Notions Of Citizenship Research Articles

State of Exception or the New Normal? An Evaluation of Pandemic Tracking Technologies and Their Implications for Citizenship

This article forms a critical examination of how the increased digitalization of daily life, exemplified by pandemic digital technologies of tracking apps and digital Covid-19 passports, affects ethical principles of privacy, subjectivity and autonomy, fundamental in a traditional notion of citizenship. The pandemic crisis has been an example of the increasing use of automated technologies across various domains, where society has become deeply reliant on these technologies. I argue that in ethical terms, the pandemic crisis has moved the borders of what is accepted by governments and citizens and have normalised far-reaching tools of registration, calculation, and surveillance. The pandemic state of exception has necessitated and legalised a temporary suspension of normal civil rights and replaced them with spatial ordering, automated surveillance, and the application of advanced and intrusive digital monitoring tools. Based on an empirical account of tracking apps I discuss the consequences for citizenship based on two theoretical figures: Michel Foucault´s concept of “bio-politics” and the concept of “a state of exception” as theorized by German political philosopher Carl Schmidt. Where traditional concepts of citizenships have focused on individual rights, responsibilities and articipation in civic life, bio-politics emphasizes a management and regulation of populations with less focus on individual agency and more on statistical analysis and control mechanisms. Technologies and discourses of automation are inter-related; digital innovation legitimize and strengthen an adherent automation of political logics, framed as a politics of necessity, where calculative predictions and technological facts leave little room for political subjectivity and values. In the concluding section it is discussed whether the rapid automation catalyzed by the pandemic was a state of emergency, necessitated by a pandemic threat, or rather represents a more profound change, a new normal for citizenship.

Moving Beyond Thai-Centrism: Theorizing “Asia as Method” in Decolonial Education

Grounded in Chen’s idea, Asia as method, the author conceptualizes his theorizing with Winichakul’s signified meaning of Asia as a home for understanding how the author encounters educational phenomenon and having the authority to reconstitute Thai-centrism discourse in education. The notion of “home” signifies Thailand is part of Asia, which is used to move beyond the debate over “us vs. them”, which is non-productive and leads to other shortcomings. Asia as method as a frame of reference can be used to conceptualize how knowledge, culture, power, and discourse intersect in education. Given that the field of education is a cultural praxis in which diverse discourses, positionalities, and pedagogies deserve its place, education needs to be reconceptualized by moving beyond the legacy of western modernity-coloniality episteme and any forms of epistemic internal colonization, a legacy that continues to occur at the deep-rooted socio-cultural and psychological level and plays essential roles in constructing our subjectivity about educational ideals for cognitive and social justice. Thus, to move forward with decolonial and critical education projects, it is essential to explore multi-epistemology and methodology for nuanced understandings of education in the socio-cultural, political, historical, and environmental contexts. The relationship between Asia as method and decolonial and critical education projects need to be a point of departure for democratic deliberations against epistemicide and demonstration of how education as a form of cultural praxis works to internalize particular knowledge production for constructing a specific notion of citizenship in Thailand, Southeast Asia and beyond.

Designing deaf spaces: education, hygiene, and citizenship in nineteenth-century France

ABSTRACT This article examines the changing architectural environments of deaf education in the nineteenth century, taking the national institutes in Paris and Bordeaux as its main focus. Founded in the late eighteenth century and initially housed in government-expropriated properties, both schools underwent comprehensive renovation and reconstruction projects in the nineteenth century to emerge as modern educational spaces. Although these projects remain overlooked in the history of modern architecture, they were closely tied to contemporary discourses on education, hygiene, and citizenship. The renovation of the Paris Institute for Deaf-Mutes during the 1820s–30s engaged pressing questions about hygiene and social progress in the postrevolutionary era of national reconstruction. The architectural transformation of the Bordeaux Institute for Deaf-Mute Girls from the 1860s not only reflected the changing pedagogical focus from sign language to oralism; it was also imbricated in broader debates about laïcité and educational standardisation as France transitioned from empire to republic. Far from being marginal, these institutions functioned as key sites for working through notions of citizenship and national identity. Their histories reveal how architectural and material frameworks could serve to impose ideology on the one hand, and provide important grounds for the formation of a minority community on the other.

Press charges: renegotiating free speech and citizenship in post-partition Delhi

ABSTRACT This article examines the conflict between press censorship and free speech in post-partition Delhi, focusing on the Urdu press. It demonstrates how conflicts over free speech became a focal point for the intersection of two fundamental tensions underlying postcolonial state formation—between civil liberties and the authoritarian legacy of colonial rule, and between a secular democracy and a religion-based partition. The article explores the Urdu refugee dailies that relocated from Lahore to Delhi amid the partition upheaval and emerged as significant media voicing refugees’ interests, often at the expense of Muslim residents. Their provocative writings simultaneously challenged the boundaries of free speech and advanced an exclusionary notion of citizenship based on blood-based descent (jus sanguinis). This narrow conception of citizenship, underlying the partition migrations themselves, challenged the secularist vision of India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. In response, the Delhi administration took actions against the refugee papers, making them central to contemporary struggles over press censorship. By taking the state to court, refugee editors promoted citizens’ right to free speech, but simultaneously advanced a circumscribed notion of ethno-religious citizenship. Navigating this dual role, the article unveils the exclusions and contradictions that marked citizenship formation in the early postcolonial period.

Transnational citizenship: political practices of Kurdish migrants’ descendants in France and Germany

ABSTRACT Over the last decades, scholars have increasingly called for the ‘deterritorialization’ of the notion of citizenship. The realities concerning citizenship have changed with new expressions of transnationalism. However, whereas the main body of research has focused on the transnational aspects of citizenship among migrants in the form of their transnational political practices and dual nationalities, their descendants have received far less attention. This paper examines the political practices of Kurdish migrants’ descendants in France and Germany and their narratives of identity and citizenship. We employ migrant descendants’ political activism as an empirical entry point to gain insight into the meanings they attach to citizenship. The paper draws from two qualitative datasets collected in France (2015–2017) and Germany (2015–2023) with individuals of Kurdish background, who were born to migrant families arriving from Turkey in the 1980s and 1990s. The findings show that national contexts – both in grandparents’/parents’ country of departure and the country of arrival – and the transnational, diasporic and even supranational space (EU) shape migrant descendants’ political activism, identity construction and consequently resonate in the meanings they attach to citizenship. This study highlights the need to approach migrants’ descendants as transnational citizens in their own right.

Preparing teachers for critical global and democratic practice: shifting inquiries into the teaching of democracy and global citizenship in teacher education

AbstractThere is an ongoing and increasingly pressing need to prepare teachers and students for a still globalising world. Such work requires that we contemplate how we are preparing learners to think globally and embody critical practices of citizenship. Much work has been done in this space yet there is little work that focuses on teacher educators and their respective views of global citizenship education, the primary paradigm through which the global context and civic action converge. Recognising the important role that teachers play in this educational process and the evolving nature of the notions of citizenship and democracy, this project focuses on Initial Teacher Education (ITE) to understand how teacher educators envisage their roles in preparing pre-service teachers (PSTs) to teach about democracy in schools. To learn how teacher educators understand global citizenship education as part of their research and teaching, we undertook a small case study wherein we interviewed teacher educators to solicit their views of global citizenship education. Through a presentation of the voices of teacher educators, we argue that there is a pressing need for those working in global citizenship education to consider how to better support teacher educators to navigate what we argue are two consistent themes: (a) a complex and unclear conceptual terrain that teacher educators find themselves navigating and; (b) an ever increasing set of regulatory and institutional hurdles that make enacting critical global citizenship challenging.

Engendering Care in the Politics of the East Bengali Refugee Identity: A Reading of Bengal Partition Narratives Through the Lens of Ecological and Culinary Citizenship

The ‘politics of care’ has become an essential dialectical discourse within the field of ecofeminism with the intervention of theorist Sherilyn Macgregor. The engendering of care has politicized the figure and the status of the woman within and beyond the domestic space. Further, this discourse has gone beyond the cultural domain of domesticity to realign itself with the understanding of care work in the light of ecological citizenship. In the light of this my paper proposes to revisit South Asian partition historiography to look at the figure of the refugee. I wish to look at the Bengal Partition of 1947 and discern how the East Bengali refugee maneuvers their identity vis-à-vis their claim of ecological and culinary citizenship. Sunanda Sikdar’s novel A Life Long Ago, translated by Anchita Ghatak for Penguin and the recipient of the Ananda Puraskar 2010 award, is a memoir that reproduces the anxieties that are part of the division of Bengal and the subsequent interruption, creation, preservation of the notion of citizenship and the instituting and the drawing of the national border that separates India from Bangladesh, erstwhile East Pakistan. Meanwhile, the anthology edited by Bashabi Fraser, Bengal Partition Stories: An Unclosed Chapter, contains multiple stories that problematize the notion of national borders specifically by challenging these political lines vis-à-vis the culinary code. Through selective stories from the anthology mentioned and Sikdar’s memoir, the paper seeks to address the issue of citizenship and national borders through the realm of the kitchen, food consumption and domesticity and how the gastronomic experience is informed by the ecofeminist rhetoric of the ‘politics of care’. I would also look at Bhaswati Gosh’s debut novel Victory Colony 1950, and Madhushree Ghosh’s culinary memoir Khabaar: An Immigrant Journey of Food, Memory, and Family, which threaten and dismantle the gender binaries embedded within the discourse of care politics.

The Civic Education of Ignacio Bonillas: Revising Ambient Notions of Citizenship in the Arizona-Sonora Borderlands

This article details the experiences of Ignacio Bonillas, one of the first Mexican students to graduate from Arizona’s territorial schools and explicates how those experiences impacted his perceptions of U.S. and Mexican citizenship. Bonillas’s story illustrates how definitions of citizenship in the Arizona-Sonora borderlands were permeable and dynamic before the era of Americanization and encourages teachers and students to interrogate the ways restrictive notions of citizenship are reproduced in public schools. This article goes on to argue for inviting students to access local archives and create case studies of figures whose experiences challenge the Americanized histories of their region.

Investing in "Civilized" Futures: Orphans and Colonial Caretaking in Saint-Louis, Senegal, 1930-49

Abstract: For nearly a century, the Sœurs de Saint Joseph de Cluny operated the Ndar Toute orphanage for mixed-race ( métis ) and African girls in the city of Saint-Louis, Senegal. By the 1940s, colonial reforms, evolving conceptions of citizenship, and even changes in the social and political culture of Saint-Louis itself, sparked questions about the responsibility of Catholic missions and colonial authorities to care for orphaned girls. As the French colonial project gestured toward more expansive notions of citizenship and social welfare for adults, orphaned children remained an exceptional case, permitting an enduring role for the "civilizing" work of Catholic missions

Brief Considerations on Citizenship from the Perspective of the Council of Europe

The concept of citizenship is of paramount importance within the recent legal space. Without a good knowledge of its conceptual foundation, of the mechanisms it encompasses as well as of its interferences with the wide range of human rights documents that have regulated it over time, we cannot have a clear picture of how to understand its evolution. Thus, this research approach aims at analyzing the notion of citizenship as it is seen through the filter of the regional protection mechanism of the Council of Europe, especially focusing on identifying the main documents that consecrated it. Therefore, starting from the general framework of the human rights protection, we narrow the line of analysis by exposing the main coordinates the European Convention on Nationality emphasizes, this document being relevant not only for defining the notion but also for regulating some areas in which citizenship appears as a central element. Last but not least, the paper underlines the connection of the European Convention on Human Rights with the idea of citizenship. The document is remarkable not because it defines the notion, because we already know that this it has no concerns in this field, but more particularly because of the way in which it creates a proper context for the European Court of Human Rights to rule by also taking into consideration some aspects regarding the notion of citizenship. This process automatically creates a bridge between the concept of citizenship and the previously mentioned document, which becomes extremely relevant for the present analysis.

Examining citizenship regimes in Assam through a structural and cultural violence lens.

In this paper, we examine citizenship crisis in the Northeast Indian state of Assam through the lenses of structural and cultural violence. In 2019, close to two million people in Assam were disenfranchised by updating the National Register of Citizens (NRC). The vast majority of those disenfranchised are Miya people who have been subjected to legacies of persecution and violence since the early 19th century during British colonial rule. We map the contours of the citizenship crisis by centering the struggles of Miya communities who are most deeply impacted by violent citizenship regimes. Using a structural and cultural violence lens, we elucidate the linkages between colonial histories, (post)colonial policies, and institutional practices on the one hand and Miya people's everyday struggles on the other. Across these analyses, we demonstrate how current citizenship regimes operate as a form of state-sanctioned violence against Miya people. The implications of these analyses for rethinking contemporary notions of citizenship and belonging for community-engaged scholarship are discussed.

Globalization, Citizenship and Subjectivity: Theoritical Assumptions and Empirical Understanding in Nepalese Context

This article attempts to show the relationship between theoretical assumptions and empirical understanding of globalization, citizenship and subjectivity. These three issues are not only interrelated each other but also controversial phenomenon in contemporary world. On the one hand, due to omnipresent nature of globalization, notions of citizenship and human subjectivity have been changing dramatically. On the other hand, citizenship derives from the existence of a community of people, a polity embedded in a geographically bounded nation state recognized by other nations and with boundaries and laws upheld, if necessary, by force. However, both globalization and citizenship are equally shaping and reconstructing the human subjectivity differently. Therefore, the main objective of the article is to explore the relationship among globalization, citizenship and subjectivity with theoretical assumptions and empirical understanding in Nepalese context. For this, in the first part of the article presents theoretical assumptions of globalization, citizenship and subjectivity followed by four Nepalese cases. More specifically, four individuals share their empirical understanding on how globalization has been shaping their human subjectivity in their own words. Finally, the article concludes that due to the globalization, human subjectivity and citizenship both also became globalizing because self and subject itself as fluid and socially constructed in globalized world.

Essential Workers of the Palais-Royal: Prostitution and the Public Good in French Revolutionary Drama

Abstract: From 1789 to 1792, the issue of prostitution was absent from parliamentary debates, policy agendas, and journalism in France. This article looks to theater and pamphlet literature instead for examples that break the silence around prostitution, with special emphasis on the play, Le Serment civique des demoiselles fonctionnaires publiques du Palais-Royal (1791), in which prostitutes debate their status and duty in relation to a new Revolutionary decree on public workers. Using print and performance to intervene in public discourse and promote their interests, prostitutes of the Palais-Royal are shown as crafting a notion of citizenship based not on a discourse of natural rights, as prominent feminist activists of the period did, but rather based on their contribution to the public good as essential workers for the nation.

Stopping Firestone and starting a citizen ‘revolution from below’: reflections on the enduring exploitation of Liberian land and labour

Attempting to reduce America’s dependence on foreign-sourced rubber, Firestone established in 1926 the world’s largest industrial plantation in Liberia under a controversial 99-year-lease agreement. Nearly a century later, backlash against the exploitative nature of corporate hegemony and economic globalisation crystallised in a transnational campaign, Stop Firestone, and class action suit to hold the multinational accountable. I argue in this article that Liberia’s unequal incorporation into global capitalism has configured and reconfigured the set of relations between government and citizens through parallel, albeit interrelated, processes—the globalisation of capital (via trade and investments) and the globalisation of rights (via universalised notions of citizenship as a human right). While the pursuit of foreign direct investment (FDI) in particular placed the interests of investors like Firestone ‘above’ the state thus undermining government–citizen relations, it simultaneously created a politicised workforce and network of Liberian activists thus strengthening citizen–citizen relations. Based on careful review of concession agreements and court proceedings as well as interviews conducted with government officials, activists and legal advocates based in Liberia and the United States, this article is the first to meld historical and contemporary developments, underscoring the twenty-first century implications of Firestone’s enduring exploitation of Liberian land and labour.

Gendering the BRI: a viewpoint

Our central purpose in this viewpoint is to briefly overview the existing literature on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and argue both how pivotal it is in underlining the experiences of local communities and do so from a gendered perspective. If the BRI is a global project in the making, as many argue, then it is important to appreciate how local people make claims, contest when their claims are ignored, refuted, or misrecognized, and through this understand how gendered notions of citizenship are disrupted and enacted. Therefore, we call for further research that genders the BRI to understand the interconnections along the axes between citizenship, claims and contestations to assess the spatial and temporal changes that a global project, such as the BRI, may bring about.

Critical Diversity Literacy: A framework for multicultural citizenship education

We propose the Critical Diversity Literacy (CDL) framework for citizenship education in contemporary heterogeneous societies. It encourages an anti-essentialist, power-conscious awareness of difference beyond notions of citizenship that have been constitutive of the nation and tend to normalise masculinity, patriarchy, heterosexuality, able-bodiedness and whiteness. Using intersectionality and decoloniality heuristics, we approach multicultural citizenship from the multiple axes of our identities as we inhabit the world more complexly than mere belonging to the nation-state. The framework synthesises insights from contemporary social theory into a usable scaffolding for diversity capacitation. The ten principles focus on intersectionality, social identities and positioning, historical awareness, diversity vocabulary, the coded nature of hegemonic power and personal engagement. Taken together, they promote an approach to multicultural citizenship that focuses on social justice and pushes us to recognise the lived experience of citizenship ‘from below’. The framework has proved useful in designing curricula and interventions in different contexts and sectors and can be utilised to develop age-appropriate materials in schools.

Civic culture in the Supernatural fandom: Misha Collins, Destiel, and the 2020 US presidential election

In the 2020 US presidential election, Misha Collins, star of the show Supernatural, endorsed Joe Biden for president and worked to support Biden’s campaign through interviews with campaign surrogates on Instagram Live and by phone banking on Zoom. In this study, we examine how fans made sense of Misha’s political action. While the political science and advertising literature on celebrity endorsements evaluates endorsements by the number of votes earned, we found that fans’ experience of Misha’s political advocacy was far more complicated than that. Our interviews with fans suggest that fans were ambivalent about Misha’s endorsements but enthusiastic about how Misha went about doing politics. Fans described a civic culture they co-constituted with Misha, defined by accepting and caring for other people, being authentic and genuine, and respecting disagreements. Fans described how these values were enacted both inside the fandom (in discussions of LGBTQ representation) and outside the fandom (in the 2020 US presidential election). Ultimately, fandom should be read as an important site of civic culture building—with implications for how fan cultures influence contemporary notions of citizenship, civic values, and political outcomes.

Democratic Confederalism: An Alternative for Facing Tensions Between Global Citizenship and Localist Citizenship

This article explores the tensions between different conceptions of “citizenship.” On the one hand, we point out the virtues and limitations of cosmopolitan citizenship in the terms in which Seyla Benhabib understands it in The Right of Others…; on the other hand, we delve into another notion of citizenship, namely, the localist, in a version that could be at odds with some cosmopolitan values, that is, localism as understood by some Mexican autonomous communities, particularly the Zapatistas. Although Benhabib’s cosmopolitan federalism is inclusive in spirit, it is conceived within a preponderantly global perspective and ends up being asymmetrical. While her proposal has some positive aspects, it faces some difficulties in the case of Mexican autonomous communities. In this article, we shall introduce the notion of democratic confederalism as a form of sociopolitical organization that seeks to strengthen the self-organization of social actors and to recognize the practice of citizenship in the terms in which autonomous communities exercise it. We propose that democratic confederalism could be an alternative for decreasing tensions between global citizenship and the idea of citizenship within autonomous communities.

Citizenship Regimes and Exclusion: Historical Analysis of Legislation on Illegalized Migration in the US

Citizenship regimes are institutionalized systems of formal and informal norms that define access to membership, as well as associated rights and duties. This paper studies illegalized migration as one of the major tests to assess whether citizenship regimes are fair institutions, based on a historical analysis of legislation meant to reduce illegalized migration in the United States between 1995 and 2022. We build our empirical research starting from a simple observation: despite the great number of bills introduced to reduce illegalized migration to the US, most of such initiatives fail to become law. In fact, 93.5% of all immigration initiatives did not even pass the chamber of Congress in which they were originally presented. Such a high rate of failure shows that these proposals are motivated by electoral aspirations, rather than coming from a genuine wish to help migrants or grant them citizenship. Furthermore, there is also an economic interest that justifies the maintenance of low-cost disposable immigrant labor, with no right to citizenship. Our analysis is an example of how state regulation processes seem to work to formalize, rather than alleviate or eradicate, the precarious legal statuses of illegalized migrants. We conclude that a globalized phenomenon such as citizenship requires going beyond merely institutional and formal conceptions. We need to rethink the institutional notion of citizenship, as a merely status held under the authority of a state and consider it from a cosmopolitan perspective and a multilateral basis. But as long as citizenship remains under the responsibility of states, illegalized migrants will continue to experience precarious citizenship.

New citizenship and the negotiation of the global/local interface: reflexivity, emotions, and metapragmatics

Abstract New citizens are typically characterized as people who occupy an estuarial position between the global and the local: to simultaneously become authentic to their global provenience and rooted in their new local societies, they are expected to cautiously partake in processes of differentiation as they construct their identities. This article investigates how new citizens negotiate this seemingly untenable position to present themselves as new citizens of Singapore who have negotiated the global/local dichotomy, rendering themselves as legitimate citizens. By adopting a metapragmatic approach, the article focuses on two object-signs that new citizens commonly deploy: familial relations and passports. The analysis traces how the semiotic potential of these object-signs is mediated by accounts of emotions, which are indispensable considerations of how signs realize their semiotic potential. Through situated reflexive practices, new citizens use these object-signs to equivocally and strategically manage supposed markers of difference, which consequently enables them to claim legitimacy as Singaporeans. These identities challenge regimented views about the global and local affordances of the notion of citizenship. This expands the semiotic range of good/new citizenship, which may prove instructive in understanding variegated understandings of citizenship not just in Singapore but also in other contemporary multicultural societies.