Marker Of Citizenship Research Articles

“They always want to argue with you”: Navigating raciolinguistic ideologies at airport security

AbstractIn the aftermath of the Holocaust, Dutch public discourse promotes a self‐image of the Netherlands as ‘innocently’ post‐racial, a place where distinctions are drawn based on cultural differences rather than bodily characteristics. However, this innocence is called into question when groups or individuals, who culturally, legally and linguistically ‘fit’ within the Netherlands, are still racialised to the point of not being recognised as properly Dutch.This paper uses a feminist approach to autoethnography and critical discourse analysis to explore the author's racialised/racialising experiences of Dutch airport security, and how these experiences are both informed by and themselves re‐inform wider enactments of normative raciolinguistic ideologies. Drawing on theorisations of the links among language, embodiment and (self‐)surveillance by Sara Ahmed and Samy Alim, this paper argues that although markers of citizenship and linguistic ability can be fluidly employed and engaged with, raciolinguistic categorisation is still heavily influenced by bodily appearance.

Architects of Memory: Information and Rhetoric in a Networked Archival Age

Architects of Memory: Information and Rhetoric in a Networked Archival Age

The discursive construction of new citizen identities in Singapore

AbstractThis article investigates how new citizens reconfigure dominant indexes of citizenship to claim status as legitimate new citizens of Singapore. New citizens are expected to resolve a tension that underpins public discourses in Singapore society: while the statal narrative of multiculturalism countenances new citizens to have perceivable markers of difference, everyday discourses expect new citizens to assimilate into the ‘Singapore core’—a term used in Singapore that denotes a homogeneous understanding of what it means to be Singaporean. By adopting a metapragmatic approach, this article identifies three common indexes of citizenship that new citizens negotiate to resolve this contradiction: language, loyalty, and legacy. By reconfiguring common markers of citizenship in Singapore, new citizens are able to discursively construct a type of citizenship that they can legitimately claim and contribute to. This expands common understandings of the notion of citizenship in Singapore society. (Citizenship, language ideologies, multiculturalism, metapragmatics, Singapore)*

‘Helping people is real Jainism’: class privileged diasporic Jains affirm citizenship and multiple belongings through transnational philanthropy to a Jain faith-based organisation in India

ABSTRACT The dominant diaspora-development discourse privileges rational imperatives and focuses on remittances to households while ignoring diaspora philanthropy to organisations. In India, religious organisations receive significant levels of diaspora philanthropy yet the motivations and cultural meanings behind such transfers, or its transnational dimensions are little understood. I examine these themes through in-depth interviews with 24 Jains in UK, U.S.A and Singapore who have supported Veerayatan, a Jain faith-based organisation established by Jain nuns to deliver welfare services in India over an extensive period. I contend that diasporic Jains display a hybrid logic of philanthropy; humanitarian ideals intersect with shared Jain religious norms to motivate giving. Support for Veerayatan is sustained through social capital; embeddedness in lateral networks of co-religionists as well as ties with the nuns in the homeland. This transnational engagement is a marker of citizenship and multiple belongings, of being British, American or Singaporean differently for class-privileged diasporic Jains.

Sonic cultural citizenship through performance: CASA 0101’s production of Josefina López’s Detained in the Desert

ABSTRACTThis essay listens to aurality in conjunction with the visual classification of racialized bodies in neoliberal citizenship through what I term “sonic cultural citizenship.” Through a close listening to the 2010 production of Josefina López’s Detained in the Desert at CASA 0101, the essay amplifies racism as operating through affective performative dimensions, where citizenship is renegotiated and resisted through sonic performance. Detained centers the necessity of unhinging visual and sonic markers of citizenship for Latinx communities. It also evokes how sonic performance needs not only to decenter racial visibility in the Américas, but also to offer non-heteronormative frameworks of belonging.

States of Obligation: Taxes and Citizenship in the Russian Empire and Early Soviet Republic by Yanni Kotsonis

States of Obligation: Taxes and Citizenship in the Russian Empire and Early Soviet Republic, by Yanni Kotsonis. Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2014. xiv, 483 pp. $80.00 (cloth). States of Obligation provides a detailed examination of the development, reform, and implementation of the taxation system in late Imperial and early Soviet Russia. Focusing primarily on the post-Great Reforms era, Yanni Kotsonis explores both the intellectual and ideological objectives of taxation policies and the results of their practical application. He illustrates the shift to personal tax assessments and highlights the difficulties of establishing a system of direct individual universal taxation in a state where such obligations had been communal and determined according to privilege. In doing so, Kotsonis argues that the development and evolution of taxation policy was part of a broader modernization project that sought to redefine the very understanding of citizenship and the relationship of individuals to the state. Kotsonis situates taxation within the larger modernization project of the Russian Empire and Western Europe as a whole; indeed, he suggests that fiscal policies lay at the heart of the modernizing state. He places Russia squarely within that broader context, comparing Russian developments to those in Western Europe at the time. In order to implement a universal tax regime, the Russian government found it increasingly important to obtain knowledge of the individual and of corporate financial transactions. Collecting this information necessitated greater surveillance of the population and essentially made individual or corporate transactions the concern of the state. This knowledge, Kotsonis argues, led to a shift in the relationship between the state and the individual as new tax policies attempted to make tax bills more proportionate to income, subjecting the individual to assessment. Through taxation, the government established a new model of citizenship that emphasized civic-mindedness and responsibility in place of rights. Ultimately, taxation became the marker of citizenship rather than estate status, minimizing collective relationships in favour of a direct bond between the individual and the state. Kotsonis provides a detailed and comprehensive account of the taxation system reforms in the late nineteenth century, describing the bureaucratization and professionalization of tax collection, as well as the changing definition of the person (corporate and individual). Corporations, encouraged to write off expenses that could be documented, reported the details of their business dealings, which allowed commercial transactions to be traced, recorded, and taxed to a greater extent. Urban areas saw the imposition of new taxes, for example, the apartment tax, which made use of both universalistic and individual principles by establishing an individual assessment that could potentially be applied to any taxpayer. …

Industrial Districts and Migrant Labour in Italy

AbstractBoth the flexibility of labour and wider sociocultural issues have historically been identified as important dimensions of the economic success of Italy's industrial districts. Increasing numbers of labour migrants from Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe are now working in industrial districts and living in local communities previously characterized as socially cohesive. Immigration status, Italian employment legislation and the micro‐level conditions prevailing in districts appear as key issues affecting employment relationships for labour migrants, and the social cohesiveness seen to contribute to the success of industrial districts is being undermined through the treatment of labour migrants as people outside the national Italian community in terms of rights and other markers of citizenship.

New Citizens, New Rights

Traditional theories of citizenship often link membership and rights, with one defining the other. Thus, becoming a citizen entitles the new member of society to a certain set of rights-civic, political, and social-that are generally unavailable to noncitizens (Turner, 1993). has that of other democratic societies, U.S. history has been marked by the efforts of excluded groups to obtain full membership in society. While the incorporation of new citizens into the polity may temporarily stabilize the social system, it can also produce frustration if these rights are curtailed, denied, or unevenly distributed: As citizenship institutionalizes social expectations which cannot be satisfied by the state under all circumstances, citizenship entitlements fuel political dissent (Turner, 1991: 217). Rights, however, are neither arbitrary nor finite. New citizen groups bring new needs to the polity and begin to enunciate and claim new rights. In the United States, the link between membership and rights is a critical but vexing one, particularly for groups that have been excluded from full membership in society. Karst (1991) contends that minorities achieve membership in U.S. society through the struggle to claim rights as citizens. Similarly, Patricia Williams (1991: 164) argues that, for African-Americans, obtaining the rights enjoyed by white Americans is the marker of citizenship. In this sense, citizenship rights are not bestowed by the simple act of birth but must be fought for and achieved. Citizenship is an active process of claiming rights rather than the passive acquisition of an arbitrary and limited set of rights. Denying minorities full citizenship militates against their citizenship and hinders their active participation in the political system, but by struggling to