Although we supposedly live in a representative democracy, citizens in many cases do not really participate in political reality and lack resources in the face of multiple situations in which their rulers do not act in the most appropriate way. The problems are numerous: the attempt of seduction of the citizenship by the political class and its subsequent kidnapping until the following elections for lack of mechanisms of social control, the breach of the electoral programs according to the conveniences; (...) sectarianism, poor political ethics or even clear corruption, use of taxes for unapproved fines, indoctrination, poor separation of powers and real power from political parties... (shrink)

European political theorists have argued that contemporary imaginaries of climate change are symptomatic of a post-political condition. My aim in this essay is to consider what this analysis might mean for a feminist green politics and how those who believe in such a project might respond. Whereas much of the gender-focused scholarship on climate change is concerned with questions of differentiated vulnerabilities and gendered divisions of responsibility and risk, I want to interrogate the strategic, epistemological, and normative implications for ecological (...) feminism of a dominant, neoliberal climate change narrative that arguably has no political subject, casts Nature as a threat to be endured, and that replaces democratic public debate with expert administration and individual behavior change. What hope is there for counter-hegemonic political theories and social movements in times like these? I suggest that rather than give in and get on the crowded climate change bandwagon, an alternative response is to pursue a project of feminist ecological citizenship that blends resistance to hegemonic neoliberal discourses with a specifically feminist commitment to reclaiming democratic debate about social-environmental futures. (shrink)

In republican political philosophy, citizenship is a status that is constituted by one’s participation in the public life of the polity. In its traditional formulation, republican citizenship is an exclusionary and hierarchical way of defining a polity’s membership, because the domain of activity that qualifies as participating in the polity’s public life is highly restricted. I argue that Black American abolitionist Frederick Douglass advances a radically inclusive conception of republican citizenship by articulating a deeply capacious account of (...) what it means to participate in the public life of the polity. On Douglass’s conception of republican citizenship, what it means to contribute to the polity, and thereby be a citizen, is to act in ways that contest and shape what the polity values. We contest and shape what the polity values not only through public discourse traditionally conceived or grand political acts like revolt, but also through quotidian forms of social interaction. In his pre-American Civil War political thought, Douglass deployed his radically inclusive account of republican citizenship as the conceptual foundation of his stance that enslaved and nominally free Black Americans were already, in the 1850s, American citizens whom the polity ought to acknowledge as such. The everyday resistance in which enslaved Black Americans engaged—their plantation politics—is, for Douglass, a paradigmatic type of citizenship-constituting activity, because it involves modes of collaboration and confrontation that enact a recognition of mutual vulnerability and embody the assertion that one matters. Douglass’s conception of republican citizenship offers a normative framework for emancipatory struggles that strive to secure meaningful membership for the marginalized through the transformation of unjust polities. (shrink)

The Snowden leaks, first published in June 2013, provided unprecedented insights into the operations of state-corporate surveillance, highlighting the extent to which everyday communication is integrated into an extensive regime of control that relies on the ‘datafication’ of social life. Whilst such data-driven forms of governance have significant implications for citizenship and society, resistance to surveillance in the wake of the Snowden leaks has predominantly centred on techno-legal responses relating to the development and use of encryption and policy advocacy (...) around privacy and data protection. Based on in-depth interviews with a range of social justice activists, we argue that there is a significant level of ambiguity around this kind of anti-surveillance resistance in relation to broader activist practices, and critical responses to the Snowden leaks have been confined within particular expert communities. Introducing the notion of ‘data justice’, we therefore go on to make the case that resistance to surveillance needs to be conceptualized on terms that can address the implications of this data-driven form of governance in relation to broader social justice agendas. Such an approach is needed, we suggest, in light of a shift to surveillance capitalism in which the collection, use and analysis of our data increasingly comes to shape the opportunities and possibilities available to us and the kind of society we live in. (shrink)

This book offers a polyphonic theory of protest as a mechanism for political communication, group constitution, and epistemic empowerment. The book analyzes the communicative power of protest to break social silences and disrupt insensitivity and complicity with injustice. Medina also elucidates the power of protest movements to transform social sensibilities and change the political imagination. Medina’s theory of protest examines the obligations that citizens and institutions have to give proper uptake to protests and to communicatively engage with protesting publics in (...) all their diversity, without excluding or marginalizing radical voices and perspectives. Throughout the book, communicative and epistemic arguments are given for the value of imagining with protest movements and for taking seriously the radical political imagination exercised in social movements of liberation. Medina’s theory sheds light on the different ways in which protest can be silenced and the different communicative and epistemic injustices that protest movements can face, arguing for forms of epistemic activism that resist silencing and communicative/epistemic injustices while empowering protesting voices. While arguing for democratic obligations to give proper uptake to protest, the book underscores how demanding listening to protesting voices can be under conditions of oppression and epistemic injustice. A central claim of the book is that responsible citizens have an obligation to echo (or express communicative solidarity with) the protests of oppressed groups that have been silenced and epistemically marginalized. Studying social uprisings, the book further argues that citizens have a duty to join protesting publics when grave injustices are in the public eye. (shrink)

Drawing on 75 semi-structured qualitative interviews with Arab, South Asian, and Black Muslim women social justice activists, ages 18–30 years, organizing in the United States and the United Kingdom, I theorize their experiences as the basis of the matrix of gendered Islamophobia. Building upon Jasmine Zine’s concept of gendered Islamophobia, I synthesize this concept with Patricia Hill Collins’s theory of the matrix of domination to give a more in-depth and nuanced structure of how gendered Islamophobia operates and is resisted by (...) Muslim women activists. This article identifies the overlapping configurations of power that affect Muslim women’s lives through structural, disciplinary, hegemonic, and interpersonal domains, countering reductionist accounts of Islamophobia as a universalized, unvariegated social force impacting all Muslims in similar ways. Instead, the matrix of gendered Islamophobia locates Islamophobia within shifting axes of oppression that are simultaneously structured along the lines of gender, race, class, sexuality, and citizenship. The findings of this research reveal a dialectical relationship between Muslim women’s oppression and simultaneous contestation of gendered Islamophobia via their collective remaking of alternative ideas, politics, discourses, and organizing practices. (shrink)

This book explores a type of wandering referred to as “errant bodies.” This form of wandering is intentional, without specific destination, and operates as a means of resistance against hegemonic forms of power and cultural prescriptions. Beginning with an examination of the character and particulars of being an errant body, the book investigates historical errant bodies including Ancient Greek Cynics, Punks, Baudelaire, Situationists, Earhart, Kerouac, Fuller, Baudrillard, Hamish Fulton, and Keri Smith. Being an errant body means stepping to the side (...) of dominant culture, creating a potential means of political resistance in the technologically driven twenty-first century. (shrink)

The public’s understanding of forensic DNA databases remains undertheorized and few empirical studies have been produced. This article aims to address this omission by exploring the answers to an open-ended question taken from an online questionnaire regarding the reasons for individuals’ voluntarily accepting or refusing to allow their DNA profile to be included in the Portuguese forensic DNA database. The analysis is undertaken from the perspective of biological citizenship and the simultaneous empowering and disempowering effects of surveillance. The results (...) indicate a pragmatic ethical framework that is linked to the cultural and emotional elements of altruism, resistance, stigma, and social representations of what is beneficial or harmful to the individual and to society. These subjectivities are anchored in commonplace images and metaphors for genetics, DNA, and forensic science that circulate in the messages transmitted by the media which pervade everyday life; hierarchies of trust in science and the justice system; and moral categories associated with the individual self-judgment in relation to crime, surveillance, and social order. (shrink)

Following the keen interests in citizenship education across the fields of education, this study delves into the ways in which we conceptualize good citizenship. To do so, I focus on two theoretical concepts (i.e., imaginary and cultural mythology) and the provincial level of education policy(ies) and the K-12 curriculum contexts in Canada. Based on my theoretical ground and critical discourse analysis of the un/official documents for Alberta education, I indicate diversity as one crucial element of a cultural mythology: (...) it, as a sign in a second-order semiological system, serves to disseminate a monolithic and depoliticized vision of good citizenship based within a particular imaginary of the idealized Canada. This study thus elucidates not only our inherited cultural biases about the popular meanings of good citizenship, but also their invisible onto-epistemological presuppositions perpetuating the unchanged institutionalized structures of privilege and their exploitations of poor and minority peoples (e.g., elimination of Indigenous peoples and their land sovereignty). Hence, this study offers critical insights to address unequal relations of power in our prevalent notion(s) of citizenship we as educators presume to teach. This work, by doing so, follows the decolonial imperative to rupture the social inequality and discrimination we all strive to resist. (shrink)

This paper discusses literacy as a socio-political phenomenon from the perspective of several relatively independent educational discourses. The first is critical education theory and research revealing the hidden mechanisms by which education policies act in the interests of a global market economy. The second is the perspective of critical pedagogy scholars on contemporary educational challenges, who offer responses similar to those discussed in current discourse on informal civic education. The third is the heated discussion of high-stakes literacy testing (related to (...) OECD literacy studies such as PISA, IALS, etc.) the results of which are used as a source of argumentation for diverse attitudes and educational consequences. Based on an analysis of literacy theory, research on active citizenship and civic education, the term “civic literacy” is proposed and argued as a relevant conceptual frame for conceptualizing school as an institution which can be involved in resistance to all forms of power politics or ideological indoctrination and manipulation, while at the same time, respecting the traditional values and aims of general education. (shrink)

This contribution involves an analysis of philosophy of higher education in Africa, specifically related to a notion of democratic citizenship education. If one understands what philosophy of higher education constitutes African thought and practice one would get to know how such an understanding of higher education is realised and guides human actions related to the African context. Thus, the main argument of this article involves what philosophy of higher education guides understandings and practices on the African continent pertaining to (...) the cultivation of democratic citizenship education. In this article, the notion of an African philosophy of higher education is rearticulated according to autonomous and deliberative iterations, human co-belonging, and the recognition of pluralist and defensible thought. Based on analyses of (con)textual matters, such a philosophy of higher education summons university teachers and students to resist their predicaments autonomously, iteratively, and co-responsibly – that is, they are urged to act ethically. (shrink)

Arendt famously pointed out that only citizenship actually confers rights in the modern world. To be a citizen is to be one who has the ‘right to have rights’. Arendt’s analysis emerges out of her recognition that there is a contradiction between this way of conferring rights as tied to the nation-state system and the more philosophical and ethical conceptions of the ‘rights of man’ and notions of ‘human rights’ like those championed by thinkers such as Immanuel Kant who (...) understands rights belonging universally to all humans as a result of facts having to do with what it means to be human. Étienne Balibar, in his recent work, adds to this by pointing out that there is a contradictory movement between this universalizing tendency in philosophical thought and the production of the citizen-subject out of the exclusionary acts of law and force. In this article, I put Balibar’s work in dialogue with the contemporary moment where we are witnessing the re-emergence of a nativist right populism. I use Balibar to help distinguish between three modes of political existence that we find today. Two of these three are more or less well understood. They are the non-citizen, who has no – or almost no – rights in a given nation-state and the citizen who enjoys the full benefit of the rights a given nation-state has to give. The third category is what I term the ‘nominal citizen’. This last category is somewhere in between full citizenship and non-citizenship. Individuals in this last category have rights in name but are largely unable to exercise them. Understanding this last category can, among other things, help us at least partially make sense of the return of right populism and also help us see the ways in which the modern category of citizenship, with its contradictions as elaborated by Balibar, can provide a means for resistance. (shrink)

Critics of investment citizenship often appeal to the idea that citizenship should not be commodified. This chapter clarifies how the different arguments in support of this Commodification Objection are best understood as versions of wider claims in the literature on the moral limits of markets (MLM). Through an analysis of the three main objections – The Wrong Distribution Argument, The Value Degradation Argument, and the Motivational Corruption Argument – it claims that these objections rely on flawed and partial (...) interpretations of the broader debates. As such, they do not in fact support the conclusions critics of investment citizenship wish to draw from them. The paper concludes that the commodification objection to investment citizenship should therefore be abandoned, and that normative resistance to the practice should be made on other grounds. (shrink)

In this article I discuss how some women activists experience their citizenship locally and around the world through their work for the environment and resistance to systems which threaten world existence. By looking at the oikos-polis distinction in Aristotle as the genesis of environmental pathologies which give rise to newly complementary categories of citizenship and ecofeminism, I consider moral pluralism and agonistic liberalism as non-hierarchical theoretical frameworks for thinking about citizenship.

Citizenship and marriage are legal statuses that generate numerous privileges and responsibilities. Legal doctrine and argument have analogized these statuses in passing: consider, for example, Ted Olson’s statement in the Hollingsworth v. Perry oral argument that denying the label “marriage” to gay unions “is like you were to say you can vote, you can travel, but you may not be a citizen.” However, the parallel between citizenship and marriage has rarely been investigated in depth. This paper investigates the (...) marriage-citizenship parallel with a particular focus on three questions prompted by recent developments in law and policy: -/- 1) Should we provide second-best statuses? Some couples — in particular gay and lesbian couples — have been offered permanent statuses, like civil unions, that bear legal privileges but fall short of full marriage equality. In contrast, similar differentiations within citizenship are generally resisted. The history of citizenship may presage the increasing unacceptability of differentiations within status in the gay marriage context. Meanwhile, the history of marriage equality efforts may help present-day citizenship advocates choose legal strategies. -/- 2) Should statuses be a gateway to rights? Some early gay rights advocates unsuccessfully argued that advocates should challenge the primacy of marriage, rather than seek access to the institution. Advocates attempting to expand the rights of current noncitizens face similar choices: should they seek to give current noncitizens greater access to citizenship, or challenge the reservation of important rights to citizens? -/- 3) Can status relationships be plural? Many critics of dual and multiple citizenship argued that allegiance to multiple states was immoral, unadministrable, or both. More recently, polygamous marriage has become a topic of legal and political discourse, first as a foil in anti-gay marriage arguments and later as a political possibility in its own right. I consider whether polygamous marriage advocates can profitably draw on arguments for multiple citizenship, and how multiple-citizenship advocates should responsibly respond to the analogy with polygamy. (shrink)

This article extends critical trends of citizenship studies and the theory of accumulation by dispossession to articulate how settler colonial citizenship is instantiated through the active accrual of land and resources and how the emerging settler colonial citizenship entrenches both structural subjugation and resistance. The article then examines the reformation of the boundaries of citizenship through indigenous agency. I do so through examining the Palestinian citizens in Israel, specifically centering the Internally Displaced Persons—Palestinians who received Israeli (...) citizenship even as they were displaced from their places of origin. I conclude by asserting citizenship’s double paradox in settler colonial contexts: It regulates certain rights and mobilities but simultaneously entraps the indigenous in a structure in which recursive accumulation is constitutive, thus entrenching dispossession and the further loss of collective rights and other claims. (shrink)

An examination of the studies of the French historian of religion Jean Delumeau on the subject of ‘angst’ and awareness of guilt as a collective mode of being, characteristic of Europeans from the 13th to the 18th century, will not only provide the reader with a nuanced picture of the influence of the so-called Renaissance and Reform Movement on the liberation of the human person, but he or she will also find it difficult to resist the temptation to draw parallels (...) with current explanations for the present day increase in feelings of insecurity and ‘angst’.Both then and now the collective ‘angst’ resulting from epidemic, war, famine and natural disaster vented themselves against ‘outsiders’, those who were different; foreigners witches, gypsies, heretics, vagabonds, the insane and the crippled all became targets. Just as people today try to discern devilish plans afoot in a world stricken by AIDS, environmental and health dangers, by growing unemployment, fundamentalism and migration, and by plans intent on undermining Western civilisation as we know it, so also then people found it easy to identify demons in the ‘other’, disguised Antichrists and Satans whose sole purpose was to undermine Christian culture. In those days people tried to avert the danger by attempting to force Muslims by government decree and Cathars by the Inquisition to embrace the true faith of Christians. Today we try to do the same by submitting foreigners to an ever narrowing concept of integration.In pre-modern culture, just as today, subjective feelings of insecurity were disproportional to objective insecurity, and although the chances of falling victim to epidemic, war or criminal acts were much greater among the lower social classes, protests of insecurity from among the better situated classes, tended to set the tone, as they continue to do today.Two aspects of Delumeau’s evocation of the culture of ‘angst’ are particularly striking. Firstly, one becomes aware of the quasi evident moralising with which people tackled the most diverse social phenomena. Signs of God’s wrath were to be found everywhere as moral warnings. Difference and alterity was immediately understood in terms of godlessness, decline, guilt, sin, unworthiness, vice, wickedness or cunning. The Christian culture was in its very core a culture of meaning in which everything, as a matter of course, acquired a moral significance. In this regard, the advent of Protestantism did not essentially change matters: morality shifted towards individual responsibility, but its worldview did not become less moralising as a result. Actually, it became even more moralising. Secondly, one becomes aware of the sustained efforts of the Church to spread and intensify the culture of ‘angst’ and to view everything from the perspective of the contemptus mundi, vitae et homini. Every form of human joy, delight or pleasure was condemned as a manifestation of insufficiency in one’s fear of God. Although the world was never to become the ‘vale of tears’ of which the clerical authorities dreamed, ‘angst’ and fear were nevertheless an essential feature of the condition humaine of the time and the dominant religious cultural expressions of the day were solely directed towards the maintenance of such a culture of ‘angst’. (shrink)

While various democratic theorists have looked at particular instances of recent social movements (Occupy or the Arab Spring, for example), none have yet attempted a more general theoretical take on what it is that relates all of these movements and what that running thread can tell us about democratic theory. Ordinary Democracy argues that there is a commonality to these movements as well as a striking lesson about the nature of democracy, sovereignty, agency and solidarity today: in that these movements (...) all highlight the ordinariness of neoliberal regimes and the ways in which citizens find solidarity and a sense of freedom in the marketplace. Aslam contends that neoliberalism is more than a set of policies, ideological principles, or a distinct phase of capitalism -- rather it constitutes the ways in which citizens think about their everyday lives. Conceived as common sense, it also governs what is permitted or forbidden in public discourse (for example, rendering issues of private debt a personal responsibility). Mass movements call attention to the effects of neoliberalism, providing a way to contest its acceptability; in doing so they help to contextualize the impasse that marks a language of civil empowerment and inclusion on one hand, and feelings of powerlessness, diminished agency and impassivity on the other. In Aslam's view, democratic theorists who view participatory agency as offering the most authentic opportunity to satisfy the need for solidarity and freedom minimize the degree to which capitalism satisfies most citizens, as well as the depth of most people's affective attachment to neoliberalism. Looking in particular at Idle No More, Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Sandy, the Egyptian Revolution, and Strike Debt, Aslam takes what may be a more sobering, but still hopeful, view toward the potential of mass movements: to resist the normalization of conceptions of solidarity and citizenship under neoliberalism. (shrink)

On first blush the Jim Crow Era may seem an odd place to locate anything meaningful about democratic, equal citizenship and the promise of the fourteenth amendment. This article argues to the contrary. The period of Jim Crow, in its negation of democratic citizenship, in fact reveals import aspects about the nature of democratic citizenship. This occurred in two ways. First, whites who implemented white supremacy implicitly understood that freedom and citizenship manifest themselves in a multiplicity (...) of spheres, which is why white supremacists sought to subordinate blacks not just politically but across all social spheres. Second, the resistance to comprehensive subordination revealed the multiplicity of the spirit of freedom and equality in actions and arguments African Americans. African Americans created spaces of democratic citizenship within the dominant culture of subordination. This article suggests that, in studying both the implementation of white supremacy and the resistance to it, we can learn more about how equal and democratic citizenship can be affirmed and implemented rather than negated, and also about the role of law as a tool for both subordination and resistance. (shrink)

This article considers the meanings attached to refugeehood, repatriation and liberal citizenship in the twentieth century. Refugees are those who have been unjustly expelled from their political community. Their physical displacement is above all symbolic of a deeper political separation from the state and the citizenry. ‘Solving’ refugees’ exile is therefore not a question of halting refugees’ flight and reversing their movement, but requires political action restoring citizenship. All three ‘durable solutions’ developed by the international community in the (...) twentieth century – repatriation, resettlement and local integration – are intended to restore a refugee's access to citizenship, and through citizenship the protection and expression of their fundamental human rights. Yet repatriation poses particular challenges for liberal political thought. The logic of repatriation reinforces the organization of political space into bounded nation–state territories. However, it is the exclusionary consequences of national controls over political membership – and through this of access to citizenship rights – that prompt mass refugee flows. Can a framework for repatriation be developed which balances national state order and liberal citizenship rights? This article argues that using the social contract model to consider the different obligations and pacts between citizens, societies and states can provide a theoretical framework through which the liberal idea of citizenship and national controls on membership can be reconciled. Historical evidence suggests that the connections in practice between ideas of citizenship and repatriation have been far more complex. In particular, debate between Western liberal and Soviet authoritarian/collectivist understandings of the relationship between citizen and state played a key role in shaping the refugee protection regime that emerged after World War II and remains in place today. Repatriation – or more accurately liberal resistance to non-voluntary refugee repatriation – became an important tool of Cold War politics and retains an important value for states interested in projecting and reaffirming the primacy of liberal citizenship values. Yet the contradictions in post-Cold War operational use of repatriation to ‘solve’ displacement, and a growing reliance on ‘state-building’ exercises to validate refugees’ returns demonstrates that tension remains between national state interests and the universal distribution of liberal rights, as is particularly evident when considering Western donor states’ contemporary policies on refugees and asylum. For both intellectual and humanitarian reasons there is therefore an urgent need for the political theory underpinning refugee protection to be closely examined, in order that citizenship can be placed at the centre of refugees’ ‘solutions’. ☆ The article is based on a paper given at a workshop on Citizenship organized by the Centre for History and Economics and held at Robinson College, Cambridge on 14–15 July 2008. It draws largely on archival research undertaken for my Ph.D., The Politics of Refugee Repatriation in the Twentieth Century, which was completed in July 2009 at the University of Cambridge. My particular thanks to Melissa Lane and Matthew Gibney for their help in developing these arguments, and to the archivists at UNHCR and the League of Nations Archives at UNOG. (shrink)

While many "benchtop-to-bedside" research pathways have been developed in "Type I" translational medicine, vehicles to facilitate "Type II" and "Type III" translation that convert scientific data into clinical and community interventions designed to improve the health of human populations remain elusive. Further, while a high percentage of physicians endorse the principle of citizen leadership, many have difficulty practicing it. This discrepancy has been attributed, in part, to lack of training and preparation for public advocacy, time limitation, and institutional resistance. As (...) translational medicine and physician-citizenship implicate social, political, economic and cultural factors, both enterprises require "integrative" research strategies that blend insights from multiple fields of study, as well as rhetorical acumen in adapting messages to reach multiple audiences. This article considers how argumentation theory's epistemological flexibility, audience attentiveness, and heuristic qualities, combined with concepts from classical rhetoric, such as rhetorical invention, the synecdoche, and ethos, yield tools to facilitate translational medicine and enable physician-citizenship. (shrink)

In this paper, I provide an analysis of the emergence of “problematic of alien sexuality.” I first locate discourses about “alien sexuality,” and the so-called anchor baby in particular, within other national discourses surrounding maternity, the fetus, and citizenship. I analyze the ways that national political discourses surrounding “anchor babies” and “alien maternity” construct the “problematic of alien sexuality,” thus constituting the “alien” subject as always-already perverse. I suggest that this production of a sexually deviant and threatening “alien” subject (...) functions in the normative dichotomy that places the sexually pure citizen on the one hand, and the perverse anticitizen on the other, in what I call “backwards uncitizening.” My analysis of this process shows that the perverse “alien” subject, as constituted in significant part by nonjuridical normalizing mechanisms of biopower, resists the juridical discourse that is supposed to determine it. (shrink)

This article’s guiding thesis is that the theory of radical democratic citizenship is built on a tension between a radical, conflictual element and a democratic element. As radical democrats, these philosophers point to the intimate relation between conflict and both emancipation and democracy. But as radical democrats, they also propose different methods that prevent conflict from breaking up the polis—the common ground that makes democratic conflict possible. I look at two radical democrats’ way of dealing with this tension: Chantal (...) Mouffe and Étienne Balibar. My claim is that the former ends up overemphasising the danger of division in her later democratic works and is therefore unable to account for more intense forms of democratic resistance (such as riots). In the work of Balibar, however, we find a way of dealing with this tension. (shrink)

¿The authors argue that queer, black, brown, and foreign bodies, and the so-called threats they represent, such as immigration reform and same-sex marriage, have been effectively linked with terrorism. These awful conflations¿ are enduring and help to explain the contradictions of contemporary U.S. politics. We are far from a post post-9/11 world.¿ Ronald R. Sundstrom, Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, The University of San Francisco, United States ¿If you want to understand how a new biopolitics of citizenship is containing (...) bodies of the nation by re-inscribing sex and race into it and how this new biopolitics is being resisted you must read this book.¿ Engin F. Isin, Professor, Department of Politics and International Studies, The Open University, United Kingdom. (shrink)

This article explores the relationship between truth commissions and gendered citizenship through a case study of Timor-Leste. It examines how, 10 years after the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation has completed its work, women’s citizenship remains constrained by, and negotiated within, deeply gendered narratives of nation-building that are informed by historical experiences of the resistance struggle. The power of these narratives—which foreground heroism rather than victimisation—underscores the need to situate truth commissions as part of an ongoing politics (...) of memory. Despite the power of political elites to shape this politics, the continued marginalisation of sections of society within official narratives is also providing an impetus for alternative truth-telling efforts that seek to broaden public perspectives on the past. By promoting new narratives of women’s experiences of the conflict, these projects might be understood as attempts to negotiate and transform gendered conceptions of citizenship in the present and for the future. (shrink)

In Adivasis and the State, Alf Gunvald Nilsen presents a major study of how subalternity is both constituted and contested through state-society relations in the Bhil heartland of western India. The book unravels the historical processes that subordinated Bhil Adivasi communities to the everyday tyranny of the state and investigates how social movements have mobilised to reclaim citizenship. In doing so, the book also reveals how collective action from below transform the meanings of governmental categories, legal frameworks, and universalising (...) vocabularies of democracy. At the core of the book lies a concern with understanding the dialectics of power and resistance that give form and direction to the political economy of democracy and development in contemporary India. Towards this end, Adivasis and the State contributes a sustained and nuanced Gramscian analysis of hegemony in order to interrogate the possibilities and limits of subaltern political engagement with state structures. (shrink)

This article offers a reading of Ken Loach’s 2016 film I, Daniel Blake, a fictionalised account of experiences of the UK welfare system in conditions of austerity. We consider, firstly, the significant challenge the film poses to dominant figurations of welfare recipients under austerity, through a focus on vulnerability to state processes. We follow with a reading of some of the film’s interventions in relation to reciprocity, drawing on the important trajectories of care, community and resistance that the film renders (...) visible through the collective stories of the major characters. Finally, we conclude with reflections on citizenship, subject narratives and alternative imaginaries of ‘deservingness’. Our article offers an ‘against the grain’ reading (hooks, 1996; Wearing, 2013) of the film, highlighting some of the radical possibilities of the more minor moments, character arcs and subject positionalities within the film’s central narrative of Daniel’s experiences in the shadow of the steadily crumbling welfare state. (shrink)

The article offers insights into the cultural, historical and political discourses that shape displaced Bhutanese-Nepali youth's reading of what citizenship is and what citizenship can be. The article argues for the need to recognize how displaced communities desire to reclaim legal and cultural citizenship in response to the oppressions they have encountered. The article explores the politics that have produced refugee subjects and how displaced communities interpret the meaning of citizenship in response to the anti-immigrant and (...) anti-refugee climate in the United States (and in the world). The research similarly documents how citizenship narratives can speak of anxiety and loss that communities have experienced and how youth resist interpretations of citizenship that privilege national affiliations. The research advocates that social studies researchers engage with how displaced communities conceptualize citizenship in relation to their experiences and histories of displacement. The article also calls for the need to recognize how transnational and cultural aspect of citizenship shapes marginalized people's everyday experiences. (shrink)

Music as Agency: Diversities of Perspectives on Artistic Citizenship focuses on the concept, application, interpretation and manifestation of Artistic Citizenship in diverse contexts. The key concepts that the book tackles are: Cultural experience, artistic practice, musical identities, equity, democracy, community, activism, resistance and empathy. In giving an overview of aspects of the compound concept of artistic citizenship, Akuno and Westvall present the outcome of research and interrogation of practice by a global network of educator-researchers from Africa, the (...) Americas, Asia and Europe. The book articulates notions of artistic citizenship, coming up with the term artizenship as a derivative of the composite term. It further explains and analyses practical ways of perceiving and relating to art spaces, art practices and arts objects towards belonging, being and becoming in a global space that is disparate, polarised and often alienating, and thus responding to issues such as social justice, identity, participation and inclusion. With a focus on music, the book targets musicians, scholars, educators and enthusiasts keen on gaining a deeper understanding of how music and musicking can influence human interactions towards social integration, trust, cultural awareness and intercultural understanding. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop an account of Frederick Douglass’s use of declaration as an emancipatory mode of political action. An act of declaration compels an audience to acknowledge the declarer as possessing a type of normative standing (e.g. personhood or citizenship). Douglass, through acts of declaration like his Fifth of July speech and fight with the ‘slavebreaker’ Covey, compels American audiences to acknowledge him as a fellow citizen by forcefully enacting a commitment to resist tyranny and oppression. The (...) distinctive emancipatory potential of declaration is grounded in its political epistemology of acknowledgment, on which political actors understand other persons as members of a shared community through the ways in which they comport themselves in relation to one another. Declaration makes political communities more inclusive not only by changing who we understand as fellow members, but how we understand them as such. (shrink)

Section one : Situations. Death and dialogue -- The impossibility of settled rule -- The singular subject -- Terror, politics, and the subject -- What is resistance? -- A rebel's vision -- Section two : positions. The labour of memory -- Towards a theory of the constituent power -- Possibilities of our trans-national citizenship -- Empire, globalisation, and the subject.

As with terms such as “human rights”, “democracy”, and “equality”, the notion of “freedom” has an emblematic character with highly normative overtones. After the declaration of universal human rights, one might argue that freedom is – at least formally – a universal entitlement belonging to every human being. However, this universalist structure is built upon a conflictual foundation, as the juridico-political meaning of freedom is determined by the boundaries of national citizenship, statehood, and territorial sovereignty. This chapter examines refugeehood (...) as a normal by-product of the post-colonial world order, embodying the counter-history of nation-states whose internal borders, walls, and external fortifications are growingly being militarised and reinforced. Refugeehood represents an anomalous juridico-political condition that cannot be elucidated by colonial-racial binaries such as inclusion versus exclusion or rightlessness versus national citizenship. The central idea of this chapter is that, for refugees, the meaning of freedom and unfreedom are intertwined and should be approached as a dynamic relationship characterising the state of (non)-subjectivity. As political (non)-subjects, refugees call structural determinations of unfreedom into question. Refugees’ freedom is expressed in the act of flight and border crossing, irregular migratory movement, language games of resistance, and other emancipatory signifying practices by which they claim a place of refuge in the world. (shrink)

Critically engaging the work of Immanuel Kant, Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, and Jacques Derrida together with her own observations on contemporary politics, environmental degradation, and the pursuit of a just and sustainable world, Kelly Oliver lays the groundwork for a politics and ethics that embraces otherness without exploiting difference. Rooted firmly in human beings' relationship to the planet and to each other, Oliver shows peace is possible only if we maintain our ties to earth and world. Oliver begins with Immanuel (...) Kant and his vision of politics grounded on earth as a finite surface shared by humans. She then incorporates Hannah Arendt's belief in plural worlds constituted through human relationships; Martin Heidegger's warning that alienation from the Earth endangers not only politics but also the very essence of being human; and Jacques Derrida's meditations on the singular worlds individuals, human and otherwise, create and how they inform the reality we inhabit. Each of these theorists, Oliver argues, resists the easy idealism of world citizenship and globalism, yet they all think about the earth against the globe to advance a grounded ethics. They contribute to a philosophy that avoids globalization's totalizing and homogenizing impulses and instead help build a framework for living within and among the world's rich biodiversity. (shrink)

“Informed consent” implicitly links the transmission of information to the granting of permission on the part of patients, tissue donors, and research subjects. But what of the corollary, informed refusal? Drawing together insights from three moments of refusal, this article explores the rights and obligations of biological citizenship from the vantage point of biodefectors—those who attempt to resist technoscientific conscription. Taken together, the cases expose the limits of individual autonomy as one of the bedrocks of bioethics and suggest the (...) need for a justice-oriented approach to science, medicine, and technology that reclaims the epistemological and political value of refusal. (shrink)

Multiculturalism is higher on the daily political agenda than it has ever been. Leading politicians and public commentators speak with an unparalleled bluntness about the perceived limitations of multiculturalism while representatives of cultural, minorities express concern about marginalisation. This debate is taking place against a background of fear about terrorism, the integrity of national identities and a loosely construed ‘clash of civilizations’. Secularism is pitted against religious fundamentalism, respect for difference against the right of freedom of speech, integration against self-determination, (...) and duties of citizenship against minority rights. This book confronts the reality of moral conflict in the debate on multiculturalism while resisting the simplification which too frequently accompanies daily commentary on both sides of an increasingly polarised debate. The volume as a whole marks an important step in the attempt to examine the underlying concepts, of the nature and legitimate extent of disagreement, of secularism, the nature of power, the state and citizenship, which inevitably constitute key assumptions in the debate. Bringing together leading scholars on multiculturalism: Gerald Gaus, Peter Jones, John Horton, Tariq Modood, Chandran Kukathas, Bhikhu Parekh, Matthew Festenstein and Cecile Laborde, this book discusses the latest developments in the field. It will be of strong interest students and scholars of multiculturalism, political science, political theory, international relations, sociology, philosophy and anthropology. (shrink)

Network Democracy uses the contemporary tools of ecology and network thinking to unearth the ancient, intellectual ruins of traditional conservative thought. Questioning the West’s veneration of freedom, equality, contractual citizenship, economic progress, cosmopolitanism, secular institutionalism, and reason, Jared Giesbrecht illuminates how these ideals fuel violence and insecurity in our high-speed lives. While the modern age witnesses the rise of a violent conservatism in the form of revolutionary movements enacting terror and vengeance for the interventions of the liberal West, this (...) study reveals a different kind of conservatism - one that has emerged in direct conversation with liberal thought. Giesbrecht highlights the need for intermediate institutions and civil enterprises that form relations and traditions independent of the state in order to develop resistance to the insecurity of the liberal age. This book offers not only a poignant critique, but a constructive and peaceable alternative to the violence of both liberalism and reactionary anti-liberalism. Attuned to the new realities of globalization, advanced technology, and social acceleration, Network Democracy is a masterful hybrid of ancient and cutting-edge political philosophy that casts a new light on the values underlying western civilization. (shrink)

What do we mean when we talk about rights in relation to health? Where does the language of health rights come from, and what are the implications of using such a discourse? During the last 20 years there have been an increasing number of initiatives and efforts for instance in relation to HIV/AIDS which draw on the language, institutions and procedures of human rights in the field of global health. This book explores the historical, cultural and social context of public (...) health activists' increasing use of rights discourse and examines the problems it can entail in practice. Structured around three interlinked themes, this book begins by looking at how and why some health issues came to be framed as human rights issues. It goes on to look at what health as a human right means for our understandings of citizenship and the political landscape. The final part of the book investigates what happens when health rights are put into practice implemented, realised, cited, ignored and resisted. Health Rights in Global Context provides an in-depth discussion of the historical, social and political context of rights in health and develops much needed critical perspectives on the human rights approach to global health. It will be of interest to scholars of public health and human rights within health care as well as sociology and anthropology"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

The urgency of today’s conjuncture calls to us in a number of ways : to develop planetary citizenship and the solidarities it implies ; to promote and help those subjectivities which gain autonomy in the processes of resistance and alternative construction ; to develop myriad transveral encounters ; and finally not to hand the planet over to destructive forces of all kinds.

From a legal philosophical perspective one can speak confidently about the concept of man in Europe. Fundamental implications of the so called homo europaeus, to be discussed in this article, are represented above all in the Treaty established a Constitution for Europe. The two contrasting concepts of man are responsible for the present crises surrounding the ratification of the new EU constitution. 3Philosophical reflections are required in order to deduce the concept of man from a constitutional text, in which the (...) concept itself is not explicitly mentioned. The implications of certain connotations are considered as basic values for a peaceful co-existence. Human dignity, fundamental rights, separation of powers, the right to resist, citizenship of the union, family, democracy, solidarity, subsidiarity and pluralism all cast a revealing light on the unapparent concept of the homo europaeus. (shrink)

Recent discussions around education for global citizenship continues to retrace notions of cosmopolitanism first laid out in Europe. Ostensibly seeking global inclusivity, much of this work ultimately returns to a rather narrow set of ontological and epistemic themes, primarily Stoicism and Pauline Christianity. The Kyoto School offers a constructive reconstruction of these core premises of European cosmopolitanism. In resisting the ontologizing of autonomous individualism and abstract universalism, Kyoto School thinkers offered an alternative tripartite structure that drew greater attention to (...) the specific : individual and universal are inevitably mediated by the ‘logic’ of specific histories, languages, institutions, and communities. Rather than naïve nationalism, this view emerged within a radically relational worldview: ‘continuity-in-discontinuity’ emplaced within absolute nothingness. Kimura Motomori, a leading Kyoto School educational thinker, explicitly extended these Nishidian ideas to challenge Rousseau’s contracting individualism, Kantian abstract universalism, and Hegelian teleological temporality, thus offering a fresh vision of cosmopolitanism: self-aware citizens engaging concretely in the task of opening their specific societies. In conclusion, in part to demonstrate the very forms of critique we envisage, we trace historically the impacts of Kyoto School cosmopolitanism ideas on postwar policy in Japan and lament the recent regressive closing. (shrink)

Thoreau's political writing is intensely personal and direct. Both his life and work focus uncompromisingly on the question 'how should I live?', and for Thoreau, no element of day-to-day existence is left untouched by moral and political issues. This edition of Thoreau's political essays includes 'Civil Disobedience', selections from Walden, 'Life Without Principle', and the anti-slavery addresses, such as 'Slavery in Massachusetts'. In her introduction, Nancy L. Rosenblum places the essays in the context of Thoreau's life of self-examination, and the (...) debates about the abolition of slavery, and she analyses the themes of citizenship and resistance that have made Thoreau an enduring influence in political philosophy and practice. (shrink)

An argument that anyone can pursue political agency and resistance through photography, even those with flawed or nonexistent citizenship.

Using the writings of slaves and former slaves, as well as commentaries on slavery, Between Slavery and Freedom explores the American slave experience to gain a better understanding of six moral and political concepts—oppression, paternalism, resistance, political obligation, citizenship, and forgiveness. The authors use analytical philosophy as well as other disciplines to gain insight into the thinking of a group of people prevented from participating in the social/political discourse of their times. Between Slavery and Freedom rejects the notion that (...) philosophers need not consider individual experience because philosophy is "impartial" and "universal." A philosopher should also take account of matters that are essentially perspectival, such as the slave experience. McGary and Lawson demonstrate the contribution of all human experience, including slave experiences, to the quest for human knowledge and understanding. (shrink)

The special issue you have in your hands arose from a somewhat peculiar premise: we preferred not to be very clear, beforehand, about what it was going to be about. It may seem a risky bet for a “thematic” issue, but the truth is that we only had a set of concerns related to the cultural imperative of monogamy that, on closer inspection, did not even seem to point in the same direction. We knew, for example, that we did not (...) want to focus on polyamorous relationships, open couples or free relationships, nor on ethical or political non-monogamy, consensual or non- consensual. Nor did we want to focus on the relational styles of swinger networks, kink sexualities or BDSM. Neither did we want to focus on the proposals of relationship anarchy. In the same way, we did not want to dedicate this issue to the legal life of monogamy, nor to the intimate relations between state, citizenship and mononormativity. We also decided not to limit our proposal to exploring the intersections - and tensions - that arise between resistance to monogamy and feminist, anti-racist or LGBTQIAPN+ struggles. Similarly, we did not feel it appropriate to devote this issue to something like the study of “non-monogamy” in Brazil, Abya Yala or the multiple souths of the planet, or to the possible coalitions between decolonisation and de-monogamisation of the world. It is true that we wanted to open up a space where we could talk about all of this, and other things. But, above all, we hoped that this issue would serve to raise a question that underlies these topics without ultimately being reduced to any of them. (shrink)

Ethnic cleansing and other methods of political and social exclusion continue to thrive in our globalized world, complicating the idea that unity and diversity can exist in the same society. When we emphasize unity, we sacrifice heterogeneity, yet when we stress diversity, we create a plurality of individuals connected only by tenuous circumstance. As long as we remain tethered to these binaries, as long as we are unable to imagine the sort of society we want in an age of diversity, (...) we cannot achieve an enduring solution to conflicts that continue unabated despite our increasing proximity to one another. By envisioning the public as a multivoiced body, Fred Evans offers a solution to the dilemma of diversity. The multivoiced body is both one and many: heterogeneous voices that at once separate and bind themselves together through their continuous and creative interplay. By focusing on this traditionally undervalued or overlooked notion of voice, Evans shows how we can valorize simultaneously the solidarity, diversity, and richness of society. Moreover, recognition of society as a multivoiced body helps resists the pervasive countertendency to raise a chosen discourse to the level of "one true God," "pure race," or some other "oracle" that eliminates the dynamism of contesting voices. To support these views, Evans taps the major figures and themes of analytic and continental philosophy as well as modernist, postmodernist, postcolonial, and feminist thought. He also turns to sources outside of philosophy to address the implications of his views for justice, citizenship, democracy, and collective as well as individual rights. Through the seemingly simple conceit of a multivoiced body, Evans straddles both philosophy and political practice, confronting issues of subjectivity, language, communication, and identity. For anyone interested in moving toward a just society and politics, _The Multivoiced Body_ offers an innovative approach to the problems of human diversity and ethical plurality. (shrink)

Discover the truth about sex in the city (and the country). Mapping Desire explores the places and spaces of sexuality from body to community, from the "cottage" to the Barrio, from Boston to Jakarta, from home to cyberspace. Mapping Desire is the first book to explore sexualities from a geographical perspective. The nature of place and notions of space are of increasing centrality to cultural and social theory. Mapping Desires presents the rich and diverse world of contemporary sexuality, exploring how (...) the heterosexed body has been appropriated and resisted on the individual, community and city scales. Editors David Bell and Gill Valentine have brought together contributors with a wealth of approaches to ways in which the spaces of sex and the sexes of space are being mapped out across contemporary culture. Among the many sexual geographies covered are: Lesbians at home and on the streets; gay men on fantasy islands; bisexual identities; The heterosexualization of the workplace; bachelor farmers and spinsters; surveillance and sexuality; prostitution; queer politics; sexual citizenship, and the transformation of intimacy. The book is divided into four sections: cartographies/identities; sexualized spaces: global/local; sexualized spaces: local/global; sites of resistance. Each section is separately introduced. Beyond the bibliography, an annotated guide to further reading is also provided to help the reader map their own way through the literature. Mapping Desire will be a valuable and accessible travelogue of information for anyone interested in social, cultural and political geography, lesbian and gay studies, cultural studies, or simply those who want to find out more about the sexual landscape of contemporary society. Contents: Part I: Cartographies/Identities; Resolving Riddles: The Sexed Body, Julia Cream ; Locating Bisexual Identities: Discourses of Bisexuality and Contemporary Feminist Theory, Clare Hemmings; Of Moffies, Kaffiers and Perverts: Male Homosexuality and the Discourse of Moral Order in the Apartheid State, Glen Elder; Femme on the Streets, Butch in the Sheets (a Play on Whores), Alison Murray; Body Work: The Performance of Gendered and (Hetero)Sexualized Identities in City Workplaces, Linda McDowell; Part II: Sexualized Spaces: Global/Local; Whenever I Lay My Girlfriend That's My Home: The Performance and Surveillance of Lesbian Identities in Domestic Environments, Lynda Johnston and Gill Valentine; The Lesbian Flaneur, Sally Munt; Fantasy Islands: Popular Topographies of Marooned Masculinities, Gregory Woods; Sexuality and Urban Space: A Framework for Analysis, Lawrence Knopp; Part III: Sexualized Spaces: Local/Global; "And She Told Two Friends...": Lesbians Creating Urban Social Space, Tamar Rothenberg; Trading Places: Consumption, Sexuality and the Production of Queer Space, Jon Binnie; Bachelor Farmers and Spinsters: Gay and Lesbian Identities and Communities in Rural North Dakota, Jerry Lee Kramer; (Re)Constructing a Spanish Redlight District: Prostitution, Space and Power, Angie Hart; Part IV: Sites of Resistance; "Surveilliant Gays": HIV, Space and the Construction of Identities, David Woodhead; Sex, Scale and the "New Urban Politics": HIV-Prevention Strategies from Yaletown, Vancouver, Michael Brown; "Boom, Bye, Bye": Jamaican Ragga and Gay Resistance, Tracey Skelton; The Diversity of Queer Politics and the Redefinition of Sexual Identity and Community in Urban Space, Tim Davis; Perverse Dynamics, Sexual Citizenship and the Transformation of Intimacy, David Bell; Guide to Further Reading; Bibliography. (shrink)

A Significant percentage of the people outside their country of citizenship or residence who are unable to meet their basic needs on their own, and need international protection, do not fall under the definition set out in the UN Refugee Convention. This has led many - both academic commentators and activists - to call for a new, expanded refugee definition, preferably backed up by a new, binding, international convention. In earlier work I have resisted this call, arguing that there (...) is good reason to pick out a sub-stet of those in need of international aid - a set that largely, if not completely, corresponds to those picked out by the Refugee Convention - for special benefit and protection. However, even if Convention refugees are in some ways special, we are left with the question of what, if anything, is owed to those in need of aid who are not Convention refugees. In this chapter, I set out philosophical foundations for so-called complementary protection, and show how this may and should apply to people in need of international aid who are not Convention refugees. (shrink)