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Introduction:: Cities and Citizenship

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... Despite attempts since the 19 th century to move citizenship to the national level, cities today remain critical spaces for the construction of citizenship. This continued importance of the city has led Holston and Appadurai (1999) to coin the term 'urban citizenship', which is particularly useful for understanding the construction of what they call 'substantive citizenship' as opposed to 'formal citizenship' (Lazar and Nuijten 2013). In other words, they understand that the city is the scale where "the (processes) and practices that make someone into a full member of a given political community" (Lazar and Nuitjen 2013:3) take place. ...
... Cities are not just important for citizenship in and of themselves. In addition to the argument of the different scale at which citizenship is defined, as discussed in the introduction (Holston and Appadurai, 1999;Holston 2008;Lederman 2013;Smith and McQuarrie 2012), other authors have also suggested that citizenship is no longer a given but is something that needs to be struggled for. Painter (2005) for example, has argued that "there are good reasons to reconnect citizenship with cities, especially if we focus on 'bottom-up' citizenship and on citizenship as practice and participation" (:7). ...
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In this paper, we explore initiatives for the construction of substantive citizenship by transnational migrants in Buenos Aires. In looking at migrants’ political participation across the city, we found that the spatiality of citizenship practices is important. At the city level, there are migrant organisations representing specific nationalities. However, in informal settlements, where many migrants reside, we found that migrants engage in political practices across nationality and ethnic lines by coming together with their neighbours in grassroots organisations. These different forms of organising embody critically different views of migrants in their relationship with rights. While the former promote practices linked to ethnic belonging and see migrants as ‘guests’ in a foreign country, unable to make claims to the local or national governments, the latter see them as rights-bearing individuals with power to claim their right to the city. We argue that activism at the scale of the neighbourhood proves to hold more potential for the building of substantive citizenship than actions by organisations active at the city level. This is because migrant organisations active at the city level organise on the basis of nationality, while those at the neighbourhood level bring migrants and non-migrants together on the basis of their class-based interests.
... But by making migration and city as equal units of analysis with capabilities to influence and interact with one another, it enables an examination of migrant women's participation in economic and social processes in the city and encourages the recognition of the women as "rights-bearing citizens" (Appadurai & Holston, 1999) belonging to the city. "City," as a more immediate cultural, political and economic entity than a nation-state, comes to represent migrant women's state as a whole. ...
... Holston & Appadurai (1999) have also pointed out that "…those excluded from the circle of citizens, their rallies against the hypocrisies of [their state's] ideology of universal equality and respect have expanded democracies everywhere" (p.1). To strengthen this, I also connect the concepts of "formal" and "informal" (Roy, 2005;Appadurai, 2002) as these women workers' access to assistance from "formal" and "informal" sectors could inform our understanding of migrants' rights understood by state and their boundaries and operation. ...
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p>Stories of migration tend to mark monumental moments in people's lives. In Indonesia, the experiences of labour migrants, in particular, female overseas domestic workers (usually referred to as TKW: Tenega Kerja Wanita ), continue to make the news and has made its way into the Indonesian popular culture as well. In this conceptual paper, I offer a brief observation on the discussion of labour migration in Indonesia, and propose new ways to explore migration and urban space. In particular, with a focus on intersectionality of the two with respect to migrant women returnee's experience, I propose an approach that considers the details in their everyday lives and reflections upon them intertwined with formal and informal aspects of urban citizenship. Finally, by using Jakarta as a case study of urban space where migrant returnees live in, and influence and change, I suggest a research direction that centralizes migrant women as a storyteller and keyplayer in our understanding of urban, social, and cultural change in Indonesia and broadly, Southeast Asia. </p
... Scholarly literature has significantly documented the practical forms of incorporation in the urban space, particularly regarding vulnerable groups or those with meager economic and social resources (Balbo, 2005;Holston & Appadurai, 1999;Varsanyi, 2006;Waldinger, 1989). Beyond the observation that the migrant presence is now a significant component of urban growth and socio-economic changes in cities (Fonseca, 2008;UN Habitat, 2011), the debate over impoverished foreign populations' access to a place in cities has provided elements from diverse perspectives, whether focused on urban transformation, the nature of migratory dynamics or-albeit more rarely-the intersection of the two (Agier, 2016;Glick Schiller & Çaglar, 2011;Nicholls & Uitermark, 2016). ...
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Peru and especially the capital, Lima, is one of the principal destinations for Venezuelan migrants. This migratory phenomenon has made this urban space more diverse, dynamic, and complex, in a context in which Lima often operated as a place of exclusion for different groups. At the same time that the Venezuelan population arrived in Peru, a national migration policy began to emerge that sought to respond to immigration from a human rights perspective. This policy underwent numerous changes and setbacks in a very short time. Although the asylum legislation provides guarantees, few Venezuelan are recognized as refugees and there have been a series of restrictions on the right to asylum over the last year. Without a comprehensive urban policy that includes the migrant population, municipal authorities have reacted to these new migration patterns in various and sometimes contradictory ways. This chapter aims to analyze these local policies with respect to the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion of the migrant population in the city of Lima through the lens of national migration and asylum policies.
... For example, probing expatriate family's home language policy can help us gain valuable insights into their multilingual children's construction of identity and belonging across geographical boundaries. Further, I suggest we look into the construction of transnational citizenship (Holston & Appadurai, 1999) as a part of an effort to disrupt dichotomies between national and transnational boundaries in order to capture how belonging is created vis-à-vis the rise of modern cities, as opposed to nations (Van Bochove, Rusinovic, & Engbersen, 2010). I understand belonging does not entail boundedness, nor does it represent territorialism, but it is highly relatable as all of my participants never imagined rural areas as a next destination. ...
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This study speaks to the larger question of how growing up with mobility that spans tensions between multiple communities across the globe influences one’s construction of identity and belonging. In this paper, I examine how young adults who have been living in multiple countries in their formative years- most prominently referred to as Third Culture Kids -reflect upon their transnational life trajectories. With a particular focus on their construction of identity and belonging vis-à-vis language, literacy, and culture, I pair the concept of capital with habitus to understand how participants constructed their sense of belonging. My analyses suggest that Third Culture Kids foregrounded multilingual competence and diversity in articulating their mobile upbringing, and they finally chose to live in the US in addition to maintaining transnational ties with Korea in their adulthood. This study contributes to the field by unsettling the automatic collapse of belonging with national citizenship. With the growing number of transnational communities that mobilize funds of knowledge from heterogenic resources across the globe, this study highlights the need for educators to incorporate students’ funds of knowledge into language and literacy curriculum.
... It could be argued that in today's world we witness a displacement of citizenship, which is reflected in two complementary processes; the re-emergence of localisms, on the one hand, and the affirmation of transnationalism, on the other. In such a situation, the city has become a crucial arena for the renegotiation of citizenship, democracy and, by extension, national belonging (Appadurai and Holston 1999). These themes are central in this volume. ...
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This collection brings together a strong ethnographic and theoretical field. The volume includes chapters that address issues of identity formation and change in relation to ‘educational’ political projects and politically coloured notions of citizenship. Drawing on their different ethnographies and on comparative analysis, the contributors address the problematic of the relationship between rulers and the ruled and between élite and non-élite groups, critically raising issues of legitimacy and responsibility in the management of power and political decision-making. The empirically based analyses offered here graphically demonstrate that urban issues are at the forefront of political and social debates. More specifically, the contributors address, from different perspectives, the more or less successful attempts of the state to legitimise its approach and authority through urban policies. A collective reading of the chapters provides a powerful analytical framework for the study of the processes that underlie ideologically biased definitions of citizenship and of their effects on urban dynamics.
... On the one end, many slum organizations are compelled to function as neoliberal frontier transmission mechanisms. These serve as instruments of welfare ( Holston and Appadurai 1999 ) and act as political entrepreneurs ( Ong 2011 ) among affected ISFs to facilitate acceptance of gentrification and relocation imperatives in exchange for accessing limited state resources for their members. On the other end are radical right to the city struggles that advocate the right to adequate housing for all. ...
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In this chapter, I descend to the everyday of a large slum facing gentrification and populated by multiple grassroots organizations, to understand the dynamics of slum political socialities as it engages the exclusions of neoliberal urban governance. Drawing from almost six years of engaged ethnographic research, I trace how neoliberal rationalities and technologies travel from urban governments to the capillaries of the slum socialities. I ask: how are grassroots socialities affected, and how do they respond to forced evictions and demolitions, and other neoliberal technologies for slum clearing in their struggle for their right to adequate housing and development? I mark how the politics of confrontation co-constitutes ‘democratic participation’ and how capitalist exclusions are downscaled unto slums, where subaltern organizations perform progressive and neoliberal functions in the compelled privileging of the localized struggle for housing. I also note the resulting fragmentation and intra-community conflict highlighting the too-often neglected exclusions by and among the Filipino poor. Moreover, I intervene in the conversations on resistance imagined as a broad unified front led by a militant class of marginalized peoples – a political ideal of radical activists. This ideal is blurred by pragmatic and heterogeneous urban poor politics, and neglects the subaltern struggles for generating collectivities and incremental successes in the face of economic dispossession and differential citizenships.
... The IALA thus disenfranchises groups that the municipal framework seeks to include through quotas, most particularly those historically underprivileged on account of caste and gender. In many ways, the nature of participatory governance in the IALA not only harks back to anachronistic forms of non-universal franchise (Blewett 1965) but also speaks to the incomplete and compromised nature of citizenship for poor groups in Indian cities (Holston and Appadurai 1999). ...
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Focusing on the industrial area local authority (IALA), a governance regime widely applied in the south Indian states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, this paper examines pathways to illiberal governance within ostensibly liberal democratic contexts. The history of the IALA exemplifies the modes by which the movement towards representative government at the local level in India was subverted at its very origins by the insertion of exceptions into the legislation that purported to establish and empower urban government. Applied to demarcated territories, both established industrial areas and spaces dedicated to globalized information technology and financial services, the IALA instrument devolves the powers and functions of the municipality to an agency controlled by the state government. The career of the IALA thus demonstrates how neoliberal agendas are enacted in enclave settings through the interplay of discursive logics of participatory governance and strategies of entrepreneurial governance in practice. Using Hyderabad as an empirical case, the paper argues that special purpose enclaves, subject to regimes of exceptional urban governance, represent vectors both of neoliberalism and neo-illiberalism in avowedly liberal democratic contexts in the Global South.
... This Lefebvrian ideal of inhabitance unhinges national citizenship as the primary political community, and instead, proposes that residence and lived presence in an urban space is the most central fact of membership (Purcell 2003;Varsanyi 2006). Urban citizenship contrasts the 'formal citizenship' of the nation state with the so-called 'substantive citizenship' of the city (Holston and Appadurai 1999). In this perspective, the city is not mainly the lowest administrative level of a nation state but rather it is its own polity anchored in the everyday life of its residents (Magnusson 2011). ...
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Irregular migrants tend to live in dense urban settings. Cities respond to this phenomenon with a variety of urban immigration and citizenship policies in support of irregular migrants. These urban policies produce a disparity between local inclusion and national exclusion. This article describes and compares such urban policies, namely, urban citizenship, sanctuary cities, local bureaucratic membership, and regularizations. Urban citizenship serves as the normative foundation of these policies because it claims membership for all people who inhabit a city. Regularization programs confer national residency status on irregular migrants. Pro‐immigration actors favor this policy; however, when regularizations are not possible, cities can turn to sanctuary city and local bureaucratic membership policies. It is important for practitioners to comprehend and engage with these types of urban policies since they are likely to travel to cities worldwide.
... Most relevant is to what extent his variances are of influence in how the local, national and European authorities interact with each other on the issue of CEE migration. The literature, which outlines this multi-level setting, observes a growing role of local governments in general and cities in particular in global and multi-level systems (Brenner 2004;Holston and Appadurai 1999;Isin 2000;Le Gales 2002;Sassen 1999). It has become manifest that in the context of 'glocalization', cities are becoming hubs for innovation in governance networks. ...
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This chapter contributes to the discussion about newly identified trends in intra-European migration. It concerns the complexity of migration movements, higher differentiation of the migratory causes, and the increased involvement of female migrants. Specifically, it focuses on an analysis of the migration of Czech care givers to Austria who make use of the Austrian 24 h system of care for elderly people. The system is based on a two-week rotation of care givers that enables migrant workers to move regularly between their home in Czechia and their work in Austria. We call this movement, which lies somewhere between migration and commuting – “MICO”. There are three main factors that contribute to creating this specific mobility mode: geographical proximity (between the two given countries), a repeated and stable short stay and return model, and a very busy working scheme that prevents workers from integrating into Austrian society. Obviously, this type of movement has some transnational features related to economic domain/integration – namely circulation and remittances.
... Most relevant is to what extent his variances are of influence in how the local, national and European authorities interact with each other on the issue of CEE migration. The literature, which outlines this multi-level setting, observes a growing role of local governments in general and cities in particular in global and multi-level systems (Brenner 2004;Holston and Appadurai 1999;Isin 2000;Le Gales 2002;Sassen 1999). It has become manifest that in the context of 'glocalization', cities are becoming hubs for innovation in governance networks. ...
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This chapter compares the movement of workers from Central and Eastern European countries to European Union member states after 1990 (CEES) with the Guest Worker System of the period 1955–1974 (GWS). Three factors are essential for the emergence and continuation of these migration systems. The first factor refers to the economic push-pull factors of labour migration. When measured in terms of GDP differentials between sending and receiving countries, of wage differentials and of work opportunities - these turn out to be quite comparable in both migration systems. The second factors specifies how individuals enter into a labour migration system: the information of migration alternatives that migrants have, the networks that may help them and the intermediaries and facilitators that take away barriers. In this respect, there seem to be some significant differences between the two systems. The third factor is related to the regulatory systems of international migration. Here the differences between the two systems are fundamental: GWS developed into a highly regulated system of labour migration, while migration in the CEES system prospered due to the unrestricted free movement within the EU in a neoliberal economic climate with less labour market regulation. It is the combination of differences in the latter two factors that makes for a different selection of who is moving and for what purpose and, ultimately, for a greater unpredictability of the CEE migration.
... perform 'everyday citizenship' (Holston & Appadurai, 1999;Isin, 2005). This understanding of citizenship blurs the boundaries between formal and informal, public and private, and macro-and micropolitics. ...
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read article here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0962629816303134 Conflicts and contention increasingly challenge the capacity to govern the city. Social conflicts are not only problematic but also reveal a sense of active citizenship and engagement. Agonistic theories argue that governments should embrace contention to improve democracy, but this notion has rarely been made tangible in a framework of analysis. This paper proposes the ‘social-spatial narrative’ (SSN) framework to analyze if, when, where, and how conflicts can create opportunities to strengthen urban democracy. The SSN framework analyzes the social geography and political significance of street-level encounters in processes of urban conflict. It unravels exactly how the micropolitics of citizenship interacts with policy practices at the street-level. Narratives reveal the perspectives of stakeholders, but in order to study how some actors establish power and others get excluded, I argue for a social-spatial approach to critical moments. Critical moments may create liminal moments to (re)negotiate meaning, relationships and repertoires of action. The potential of conflict lies in the dramaturgy of these critical moments, which are therefore pivotal vantage points for critical reflection on the repertoire of urban politics. The paper coalesces theories from conflict studies, geography, and public policy to examine conflict empirically through case studies. I illustrate the framework with a case study in Amsterdam that addresses when and where opportunities to engage plural voices in decision making have emerged, and how local officials have missed these opportunities.
... Also, as James Holston and Arjun Appadurai contend, citizenship not only defines membership in a nation-state, but also signifies an identity, which manages and subjugates all other identities, whether they are racial, class-based, or gendered. 13 Citizenship is an idiosyncratic experience, and for people living in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands citizenship is, at its very best, ambiguous, and at its very worst, undemocratic. ...
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This article is theoretical in focus, contrasting a legalized citizenship of membership (the citizenship regime) with an alternative-citizenship of belonging (" borderdom "). The article will discuss the broader issues of cultural politics, which I argue transcend both the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and the citizenship regime. As such, we should confront and cross borders, as we seek to deconstruct them through the creative means that seek to redefine place and space against oppressive contexts, as a new discourse – a " borderdom " – is itself a utilized and evolving new culture. Beyond the citizenship regime, the article will examine cultural politics in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and the people who challenge established notions of citizenship in their everyday activities. The goal is to show how attitudes, cultures, and identities, while diverse and varied, may exhibit an alternative-citizenship. I utilize cultural citizenship and cultural politics theories and approaches to illustrate, accept, and celebrate difference, instead of assimilation. The cultural approaches may also help us find alternative methods for political empowerment.
... This involves not only their role in the implementation of specific policies, but also as actors in processes of agenda setting and policy formulation in such multilevel settings. This is an important limitation against the background of a growing role of local governments in general and cities in particular in global and multilevel systems (Sassen 1999;Holston and Appadurai 1999;Brenner 2004). Therefore, cities should not only be studied as subnational governments that are affected by Europeanisation (Emelianoff 2013) but also as key players in multilevel networks and as motors of policy dynamics 'from below'. ...
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‘Intra-EU mobility’ from new member states provides a governance challenge to European countries like the Netherlands. Freedom of movement within the EU enables mobility but also has important social consequences at the urban level in particular. This article discusses to what extent local, national and European governments have interacted in the governance of ‘intra-EU movement’ and how this has affected their policies regarding migrants from Central and Eastern Europe in particular. Focusing on the Dutch case, including the cities of The Hague and Rotterdam, this article shows a development from a decoupled relationship, to localist governance and only recently evidence of emerging ‘multilevel governance’. Speaking to the broader literature on multilevel governance, this article firstly shows that in spite of its broad theoretical application, multilevel governance should be seen as one of the varied types of governance in a multilevel setting. And secondly, it shows how and why local governments can play a key role in the bottom-up development of governance in a multilevel setting.
... Inoltre, i processi formativi, le trasformazioni dei rapporti dentro e fuori le istituzioni educative, come l'organizzarsi collettivamente per entrare nello spazio pubblico, rappresentano tutti tentativi di costruzione della cittadinanza agita nella quotidianità sociale. L'antropologia si è negli ultimi anni avvicinata al concetto di cittadinanza invitando a concentrarsi sulle sue dimensioni vissute e praticate (Holston, Appadurai 1999;Ong 2003;Brettell 2008). Un aspetto critico che ricorre costantemente in questo dibattito è costituito proprio dalla necessità di uscire dai confini strettamente formali della cittadinanza per esplorarne la sua traduzione nella vita quotidiana dei soggetti. ...
... In Brubaker's (1992) civic/ethnic nationalism continuum, Italy's citizenship history is closer to the German than the French case, where belonging to the nation is conceived as a cultural-linguistic (rather than a political) community, making Italian citizenship for (non-Italian) migrants a particularly contentious issue. Key sociological and anthropological research on substantive forms of citizenship has tended to downplay the role of legal citizenship in everyday life experiences (Holston and Appadurai, 1999) in favour of an understanding of 'citizenship as a more total relationship, inflected by identity, social positioning, cultural assumptions, institutional practices and a sense of belonging' (Werbner and Yuval-Davies, 1999: 4). For example, Ong (1996) makes a compelling case for the notion of 'cultural citizenship' defined as contemporaneous processes of self-making and being-made. ...
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This article explores the experiences of second-generation migrants with a focus on Chinese in Prato (Italy), for whom the relationship between citizenship and identity is tightly linked. Most studies maintain that the link between citizenship and identity is instrumentalist or ambiguous. In contrast, we focus on the affective dimension of citizenship and identity.We argue that citizenship status functions as a key defining concept of identity in Italy, in contrast to countries like Australia, where the notion of ethnicity is more commonly evoked. Several factors have contributed to this situation: the strong essentialist conception of ius sanguinis in Italian citizenship law, the recent history of Italian immigration, the European politics of exclusion and the repudiation of the concept of ethnicity in Italian scholarship as well as popular and political discourse. We conclude that the emphasis on formal citizenship, and the relative absence of alternative identity concepts like ethnicity, limits the possibilities for expressions of mixity and hyphenated identities in contemporary Italian society.
... Urban citizenship and city-making 7 Holston (2009:12) defines urban citizenship as: "A citizenship that refers to the city as its public sphere and to rights-claims addressing urban practices as its substance-claims concerned with residence, neighbourhood life, infrastructure, transportation, consumption and so forth." As Desai and Sanyal (2012:2) following the work of Holston and Appadurai (1999), point out, Indian cities have become-and have become recognised as-crucial spaces in which the meanings of citizenship are negotiated and contested. Because negotiating citizenship in the city "means asking difficult questions of inclusion, exclusion, equality and belonging" (Bhan 2010) some of these negotiations are centred on the way class is bound up with the substantive aspects of citizenship. ...
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This special issue of SAMAJ, composed of six empirical papers and this introduction seeks to throw light on environmental politics in contemporary urban India. Adopting a deliberately broad understanding of the environment, to include environmental amenities, urban natural resources and the built environment, the diverse case studies within this issue contribute to an interlinked set of discussions on the politicization of India’s urban environment. In doing so they engage with the ways that the environment is entwined with questions of urban citizenship; the role environmental knowledge(s) play(s) in urban environmental politics; and the situated character of urban political ecologies. While these papers employ diverse entry points into the environmental politics of Leh, Puri, Chennai, Bangalore and Delhi they all pay close attention to everyday practices and situated dynamics. As this perspective is applied across various city sizes the results demonstrate on the one hand the heterogeneity of India’s urban environments and on the other the pervasiveness of similar environmental politics across diverse sites. The insights from these papers aptly highlight the analytical challenge of considering issues of temporality and intersectionality whilst also recognizing the multi-scalar political-economic and social factors that shape contemporary urban power dynamics and the reproduction of particular urban environments.
... Studying democracy through informal tactics and formal strategies provides a means for recognizing that everyday life spaces are critical sites for the constitution of different forms of citizenship, and a medium through which citizenship negotiations take place (Davis and Raman, 2012;Holston and Appadurai, 1999;Isin, 2000). It helps demonstrate that 'informality is not "outside" the formal systems, but is instead produced by formal structures and always intimately related to them' (Porter, 2011: 116). ...
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Democratic governance is increasingly focused on active citizenship. Governments in the Global North seek to make residents responsible for improving their communities. Democracy, however, is not solely experienced in abstract terms, it also materializes through more informal everyday interactions with public officials. This article explores the significance of routine and performative street-level encounters that shape people’s experience of belonging or exclusion in a democratic state through a methodology of narrative mapping. Two ethnographic vignettes reveal the disjuncture between formal policy strategies that seek to foster citizenship and residents’ informal tactics to perform citizenship in an urban neighborhood in the Netherlands. The article underscores a paradox: the fact that formal strategies can inadvertently disrupt informal citizenship tactics, and thereby undermine the goals of an inclusive project.
... Social citizens assert rights to citizenship substantively through social practice and social presence rather than law (Glick Schiller and Caglar, 2008). This approach to citizenship, which locates citizenship in horizontal social relations is concerned with the performative dimensions of membership beyond the domain of legal rights, and defines the meaning and practices of participation and belonging as it is displayed within the public sphere (Holston and Appadurai, 1999). ...
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This article locates anthropology's arrival to citizenship studies and explores the peculiarities of anthropological approaches to citizenship, their contributions to theorization of citizenship as well as their limitations. It argues that the practice-based and processual understandings of citizenship in anthropology put a strong emphasis on the shifting meanings, everyday practices, and the varying and unpredictable sites of citizenship, which in turn makes ethnographic research central for citizenship studies. Finally, it situates anthropology's valorization of ‘citizenship from below’ within the context of neoliberal governmentality and argues that without ‘nonlocal ethnography’ anthropology's contribution to citizenship studies remain limited.
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Low-wage labor migrants experience major human and working rights abuses in the Gulf Cooperation Council countries despite national labor laws and signatures to various human rights conventions. On paper, India has established an institutional framework of transnational social protection for its officially estimated 5.5 million low-wage workers migrating to the Gulf Cooperation Council countries, e.g., financial emergency support, repatriation services, and walk-in centers. However, migrants in low-wage employment often cannot access substantive social rights in practice. Indian upper/middle-class migrant civil society groups mediate their access to Indian embassies’ services and the destination countries’ state institutions. The realization of social rights via informal, third-party representation stems from a representational disjuncture between low-wage labor migrants and the Indian state, which is rooted in their historical socioeconomic marginalization, limitations of the formal political system, and the constitutive role of informality in shaping and structuring citizen-state interactions in India. Through the lens of Piper and von Lieres’ (2015) concept of mediated citizenship and based on data from semi-structured interviews and participant observation of migrant support networks in the Gulf countries, this article examines why mediation takes place and how volunteers speak and take action for marginalized migrants in low-wage employment and consequences of mediation. It argues that migrant volunteer organizations and individuals are powerful stakeholders in the migration governance in the GCC region, as they possess leverage over who has (better) access to state institutions and the provision of social and human rights. Their status as intermediaries underlines the disaggregation of Indian citizenship along class and caste lines, which can be (mis)-used by mediators to pursue their interests, resulting in ambiguous effects. The article contributes to perspectives on migration governance in the GCC region, transnational social policies, and migrant volunteering.
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Traditional schooling seems ill equipped to handle the political and social challenges that have recently arisen worldwide. Acquiring the capacity to be a politically, socially, culturally, and economically active member of society is a fundamental component of any citizenship education and will be influenced by the dynamic nature of societal change. This article describes the potential of (global) citizenship education, focusing on its positive effects in complex urban settings. It starts with a more general approach and then highlights the specificities associated with Brazil’s and Rio de Janeiro’s educational system.
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This article examines the sonic dimension of police operations and occupations by tracing how the everyday life changed sonically in favelas in Rio de Janeiro during their occupation by Pacifying Police Units. I tune into the silencing practices of these security policies and conclude that a moral silencing of a racialized and gendered class of people takes place. A focus on silence helps us to understand sound as a technology of power, which enables the Brazilian state to operate along a gendered sonic color line. The cases I discuss are two instances of silencing that are a product of the operations and occupations: first, the silencing of the soundscape of the favela during police operations, and second, the silencing of funk parties. These ethnographic instances elucidate how racialized processes of negation of black subjectivity and black cultural expressions take place in the Olympic city.
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Australian multiculturalism emerged as national policy in the 1970s following contentious immigration policies designed to limit the entry of non-white immigrants. Multiculturalism frames articulations of national belonging in terms of broad moral implications and the immigration policy from which such implications stem. Paradoxically, discourses central to the multicultural ideal, such as integration and tolerance, can act to limit people’s experience of social belonging by providing scope for demonstrations of Anglo-Celtic heritage as a form of symbolic capital. I explore the ways non-white young people with refugee backgrounds interpret whiteness in relation to multiculturalism and negotiate their sense of belonging in Brisbane, Australia. I discuss the link between whiteness and multiculturalism from the perspectives of these young people and demonstrate the various ways in which they interpret Australian national belonging as intrinsically linked to skin color. By alternately highlighting and evading their own racialized sense of themselves, young people exhibit a multiplicity of possibilities for belonging and respond to the political context of their own lives.
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Otras geometrías o en busca de la piel. Muéstrame tu jardín y te dire quién eres: La proyección (a)utópica en Carlos Garaicoa D Ojeda Diagonal. Ensayos Sobre Arte Cubano Contemporaneo
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Artykuł rozpoczyna się od rekonstrukcji dyskursu o kryzysie demokracji i reakcji wywoływanych przez ten rodzaj narracji. Następnie omówiono ideę protestu miejskiego, wskazując na dwoiste oblicze obywateli miasta i ambiwalentne reakcje miast na zjawisko dekapilaryzacji władzy. Aby ukazać złożoność i różnorodność opisywanego zagadnienia, autor przywołuje przykłady miejskiego populizmu i reakcji na to zjawisko (między in-nymi w miastach Polski, Kanady, Włoch, Holandii, Niemiec). Autor w tekście wskazuje, że odpowiedź miast na populizm i kryzys demokracji wzmacnia lub osłabia tendencje autorytarne, zarówno w przypadku działań instytucjonalnych (związanych z tworzeniem i realizacją lokalnej polityki), jak i pozainstytucjonalnych (związanych ze sferą aktywizmu mieszkańców). Abstract In the article, a reconstruction of the crisis of democracy discourse and the reactions to this narration is laid out. Based on this reconstruction, the idea of urban protest is discussed. The dual face of the urban citizenry and ambivalent reactions of cities to the phenomenon of decapillarisation of power are discerned. Several case studies of urban populism (from the cities in Poland, Canada, Italy, Netherlands, Germany) and reaction to it are presented and analyzed in order to demonstrate the complexity and diversity of the problem. The author stipulates that the response of cities to populism and the crisis of democracy may strengthen or weaken authoritarian tendencies both at the level of institutional activities (related to the creation and implementation of local policies) and at the non-institutional level (related to the sphere of activism).
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This article assesses whether the everyday experiences of disabled Istanbulites can be considered from an urban citizenship perspective. To this end, Lefebvre’s notion of the ‘right to the city’ and its relationship with the literature on urban citizenship and Disability Studies is discussed, and two broad categories of analysis are presented to elaborate the issue in the case of Istanbul. These are, namely accessibility – to space, but also to education, health, and employment – and participation in decision-making. Interviews show that the limited rights-based discourses, which guided the institutional transformation of the greater and district municipalities in the early 2000s, have had almost no impact on the everyday experience of disabled Istanbulites. Istanbul remains a largely disabling city with major problems of accessibility and no room in decision-making processes for disabled people. Unfortunately, current developments do not point to the possibility of a more powerful practice of urban citizenship.
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Voluntary action in Indonesia is often state-driven, emerging not in relation to bottom-up grassroots initiatives, but encouraged or even enforced by the state. This article examines the ways volunteers in a development programme in the city of Medan use state-created opportunities for volunteering to critique the practices of the state and experiences of citizenship. Volunteers articulate an ideal relationship between citizens and the state, based not on the impartial distribution of welfare according to rights, but on personalized relationships of care. Volunteers suggest that their position outside of formal state structures makes them better able to form these relationships with citizens. In making these claims, volunteers both carve out a role for themselves within state-led development, while also conveying the impossibility that state-actors can achieve this citizenship ideal. At the same time, volunteers’ entanglement with the state – their association with the norms and practices that constitute it – limit their ability to transform citizenship practices.
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The city of New Delhi has been scarred by multiple evictions that have altered its landscape over the last two decades. How does one understand these evictions? Bhan’s article argues that the meaning of an eviction is particular within an auto-constructed city, that is, a city built largely in tension with formal logics of planning and law. Here, the basti, the slum, the shack, or the favela are not just settlements but modes of urbanization within which subaltern urban residents negotiate–incrementally, over time, and continuously–their presence in as well as their right to the city. This is a mode in which citizenship is built, acquired, and performed. This essay looks at the city from the sites of evictions within it, asking what they tell us about the nature and possibilities of citizenship in the contemporary Indian city. It argues that postcolonial debates on citizenship have remained insufficiently attentive to both spatial and urban citizenship, thereby leaving theory unable to understand fully what it means for democratic and urban politics for a city to be reconfigured through eviction. It suggests that taking spatial illegality seriously may be one way to address this gap.
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This chapter investigates José Esteban Muñoz’s claim ‘that the future belongs to queerness’ by focusing on middle-class queer women’s everyday experiences in contemporary Bangalore. As middle class, these women are co-opted into nationalist and neoliberal imaginaries as symbols of India’s rising power. As queer, these women are subject to normalized notions of both femininity and heterosexuality. Therefore, the strategies and tactics that queer women employ to create space in urban India signal multiple and continual rejections of heteronormativity and question if there is an idealized future in which these actions are unnecessary. In an evaluation of the implementation and reception to these tactics, this chapter will also highlight the failures of these spaces as and, following Muñoz, ask if the future really is ‘queerness’s domain’.
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Research on urban inequality has a long tradition in human geography as well as sociology. This special issue seeks to amplify the discussion by introducing some new theoretical approaches to the analysis. The first is to open up a research setting for comparative urbanism. By looking at urban life-worlds of marginalized neighbourhoods in the two Americas, the contributors do not want to search for similarities or disparities between different countries, but try to shed light on societal contexts and their spatial settings. The idea is to develop a reconstructive perspective to understand the uneven place-making within cities. With this, a second task is circumscribed: by describing and interpreting every-day life practices in Brazilian favelas and US ghettos, we want to contribute to a better understanding of patterns and spaces of urban inequality. Despite the wide array of (mostly quantitative) studies on urban inequality and segregation we declare a lack of understanding how these marginalized localities are experienced and reproduced. How do unprivileged inhabitants cope with everyday negligence and discrimination? Further concepts of urban citizenship, governmentality and the role of the penal state are introduced to enhance the conceptual as well as empirical analysis of inequality in cities.
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This book is a study of an increasingly popular somatic practice that has had a profound effect on the configuration of religion, politics, and community in India. The creative experiments with the regimented script of physical culture (or physical training) that young Hindu nationalist volunteers increasingly undertake, have transformed it into a widely observed daily routine that is continually developed within and around the precinct of Hindu nationalist shakhas in lower-middle and middle-class neighborhoods in various cities and towns of contemporary India. As I argue, explorations with the script of physical training should be understood as being part of a broadly observed ethicopolitical mode through which political subjects and communities have been formed and mobilized in colonial and postcolonial India particularly in the state of Gujarat. Rather than framing physical culture as only being an instrument through which Hindu nationalist leaders create pliant volunteers, I illustrate in this book the manners in which the program of physical training that local Hindu nationalist organizers oversee has come to be nourished by a critical sensibility that branch volunteers have introduced to daily physical training and therefore the movement in general. Performed both according to and against the script of physical culture that the founding leaders of the Hindu nationalist apparatus disseminated in the early twentieth century, drill has become the site in which its embodied routines have been transformed within a perceived ethical zone of corporeal self-experimentation in which volunteers modify and elaborate its regimen on a daily basis.
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Der Beitrag nimmt Bezug auf die Intersektionalitätstheorie, die sich mit dem Zusammenwirken mehrerer ungleichheitsgenerierender Kategorien befasst. Am Beispiel der Strukturkategorien von Migration und Behinderung wird aufgezeigt, dass der Intersektionalitätsansatz es vermag, Ungleichheitsverhältnisse in ihrer Komplexität aufzuzeigen. Dafür stellt die Autorin eine Fallanalyse aus ihrer qualitativen Studie zur Lebenssituation von Eltern türkischer und iranischer Herkunft mit einem behinderten Kind vor. Der Fall einer alleinerziehenden Mutter steht exemplarisch für die prekären Lebenssituationen Betroffener, die sich aus den Verwobenheiten und Wechselwirkungen diskriminierungsrelevanter Positionierungen ergeben.
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Strata title was introduced in Australia over 50 years ago and offered a legal mechanism for space to be vertically subdivided and traded. Importantly, it allowed individualised property rights to be applied to multi-unit housing. In New South Wales, recent changes to the Strata Scheme Development Act allow termination of strata schemes with less than unanimous support of owners. A central feature of the discussion surrounding the implementation of these changes was to question the rights associated with ownership of strata. This paper presents findings from key-informant interviews undertaken in the lead up to the reforms to the NSW legislation governing strata termination. Analysis of these interviews demonstrates the complex ways in which property rights are understood in relation to strata termination within the broader context of housing. This paper argues that successful implementation of the new legislation impacting upon property rights in strata will require concerted engagement with wider social concepts and understanding of housing within the Australian community.
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This article revisits the notion of radical planning from the standpoint of the global South. Emerging struggles for citizenship in the global South, seasoned by the complexities of state—citizen relations within colonial and post-colonial regimes, offer an historicized view indispensable to counter-hegemonic planning practices. The article articulates the notion of insurgent planning as radical planning practices that respond to neoliberal specifics of dominance through inclusion — that is, inclusive governance. It characterizes the guiding principles for insurgent planning practices as counter-hegemonic, transgressive and imaginative. The article contributes to two current conversations within planning scholarship: on the implication of grassroots insurgent citizenship for planning, and on (de)colonization of planning theory.
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