international field of leaving care research. This article builds on twelve in-depth interviews with young people aged 17–24 from a Swedish research project on youth transitioning from out-of-home care and their paths to housing, work and education. From the perspectives of care leavers, the processes governing transitions are characterised by rigid managerialism and social administration that fails to address the extensive needs regarding housing, income, education and health as experienced by this group. The article explores leaving care from a lived citizenship perspective, arguing that the lack of responsiveness from the social services, as well as the lack of meaningful long-term interventions capable of addressing the material, psychological, emotional, relational and educational needs of young people leaving care, places this group on the margins of citizenship, unsupported and insufficiently prepared to enter the many trials of emerging adulthood.

Book review: Anasua Chatterjee, Margins of Citizenship: Muslim Experiences in Urban India

Anasua Chatterjee, Margins of Citizenship: Muslim Experiences in Urban India. New Delhi: Routledge, 2017, 192 pp., ₹695 (Paperback). ISBN: 9781138038264 (hardback).

The city and the clock in planetary times: revisiting Isin’s Being Political twenty years on

ABSTRACT This article highlights the profound contribution to Citizenship Studies of Engin Isin’s Being Political: Genealogies of Citizenship. Over the last twenty years, scholars have drawn on this seminal work to show how those positioned at the margins of citizenship have been central to its transformation. Key to Isin’s approach is the notion of the city as a difference machine – a paradigmatic formulation that captures the social and spatial dimensions of citizenship struggles. Reflecting on this notion twenty years on, I ask how it intersects with an emergent planetary imaginary in which a politics of time, as much as space, is increasingly explicit. I make a case for attention to the clock, alongside and as part of the city, where the clock is understood as a non-exhaustive symbol of the temporalities in and through which subjects become political. I pursue this approach in relation to a specific example: a 2020 case before the High Court of Australia concerning the power of the Australian government to deport Aboriginal persons who were not Australian citizens. The case speaks to complex interconnections between Indigenous politics, planetary politics, and citizenship, in and through which the city and the clock are being reconfigured.

“Muslims are Finally waking up”: post-9/11 American immigrant youth challenge conditional citizenship

ABSTRACT Across the world, Muslims in non-Muslim majority countries are seen as alien humans, relegated to the margins of citizenship, permitted tenuous forms of belonging as long as they follow the “Good Muslim” script assigned to them by the majority. In the U.S., youth from Muslim American immigrant communities have awakened to, and are rejecting, this conditional citizenship. Drawing on a nation-wide qualitative study with youth from diverse Muslim immigrant communities, we argue that, since 9/11, there have been significant changes in young Muslim Americans’ self-perceptions and attitudes toward their rights, citizenship, and feelings of belonging. These youth recognize themselves as people of colour and are more likely than their parents’ generations to link their struggles with those of other racially minoritized communities, thus suggesting a more radical politics of belonging in the United States.

On the margins of citizenship: youth participation and youth exclusion in times of neoliberal urbanism

ABSTRACT Over the last few decades there has been growing interest in youth participation, at policy level and in research. Generally, this is attributed to growing public concern regarding the ‘youth participatory deficit’ and youth dissatisfaction in European societies. In contemporary discourse young people are positioned as a problem associated with a lack of participation in economic, social and political processes, which in turn is seen as a threat to the very foundation of democracy. Taking into consideration the neoliberal transformation of Western European cities towards increasing socioeconomic and ethno-cultural segregation, the authors argue that there is a pressing need to analyse youth participation as it is shaped by structural order and unequal access to resources, which creates spatial, material and symbolic divisions between different categories of young people. By placing it within a framework of citizenship theory, the authors analyse the enigmatic concept of ‘youth participation’ through the prism of social exclusion, arguing for an understanding of participation as embedded in the social landscape of unequal power relations and life opportunities which are essential characteristics of the neo-liberal city.

Nobodies and somebodies

This article draws on ethnographic research to examine the bureaucratic matrix of temporal, material, and legal scales that come together to constitute the rehousing process for a group of rough sleepers seeking passage out of homelessness in contemporary London. Further, it explores the ways in which different bureaucratic technologies mediate the relations between the rehousing hub’s staff, its homeless clients, and local housing authorities, paying particular attention to the way these economies solidify the already asymmetrical power relations that existed between the homeless and those employed to manage them. For the homeless, this process is constituted by a spatiotemporality of confinement and seemingly endless waiting that shunts them into the margins of citizenship, caught between being a nobody and a somebody. Thinking through contemporary debates in political theory, this article approaches the rehousing process (or failure thereof) not as a linear pathway but as a constellation of disciplinary and bureaucratic procedures within which exceptional structures of sovereignty and neoliberal governmentality intersect. Applying these ideas anthropologically, I demonstrate how this intersectionality works to continually shape and reshape the existential realities, possibilities, and aspirations of the hub’s homeless clients.

Anasua Chatterjee, Margins of Citizenship: Muslim Experiences in Urban India

Anasua Chatterjee, <i>Margins of Citizenship: Muslim Experiences in Urban India</i>

Book Review: Anasua Chatterjee. 2017. Margins of Citizenship: Muslim Experiences in Urban India

Book Review: Anasua Chatterjee. 2017. <i>Margins of Citizenship: Muslim Experiences in Urban India</i>

Stateless in the Gulf: Migration, Nationality, and Society in Kuwait. By Claire Beaugrand

Bidun—people without papers or nationality—make up almost 10 per cent of the Kuwaiti national population, but are culturally and linguistically relatively indistinguishable from citizens (p. 1). They do, however, work in low-wage and low-skilled jobs that most citizens would not and often live in impoverished conditions on the outskirts of the city. In Stateless in the Gulf, Beaugrand traces the story of their origin through nation formation, urban settlement, citizenship laws, and oil development. She also meticulously explores how bidun legal, economic, and social identities intersect with significant aspects of Kuwaiti history, such as the Gulf War of 1990, intensified labor migration, Islamism and sectarian tensions, and the Arab uprisings of 2011. The story of Kuwait and the Arabian Peninsula’s modernity is entangled with the story of the bidun, and in retelling this story from the margins of citizenship and belonging, inclusion and exclusion, Beaugrand aims to produce a ‘counter-narrative’ to the state (p. 13). In the process, she also shows readers how Kuwait can be central to citizenship and migration studies more generally, by helping to understand how margins get constituted and how those without formal legal existence claim collective identity and take political action.

When the subaltern speaks: Re-examining indigenous-language media as alternative public sphere during colonial South Africa

Abstract This article attempts to examine the efficacy of indigenous-language newspapers published in South Africa during the colonial era. In doing so, the article is particularly interested to see how the success achieved by those publications could be replicated to boost post-apartheid indigenous-language media in their encounter with the hegemonic onslaught of the mainstream media whose scope and hegemony continue to expand at an alarming rate. The article embraces the notion of the public sphere and the theory of hegemony to make sense of how indigenous media permeated the language and political discourse and emerged as a strong voice for the oppressed, reinforcing at once what Herman and Chomsky (2002) refer to as ‘class consciousness’. The notion of the public sphere is found to be particularly profitable in highlighting the exclusion/inclusion of wide-ranging voices in the public affairs while the robustness of the theory of hegemony lies in its strengths to unravel the political imperatives and the ideological contest that characterized the colonial era. The article argues that indigenous publications succeeded in becoming viable platforms for the indigenous communities who had been pushed beyond the margins of citizenship. The article concludes that indigenous-language media were particularly important for their political mobilization and contribution to media diversity through the range of voices that they orchestrated.

Pr�ctica pol�tica y diversidad sexual: ciudadan�a y derechos en las demandas del activismo LGTBIQ e

The present work aims to reconstruct the experience of activism for sexual diversity in recent Argentine history. From the contributions of Chantal Mouffe, we investigated the record in which said actors formulated their demands, arguing that the formulation in terms of rights contributed to activate the democratic paradox and question the margins of citizenship.

On the Margins of Citizenship: The Refugee Crisis and the Transformation of Identities in Europe

Drawing on the notion of the “right to have rights”, the study aims to explore how the European responses in the context of the current so called “refugee crisis”, based on strong inclusion-exclusion mechanisms, as well as the current shortcomings of the international human rights regime can be pertinent for analysing and capturing current transformations of the notion and foundations of European citizenship. It is further suggested that the institution of European citizenship in its current form needs to be superseded, in order to attain a truly cosmopolitan content and to provide a basis for a universalistic human rights regime. The main proposal presented in this direction, stresses the need to rethink human rights in terms of political practices and to “rediscover” the revolutionary heritage of human rights from an Arendtian perspective.

Managing the “Dirty Work” of Illegality

Drawing on in-depth interviews with 45 Latinos living in a small city the author calls Sycamore City, the author examines the discourses and practices through which Mexican migrants and Puerto Ricans deal with the “dirty work” of illegality. The focus is on the “physical dirty work” performed by undocumented workers and “social dirty work” performed by workers on the margins of citizenship. This research shows that “physical dirty work” and “social dirty work” overlap when a new class of worker enters the labor market. As such, the author documents the dirty work undocumented workers perform and the ethnoracial distinctions used to gain self-worth while performing physical dirty work. In addition, this article shows that as citizens, Puerto Rican professionals offer discreet assistance when they encounter undocumented migrants. In providing assistance, these professionals diminish citizen-migrant distinctions.

Book Review: General Politics: The Margins of Citizenship

Book Review: General Politics: The Margins of Citizenship

The margins of citizenship: introduction

The margins of citizenship: introduction

Doing Disability Justice

Doing Disability Justice

On the Margins of Citizenship: Intellectual Disability and Civil Rights in Twentieth-Century America

On the Margins of Citizenship: Intellectual Disability and Civil Rights in Twentieth-Century America

CONTESTING THE SECURITIZATION OF BRITISH MUSLIMS

UK security threats are perceived to have changed significantly since 9/11 and 7/7. Politicians, policymakers, academics and the media have adopted an understanding that security is now experienced in a new way. Importantly, threats and danger are not solely outside of state borders but are also originating, operating and felt within them. As a result, ever more areas of policy are justified through the language of security – or rather that of insecurity, threat and danger. However, the impact of this expansion is not evenly felt among UK citizens. The discourses of state agencies frame Muslim communities not simply as ‘problem communities’ but as security concerns. As such they are placed on the margins of citizenship and their loyalty questioned. This process has been reinforced by a series of policy initiatives and Acts of Parliament in recent years. However, this process is not uncontested and alternative cultural models of belonging emanate from Muslim communities that ‘normalize’ and challenge the Othering in security discourses. The aim of this essay is to examine the policy and discursive mechanisms by which securitization and resistance occur.

On the margins of citizenship: intellectual disability and civil rights in twentieth-century America

Acknowledgments 1. Introduction 2. A Theory of Rights and Disability 3. Setting the Stage: Early Tensions in Citizenship 4. The Feebleminded versus the Nation: 1900-1930s 5. Professionals and the Potentially Productive Citizen 6. The Rise of the Parents' Movement and the Special Child 7. Creating the Mentally Retarded Citizen 8. The Difficult Road of the 1980s 9. Reimagining Retardation, Transforming Community 10. Conclusion Notes References Index