Citizenship Practices Research Articles

Praktik Kewargaan dalam Arena Institusi Informal Era Demokratisasi

Most studies on citizenship have only focus on the practice of citizenship in the context of formal state institutions. On the other hand, there are relatively few studies discussing citizenship practices in informal institutions. Therefore, this study examines the practice of citizenship in Islamic boarding schools/pesantren in the form of bonds as jamaah. This article intends to map the operation of pesantren as a binder of social ties between its citizens, as well as the pattern of relations between kiai and santri. This research shows that pesantren acts as lebenschraum habitus which installs the perceptions and expressions of its citizens. Pesantren is also a locus of power that has a significant influence on political and civic practices. As a locus of power, there is symbolic capital which is represented and reproduced continuously so that the symbolic capital produces economic, social, and cultural capital. The surplus of capital owned by the lora enables them to transform from the habitus of pesantren, to the habitus of political society and the state through the mechanism of electoral democracy. Even though the pesantren with all their supporting elements have a clientelistic relationship pattern, there is a public morality that can be transformed to strengthen the democratization agenda in the future.

Moral cosmopolitanism, civic action and ethical consumption: Social differences in young Australians’ global citizenship

The relationship between global citizenship identity and actions remains an unsettled issue. In this article we use the PISA 2018 survey to explore whether global citizenship identity is associated with a greater likelihood of engaging in ‘globally minded’ practices among young Australians. Descriptive analysis reveals that self-reported global citizenship identity is associated with higher levels of moral cosmopolitanism, more so than with greater intercultural values or with more positive attitudes to immigrants. However, this self-declared identity does not necessarily translate into cosmopolitan action. Statistical modelling shows that, in the Australian context, global citizenship knowledge, values and identity account for a limited proportion of differences in self-reported cosmopolitan action. We argue that a sociological theory of practice helps explain these results. We conclude by highlighting future research opportunities to better understand the social determinants of global citizenship practices, including by exploring out-of-school socialisation and a broader range of cosmopolitan practices.

The Politics of Rightful Killing: Civil Society, Gender, and Sexuality in Weblogistan

The Politics of Rightful Killing: Civil Society, Gender, and Sexuality in Weblogistan

India and overseas Indians in Ceylon and Burma, 1946–1965: Experiments in post-imperial sovereignty

AbstractDespite the existence of a large Indian diaspora, there has been relatively little scholarly attention paid to India's relations with overseas Indians after its independence in 1947. The common narrative is that India abruptly cut ties with overseas Indians at independence, as it adhered to territorially based understandings of sovereignty and citizenship. Re-examining India's relations with Indian communities in Ceylon and Burma between the 1940s and the 1960s, this article demonstrates that, despite its rhetoric, independent India did not renounce responsibility for its diaspora. Instead, because of pre-existing social connections that spanned the former British empire, the Government of India faced regular demands to assist overseas Indians, and it responded on several fronts. To understand this continued engagement with overseas Indians, this article introduces the idea of ‘post-imperial sovereignty'. This type of sovereignty was layered, as imperial sovereignty had been, but was also concerned with advancing norms designed to protect minority communities across the world. India’s strategy to argue for these norms was simultaneously multilateral, regional, and bilateral. It sought to use the United Nations, the Commonwealth, and the 1947 Asian Relations Conference to secure rights for overseas Indians. As those attempts failed, India negotiated claims for citizenship with governments in Burma and Ceylon, and shaped the institutions and language through which Indians voiced demands for their rights in these countries. Indian expressions of sovereignty beyond the space of the nation-state, therefore, impacted on practices of citizenship, even during the process of de-recognition in Asia.

Sorting through citizenship: A case study on using cognitive scaffolding to unpack adolescent civic identity formation

Civic engagement requires individuals to have both knowledge of democratic principles and the skills for enacting change. Acquiring the knowledge and skills necessary for a productive civic life can be difficult for students if they are not provided conceptual scaffolds and opportunities to practice citizenship. We implemented and studied an activity using Westheimer and Kahne's (2004) citizenship typology during a summer civics institute to help students grapple with their understandings of “good” citizenship. We found (1) students appropriated the language of Westheimer and Kahne's citizenship typology by using it to describe their expanding understandings of citizenship; and (2) students used the citizenship typology to name and make sense of their civic identity. We discuss these findings and reflect on our use of Westheimer and Kahne's citizenship typology as a cognitive scaffold.

‘Provoking responsibility’: The struggle for recognition as an everyday cyclist in Dublin City

In this paper, I present how cyclists in Dublin engage in a process of provoking responsibility in their interactions with other mobile subjects as means of dealing with conditions of precarious entitlement to public space. I begin the paper with an exploration of the extant literature relating to cycling, citizenship and public space, arguing that provoking responsibility can add to such literature on individual and collective cycling mobilities in that it conceptualises how cyclists engage in an individual, everyday struggle for recognition as a legitimate public space user amidst the sharing of public space with differently mobile subjects. Next, I detail the grounded theory methodology, study context (Dublin, Ireland), means of data collection (qualitative interviews), interviewee sample, and ‘precarious entitlement theory’. Following this, I posit the category of ‘precarious entitlement’ to public space – the main concern of utility cyclists in Dublin – and conceptually outline provoking responsibility as a process of dealing with conditions of precarious entitlement, using illustrations from qualitative interviews with cyclists. I include in this outline the key modes of provoking responsibility: accentuating presence, asserting entitlement, indicating transgression, punishing transgression, and displaying responsibility. I conclude that provoking responsibility shows how cyclists can engage in everyday, mobile practices of citizenship in the name of recognition of spatial entitlements and equal status within public space without collective mobilisation; moreover, the category depicts how cyclists engage in not only multisensory practices but also multisensory provocation in their interactions with co-present mobile subjects as means of being recognised and respected.

Citizenship, Resistance and Animals: Karamoja Region Pastoralists' Resilience against State Violence in Uganda

Abstract Universal equality is achieved through citizenship. Despite this normative definition, the reality of citizenship differs across space and time. Against the backdrop of the decentring of state power in the wake of globalisation, when Western scrutiny focused on the peripheries of Uganda, Kenya and South Sudan, and when integrated disarmament and sedentarisation policies were promoted, pastoralists in the Karamoja region of Uganda, rather than appealing to normative notions of citizenship, initiated their own practice of citizenship in resistance to and articulation with the state order. Aware that direct confrontation with power immobilises a one-sided violence perpetration/victimisation relationship, pastoralists developed a repertoire of citizenship-related practices, including animals as co-citizens, to obtain recognition for continued nomadic pastoralism.

Worker centres and coming out politics in migrant struggles

ABSTRACT Through an ethnographic account of an immigrant worker centre in San Francisco, this paper examines their role in brokering the practice of citizenship among undocumented workers through strategies of visibility and recognition. Positioned as critical brokers in migrant struggles, worker centres aim to build the collective ‘political muscle’ of those denied formal rights. Unlike previous research that documents the evolution and scope of worker centre activities, and their contribution to a worker-centred moral economy, this article focuses on how these representational brokers contribute to migration governance, particularly of precaritized workers who rely on them for their livelihoods. Drawing on critical citizenship and migration perspectives, it considers migrant activisms that are neither entirely voluntaristic nor particularly emancipatory. Instead, these mediated enactments are situated alongside a broader, increasingly normative (and assimilationist) process of ‘coming out of the shadows’ – a process that is widely celebrated and encouraged as it is assumed to mark an ontological shift from anonymity, nonbeing, and shame to defiant resistance. Here, the concept of ‘coming out’ emphasizes the highly laborious, selective, and normalizing nature of coming out politics. In the context of the worker centre movement, ‘coming out of the shadows’ entails heightened exposure and risk-taking among those with precarious immigration statuses and labour prospects, thereby contributing to an institutional culture of compulsive (and compulsory) self-disclosure.

Bamboo Shoot in Our Blood

This essay draws from my ethnographic fieldwork in Northeast India and examines how identities are mediated through fermented food like bamboo shoot. These shoots come in different textures and forms: wet chunky pieces, sun-dried and stringy threads, smoked and curly strands. Our relationship with fermented food, as this essay highlights, determine how we organize, move, and order our lives, contributing to the creation of differences and alliances. At a time when we witness a global movement on fermenting cultures and the microbial world, this essay locates small-scale nonindustrial fermentation practices among communities across Northeast India. Exploring the significant role of food in shaping taste, practices, and politics on the ground, I show how fermenting cultures shape citizenship practices and identities. By highlighting narratives and representations of fermented food, this essay brings the extraordinarily varied and dense worlds of fermenting cultures and highlights the associative relationship between fermented food and communities.

Walking the Line: Borderlands and the Politics of Hiking

This article takes the Arizona Trail (AZT) as a case study to consider the ways that hiking is made to serve a political purpose in part through its representation as apolitical. I show how certain opposition to border wall construction employs the figure of the hiker as one that is both beyond the realm of politics and aligned with practices of good citizenship. This move then entails the production of that figure’s other, the migrant whose criminalized walking the wall is meant to prevent. In leaving that other largely unmarked and unaddressed, opposition to the wall’s construction can claim to be disengaged from politics while tacitly affirming the necessity of borders and their enforcement.

Afterword

ABSTRACT This Afterword to the Special Issue on ‘Marriage Migration, Family and Citizenship in Asia’ seeks to foreground some key themes from the six articles it contains. Drawing on some old conceptual friends of the field – including Appadurai’s model of disjunctive global ‘scapes’ and flows, and Plummer’s notion of ‘Intimate Citizenship’ – it highlights particularly significant contributions to understanding processes and practices of citizenship connected to marriage migration, through attention to diversity, continuity, and disjuncture. The disjunctures documented here encompass tensions between processes not just at the level of family and the nation, but between national and inter- or transnational dynamics – highlighting inequalities in intimate citizenship, but also providing potential spaces for change and agency. This rich collection therefore represents a substantial contribution to a foundational issue in the literature on marriage migration – the question of how to conceptualise the agency of marriage migrants, who paradoxically manage the agentic leap of migration at the same time as being profoundly dependent on their citizen spouses, with the well documented potential for victimisation this dependency contains.

The dispositif of citizenship: technology and personhood in Iain M. Banks’s culture

ABSTRACT This essay examines concepts of personhood and citizenship in Iain M. Banks’s science fiction novels Surface Detail and The Hydrogen Sonata, both set in the fictional utopia of the Culture. Although personhood is often described as a quality inherent to human beings, this essay will show how the novels represent that concept of personhood and subsequent practices of citizenship as contingent on the Culture’s technology. The essay draws on theories of the dispositif to describe personhood and technology and proposes a distinction between technical and conceptual dispositifs. Drawing on Carl Freedman’s work on science fiction, I deploy the reading of the novels as a utopian theory that offers a critical perspective on Hannah Arendt’s work on human rights and citizenship and on the work of philosophers who have sought to develop more inclusive normative concepts of personhood. Although these philosophers have done significant philosophical work to develop more inclusive conceptual dispositifs, the utopian critique created by the novels suggests that our thinking would be better directed toward the technology used to put those concepts into practice. The last section of the essay shows how Surface Detail represents the Culture’s technology creating a form of ‘extraterritorial’ citizenship.

Industrial citizenship, workplace deliberation and participatory management in China: the deliberative polling experiment in a private firm

A variety of forms and practices of citizenship in China has been well studied, but, unfortunately, studies on industrial citizenship are missing. Moreover, while there has been a growing literature on Chinese workers and their relationship with management in the last decade or so, most of it has focussed on protest and litigation rather than on deliberation and industrial citizenship. This paper fills the intellectual gap by applying T. H. Marshall’s idea of industrial citizenship to workplaces in China and examining it through a case study of a workplace deliberation experiment. The workplace deliberation experiment showed that, first, workplace deliberation in China can be seen as a form of industrial citizenship and “participatory management”, which still retains an element of hierarchy, but falls short of the radical idea of industrial democracy and unionism. Second, workplace deliberation improved management practices but still faced significant obstacles, such as asymmetric power relationships and the control characteristics of industrial relations. Though Chinese industries are institutionalizing more workers’ voice input, Beijing nevertheless forestalls the Polish style of an independent trade union, thus workplace deliberation can be seen as a part of its authoritarian empowerment strategy.

Harnessing Conflict: Antagonism and Spatiotemporal Design Practices

This paper explores the capacities of design to interrogate the socio-spatial context in order to foreground conflict, dissent and dispute as creative practices to fuel urban transformation.
 In today’s urban habitat, spaces and actions do not mesh seamlessly. The city is characterised by a disjunction between the physicality of the urban fabric as a materialisation of ideologies and the relationality of contested supremacies and entropic dynamics that inhabit it. Consequently, the practices of contemporary transformative city-making need to be reinvented through temporality and impermanence, accounting for disorder and embracing instability. In that sense, antagonism is a key element to harness in critical design practices aimed at promoting urban diversity. In this paper we study how incorporating antagonism in design practices can trigger processes of urban reformulation by constituting liminal spaces of opportunity where democratisation emerges as a spatiotemporal practice.
 Two related case studies carried out in 2020 in the Raval neighbourhood of Barcelona (Subjective Cartographies: A Mirror of Diversity and Infrastructures for Public Space Interaction), are presented to explore how design can support dissidence and plurality, whether through identification and visualisation or by catalysing them as situated practices of active citizenship.
 In both case studies, design fosters de-hierarchisation and trans-linearity in the city, reclaiming the right to direct action in collective urban spaces. In this sense, this paper explores how design contributes to activating multiple processes of emancipated citizenship, harnessing conflict and constructive dissent as situated spatiotemporal practices to promote diversity. Facilitating the proliferation of counter-hegemonic notions of cosmopolitics, territory, domesticity and publicness, the design practices revisited in this paper operate between politics, space and affect in order to promote intersubjective relations in public spaces, using the material, temporal and affective dimensions of design to co-create diverse and resilient urban habitats.

A Educação em Cidadania no Centro de Alfabetização e Educação de Jovens e Adultos de Morrumbene

This article presents an explorative research on Citizenship Education at the youth and adult literacy and education center of Morrumbene. We focus our analysis on previous students aiming to understand how these courses are favoring promoting the development of citizenship practices, namely on entrepreneurial and sustainable development level, complementing with the view of those that teaches and supervise the courses. Our objective, with this research, is to contribute for an education that has as purpose the fully forming the individuals, which may, and should, enable the development supported on human rights.

Reconstruction of social environment influences on the development of future teachers’ citizenship competencies

It is presented the results of the empirical study on the social environment influences on the development of future teachers’ citizenship competencies. It is reconstructed the structure and determined the modality of the direct, indirect, and mediated forms of the environment influence aimed at restriction, motivation, and approval of citizenship practices. It is found that the mediated forms (facilitation, encouragement, approval, support, celebration, recognition, etc.) prevail in the structure of the environment influences. These forms are not oriented toward practice correction or development. It is significantly more seldom that the environment uses the direct (restriction by norms, rules, regulations, judgments, customs), and indirect (motivation by prompting, explanation, clarification, specification, providing arguments, reinforcement) influence forms, which have much stronger development potential. There are analyzed the peculiarities of the environment influences on establishing citizenship practices relating to different groups of competencies: value, motivational, relational, cognitive, and identification ones. The direct influence forms by their orientation and modality often do not meet the criteria of the developing environment, which particularly refers to the restriction of such practices as openness; law obedience, and reporting; trust; confrontation’s and extreme judgments’ avoidance. At the same time, it is turned out to be a small segment of the motivational influences which stimulate the critical attitude to information, trust to government institutions and authorities, avoidance of confrontation, refusal from the «common good to one’s own benefits» idea, and from domination. Among those that meet the criteria of the developing environment in the best way are the influences oriented at the establishment of citizenship self-identification practices, values of solidarity, and self-organization to solve common problems. The future research will focus on the determination of the directions and means of adjustment of the environment influences in order that their character and structure may better meet the developing environment criteria

Trust, Globalisation and Citizenship in Renaissance Europe: The Case of the South German Merchants of Lisbon Around 1500

This article reassesses the relationship between trust and globalisation with a focus on the merchants of Nuremberg and Augsburg dealing with Lisbon around 1500 and further groups involved in their trade (artists, artisans, printers, scholars and courtiers). It aims to explore the significance of Renaissance citizenship as practice and as thought in shaping the relationship between trust and globalisation. By introducing a decisively republican approach to citizenship and trust, it suggests a new approach to the relationship between trust and globalisation. The article starts by reframing the question of the relationship between globalisation and trust in the Renaissance in republican terms before proceeding to the close examination of the case of the German merchants trading in and with Lisbon around 1500 and their milieu (I). After having introduced the context of the case-study and elaborated on its empirical dimension (II), the article investigates how, in the mentioned context, trust arose from citizenship, i.e. how citizenship understood as a category (C. Tilly) favoured access to information, and, conversely, how trust contributed to building citizenship defined as a tie (C. Tilly) to the extent that it enhanced obligations of reciprocity (III). The article, finally, explores some aspects of the relationship between the theory and practice of citizenship in the Renaissance as it can be drawn from the case-study (IV).

Revisiting inclusion in smart cities: infrastructural hybridization and the institutionalization of citizen participation in Bengaluru’s peripheries

ABSTRACT Smart city development can be traced back in the urban development trajectories of cities, as well as the respective articulations, framing and practices of ‘inclusive’ and ‘participatory’ smart cities. As smart city development steadily gains more and more traction among urban policy makers throughout the Global South, many scholars warn for its negative consequences on the accessibility of infrastructure and the processes that transform democratic citizenship practices. Rather than perceiving the transformative power of smart cities as a phenomenon particular to the use of new technologies, this paper aims to analyse societal segregation and marginalization through smart city development and traces these externalities as a continuation or intensification of existing governance practices. This is demonstrated by the case study on the metropolitan city of Bengaluru, that participates in India's national Smart City Mission. Due to massive urbanization, Bengaluru's peripheries are suffering from increasing pressures on its basic infrastructure. In response, state actors have turned to hybridizing the city's infrastructure facilities and governance to market- and civil society actors. Furthermore, the efforts of middle-class civil society groups that contribute to infrastructural governance through the assistance in planning, facilitation and controlling state responsibilities are institutionalized by bureaucratic state actors, at the cost of electoral governance by local representatives. This analysis on infrastructure governance in the peripheries has been set in relation to a discourse analysis of official policy documents on the inclusive and participatory character of smart cities. The practices of hybridization and institutionalization not only undermine the access to basic infrastructure for marginalized groups but also heavily underpin the design of Bengaluru's smart city projects. To be called inclusive, we argue that smart city projects should make an effort to improve the overall accessibilities of infrastructures for all classes and population groups.

When biographical disruption meets HIV exceptionalism: Reshaping illness identities in the shadow of criminalization.

Drawing on interviews with civil society actors in the AIDS Service Organization (ASO) sector in Canada, this article explores how these actors contribute to shaping the illness identities of people living with HIV/AIDS in the shadow of efforts to criminalize exposure to HIV. While the biographically disruptive qualities associated with an HIV diagnosis have been addressed in the medical sociology literature, we turn our attention to the key role played by ASOs as interlocutors in this process. Paying specific attention to the intersection of processes of medicalization and criminalization, we ask how they are re-stigmatizing a condition that has shifted in the public consciousness from its earlier association with deviance and moral culpability. One important implication of our findings concerns the need to take greater account of how the illness identity and experience can be shaped by a 'biography of telling', of a renewed pressure to disclose intimate details of one's health status as a way to perform responsible practices of citizenship.

Visions of global citizenship: cosmopolitanism and internationalism in citizenship education policy in Australia

ABSTRACTThe advent of global citizenship agendas marks a transformation in citizenship education policy and practice internationally. However, research has revealed a highly diverse collection of visions and models for global citizenship. This article seeks to make two main contributions to the study of global citizenship in education. Empirically, it aims to identify the kind of global citizenship proposed in state-led Australian citizenship education policy for schools, using a national policy corpus spanning the last three decades. Theoretically, it intends to highlight the relevance of the sociology of citizenship, cosmopolitanism, and internationalism to refine our understanding of visions global citizenship in schooling. Comparing and contrasting ‘global’ and ‘international’ references in the corpus, the analysis reveals that different supra-national visions are associated with global and international lexica. We conclude by highlighting the implications of our analytical model and findings for future research on global citizenship education.