Search

This paper examines the administrative category 'ungeklärte Staatsangehörigkeit' ('unclear nationality') and its implications for citizenship rights in Germany. An unclear nationality represents a de facto statelessness but does not concede the rights established for de jure stateless people. It impedes naturalization in Germany and complicates access to a travel document and settlement permit. The paper analyses the (re-)production of unclear nationality and traces its effects on the life of a woman born in Germany with an unclear nationality since birth. Her experiences disclose the difficulty of navigating the German bureaucratic system and its discretionary power. Her experiences also reveal how a state of limbo is perpetuated over generations, confining individuals in a territory whose bureaucratic apparatus views them as foreign. Unclear nationality thus functions as a technology of exclusion: by placing the person in a yet-to-be determined nationality, it interpellates them not as subjects of rights but objects of clarification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses how kinship in its intersection with the law shapes female migrants' gendered vulnerabilities, but also their political subjecthood. My ethnographic fieldwork in Athens from 2017–2020 with young adult Syrian women shows that female migrants prefer to remain undocumented in Greece, because so-called 'illegal' smuggling routes remain their best bet for reaching Central/Northern Europe. I read their strategies of 'self-il/legalisation' as 'ambivalent' yet 'generative' political acts. By selectively and simultaneously working with and against the EU's border regime and kin-related legal and socio-cultural structures, acts of self-il/legalisation oppose the infantilisation of women as secondary to male citizens, and of non-citizens as outsider, non-political subjects. I argue that in doing so, female migrants enact an ambiguous political subjecthood that defies classic binaries of the personal/political, citizen/refugee, law/culture and legal/illegal, and also unmask the false claims to rationality, modernity and neutrality upheld in the EUs migration and asylum regime, exposing instead its racialised and heteropatriarchal foundations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Moving as a French or Dutch citizen to Belgium should be easy, given the freedom of movement of EU citizens. Reality paints a different picture, however. This paper analyses the practices of Belgian municipalities and the Immigration Office as to the registration of EU workers, self-employed, jobseekers and their family members. It is based on a desk study, a survey among a sample of municipalities as well as semi-structured interviews with municipal officials, the Immigration Office and other stakeholders. The paper adopts a legal understanding of 'procedural justice', focusing on dimensions of equal treatment and transparency. It shows that the achievement of procedural justice for EU citizens is impaired by divergent and at times questionable practices by street-level bureaucrats. These practices indicate, among others, that varying levels of 'deservingness' of residence in Belgium can be observed within the category of mobile EU workers. Furthermore, increased digitalization and the use of intermediaries in the registration procedure facilitate and reinforce differential treatments among EU citizens and their family members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the paper is to understand the reasons for the spread of fear, the suspension of solidarity, and the securitizing national and local context along the European migratory route. A settlement located on the Hungarian side of the Serbian-Hungarian border, heavily affected by international migration in 2015, is the focus of inquiry. The mayor of the village is a major figure in the Hungarian far-right who mobilized not only the political scene but also various segments of the media to create and legitimize a discourse involving threatened villagers (and more generally, threatened Hungarians and Europeans) and a migrant menace (perceived as non-European, non-white, and non-human). Based on an ethnographic inquiry, the paper reveals the variety of discourses and attitudes which emerged as immediate reactions to people on the move appearing in large numbers in the village. These initial reactions included empathy and a willingness to help which rapidly disappeared. The paper analyses how welcoming acts and voices were silenced and eliminated, and a hegemony of fear was constructed. It contributes to the special issue by showing how fragile solidarity with refugees can be, and how its elimination can occur if social precarity and far-right politics are combined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2019, India made the unprecedented move of listing 1.9 million people in its northeast state of Assam as illegal migrants from Bangladesh in a new National Register of Citizens before passing the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, which overtly discriminates against the country's Muslim minority. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork, this paper investigates the reality of precarious citizenship under India's increasingly anti-migrant regime, particularly for Bengali-speaking Muslims. Going beyond the predominant notion that illegal migrants acquire documentary citizenship through fraudulent means after crossing the porous border between India and Bangladesh, this essay reveals a reverse scenario: those living with citizenship rights and in a regular social world are subjected to the gradual process of detection, detention and 'deportability' in India. This paper employs the concept of precarious citizenship to unravel this complex and oscillating world of legality and illegality, citizenship and noncitizenship, and the predicaments of life as a Bengali-speaking Muslim in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on newly incorporated citizens' experiences, interviews with numerous state officials, and field observations in the former border enclaves of India inside Bangladesh after their exchange in 2015, I contend that the state of Bangladesh took extraordinary measures to incorporate its new citizens. Such exceptional measures resulted in a category of citizens that cannot be fully grasped by the existing citizenship vocabulary. In this paper I therefore offer the concept of showcase citizens. Showcase citizens represent an exceptionally treated group of citizens who became subjects to special attention from the state in certain spaces at a specific time. The key to our understanding of such 'exceptions' and the unique response from the Bangladesh state, I argue, lies in placing the enclaves within the broader context of post-colonial South Asia, specifically in relation to the imagination of nation and territory, sovereignty, (performative) governance, and state-making. As such, showcase citizens becomes both an analytical tool – which links the imagination of territory, sovereignty, and citizenship in post-colonial South Asia – and a technique of performative governance that combines the formal with the informal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Private actors play an increasing role in mediating the relationship between States and noncitizens and even in creating or perpetuating exclusions associated with noncitizenship. This paper offers a way to analyse the forms of engagement of the for-profit private sector in migration control and asks what it means for how noncitizenship is constructed. It presents the private sector as acting like a buffer, altering whether and how individuals may engage with a State constructing what noncitizenship means within a State’s territory, and removing so-constructed individuals from a relationship with that State. It shows how this may occur directly or indirectly, explicitly or implicitly. The paper addresses two main concerns: the impact on the State-noncitizen relationship and whether there are some areas of the relationship between the State and the noncitizen that should not be so-delegated. It argues that privatised migration control raises problems for standard justifications of migration control and noncitizenship construction. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Over the last few decades, only a few studies have assessed denationalisation as a way of terminating 'obsolescent' citizenship resulting from the long-term emigration of an individual. This mode of loss of citizenship seems prima facie more legitimate than citizenship revocation as a means of punishment, as it only represents the legal recognition of the disappearance of a genuine link between an individual and a state. This paper explores the legal status of this mechanism (both from international law and national legislation) and differentiates three models (corrective, preventive, and extensive). From a normative perspective, reviewing three democratic theories of citizenship, this paper claims that the most persuasive justification for this mode of loss is the 'all subjected persons' principle. The loss of citizenship of permanent expatriates thereby becomes part of a democratic theory linking habitual residence with possession and conservation of citizenship, with due respect for human rights principles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces a materialist approach to Isin’s concept of ‘acts of citizenship’ to call for an attention to the lively and agential materials that mediate citizenship claims. It describes two ways in which materialism helps progress conceptualisations of citizenship. Firstly, it demonstrates the ways in which a materialist viewpoint forces a reconsideration of ‘acts of citizenship’ as undertaken by heterogeneous collectives, rather than them being the sole responsibility of human actors. Secondly, it suggests that, because acts of citizenship arise out of socio-material entanglements, they may exceed the apparent intentions of human subjects. This paper argues that materials are more than bystanders in claims to citizenship; they actively mediate and facilitate encounters through which political claims are made. This argument is developed through a detailed empirical study of the materials permitted to circulate from Immigration Removal Centres during a community exchange project organised by the charity Music in Detention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to analyze a particular form of noncitizenship – arising from legal long-term temporary migration – that is increasingly significant to the contemporary Australian context and to understand some of its consequences. It argues that traditional pathways of permanent settlement and full citizenship are being disrupted by new temporary migration schemes that create ‘middling’ noncitizen subjects who experience ‘patchwork’ rights and statuses across complex and diverse migration pathways. Through a close analysis of policy narratives and discourses, as well as of the existing literature on the social conditions and emerging solidarities of these noncitizens, the paper shows the various ways that noncitizenship is depoliticized and citizenship contractualized in Australia. These entwined processes of depoliticization and contractualization have intimate effects on the lives of noncitizens, and also limit and constrain the emerging solidarities that seek to challenge their exclusion. The analysis has a number of implications for the ongoing study of contemporary transformations in citizenship in other ‘immigrant democracies’ globally. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, we analyze online discussion threads related to national belonging in Finland, Denmark, and France. These discussions are all related to immigration and the definition of 'legitimate' citizens. Our approach is empirical: the goal is to show how in-groups and out-groups are construed linguistically and discursively in the data and how the interactants negotiate membership categories and express their opinions regarding them. The most important in-group in the datasets consists of the nationals born in the country, whereas the out-group par excellence is formed by Muslims. The data show how the boundaries of national communities are performatively constructed through the everyday discourse of online fora, which constitute an important arena of societal debate today. This discourse draws its force from the reiteration of stereotypical generalizations and the power attached to the written word in a communication environment enabling an efficient dissemination of ideological discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information and communication technology held promise for quite a while as a potential instrument for instigating new rhetoric in public discourse, and a would-be generator of social change. This development has been particularly desired in the area of mobility and border control. In this paper, I further my analysis of counter-security technologies used by illegalised migrants, and explore its potential impact on how we conceptualise and engage with irregular migration. I look at the use of information and communication technology (such as smartphones and social media) in developing and adopting counter-accounts around migration that can assist in desecuritisation of the issue, and rehumanisation of border crossers. Ultimately, I argue, counter-security technologies could be instrumental in altering narratives pertinent to people on the move, and their transformation from illegalised non-citizens to (unhyphenated) noncitizens. As such, they are defined by the relationship with the state, in which their human rights and agency will be upheld. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues for a line of inquiry in the intersection between migration studies and STS work around the notion of material politics in alternative spaces. Drawing on multisited ethnographic inputs, I describe arrangements of cooperation coexisting with post-conflict reparation in Colombia and governmental humanitarianism in Greece. I follow material practices transforming objects into arrangements of remembrance and collective support and address the orders enacted by these practices as alternative infrastructures challenging infrastructures of migration control. The notion of alternative infrastructures offers the possibility to epistemically explore an overlooked angle by citizenship studies and STS; it engages with the objects and relations embedded in the materiality of everyday life and its politics beyond the boundaries of instituted forms of citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article recounts the story of sanctuary city organizing in Ottawa, Canada to explore the politics and potential of a transformative approach to sanctuary rooted in anti-prison activism and abolitionist feminist thought. More specifically, we have adapted the abolitionist framework of reformist reform and non-reformist reform and applied it to sanctuary city organizing. Analysis of the Ottawa case draws on research with frontline service providers and migrant justice organizers, as well as our own organizing experiences, observations, and adaptive practices as sanctuary city campaigners. The paper also elaborates on the forms of solidarity and citizenship that have emerged or have the potential to emerge in the context of a non-state centric vision of sanctuary that prioritizes grassroots transformative practices over municipal policy and that do not bolster or legitimize the state's capacity to deport, punish, and exclude. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conceptualising citizenship as an act rather than a status enables us to rethink the familiarity of both ‘who’ can be a citizen and the type of ‘practices’ that can be understood as citizenship. This paper focuses on unfamiliar practices of citizenship per se by exploring the liminal site from which intergenerational migrant youth resist the taken-for-granted space of citizenship through a turn towards vernacular music and language. It considers how citizenship is resisted here through the unfamiliar act of turning away from either identifying or, failing/refusing to identify with the nation-state. It explores the effect of this move in challenging narrow national linguistic and ethnic ideologies through the development of non-standard language practice and cross-cutting musical styles. It argues that citizenship is enacted in this move by creating a spaceinvernacular music and language for expressions of hybrid political identity and belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The arrival of migrants on Italian coasts following the so-called Arab Spring in 2011 has led to a multiplication of housing struggles. These struggles are widespread across the country and focus on the occupation of abandoned buildings and their transformation into collective housing spaces to provide an alternative to the formal reception system. This article will focus on the housing struggles in Rome, as the place with the highest number of occupations and the longest tradition of campaigns for the right to housing of migrants in the country. These struggles are the outcome of the encounter of recently arrived migrants with local solidarity movements and build on existing occupation movements and housing struggles. The article explores how the mobilizations over the right to housing intersect with issues such as the social appropriation of urban commons, the regeneration from below of unused areas, freedom of movement, and the contestation of Italian government policies on the relocation of migrants and refugees. The paper argues that housing struggles not only appropriate and regenerate urban commons, but also challenge the reception governance of migration and the policies of border control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After years of frenetic cross-border movement, in 2014, a mother and daughter live in post-Soviet Georgia as practically stateless noncitizens. Recognizing the advantages of citizenship, they commit their limited resources to obtaining citizenship documents. Through an analysis of their attempts to make citizenship claims and build stable lives, this paper argues that the contemporary Georgian citizenship regime fosters a relationship that further destabilizes the lives of already vulnerable non-citizens. It does so by drawing them in with the promise of citizenship – only to deny them. Yet, Georgian citizenship law is neither uniquely malicious nor indifferent; its form of ‘inclusive exclusion’ is an inherent feature of the reigning paradigm of global citizenship. In this context, far from being passive subjects, non-citizens facing consistent official refusals and seemingly flagrant obfuscation actively attempt to both maintain their relationship with the state and transform it in their favor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attends to the relationships and spatialities through which immigration detention centers, though isolating and constraining spaces, are shaped by detainees. I approach the problematic of detainee resistance and agency through both Critical Citizenship Studies and feminist relational frameworks. I do so through a case study of one particular rupture – the 2014 hunger strikes at the Northwest Detention Center. My analysis of the 2014 hunger strikes at the NWDC directs me to conceptualize detainee activism as a process of political subjectivization, though one that is fraught with physical and political risk to both detainees and the order of sovereignty and citizenship. This process is undergirded by and productive of a series of interpersonal and political relations that mediate detainee actions and statements, and constitute them as a rupture in the order of sovereignty and citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

To further advance the literature which contests the shift from national to post-national citizenship, the aim of this paper is to compare the experiences of two groups of migrants to reveal how national immigration policies remain influential and determine the employment and living conditions of migrants. Reporting evidence from Italy on the different experiences of non-European Union (Tunisian) and European Union (Romanian) migrants employed as seasonal workers in the agricultural sector in Sicily, the finding is that the degree of exploitation they witness in their working conditions is shaped by their citizenship entitlements. The outcome is that it is revealed that (European Union) citizenship status, rather than formal employment, provides greater belonging and security to economic migrants. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Citizenship does not equal belonging. In this paper, we investigate how the disjunction between the ‘imagined community’ and the formal citizenry impacts on citizens’ rights. In particular, we analyse decision-making on the family migration rights of citizens in France, Germany and the Netherlands. Our analysis shows that in these three countries, notwithstanding their different migration and citizenship regimes, the reduction of citizens’ family migration rights is based on the same discursive mechanism: the ‘membership’ of citizens of migrant origin who marry a partner from abroad is called into question. As they are excluded from membership of the imagined community, their entitlement to family migration rights is decreased. Ethnic conceptions of national community, intersecting with gender and class, play a crucial role in shaping the rights attached to citizenship in Europe today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Domestic welfare reform and the management of international migration in Britain have been described by David Cameron as ‘two sides of the same coin’. Heightened conditions and sanctions for the benefit-dependent domestic population, both in and out of work, are being harnessed as a means of promoting labour market change and reducing demand for low-skilled migrants – often EU workers, whose own access to benefit is being curtailed. Arguments about the post-national expansion of rights and associated cosmopolitan debate implicitly measure migrants rights against a normative model of citizenship as the yardstick of full social inclusion, but with little attention to how far citizenship itself falls short of this promise. Taking Britain as a case study, this paper considers how the concept of civic stratification can further advance analysis of the link between domestic welfare, migration and human rights in a context of intensifying controls for both migrants and citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inspired by autonomy of migration and acts of citizenship literatures as frameworks for understanding migration, the paper analyzes the case of Haitian migrants in Brazil. It focuses, on the one hand, on the relational processes of constructing Haitian migrants as ‘humanitarian immigrants’ and, on the other, on the (im)perceptible tactics of survival and mobility enacted by them upon arrival. We argue that the ‘humanitarian immigrant’ label negotiatesstasisby instantiating an ambivalent and depoliticized subjectivity, modulated in-between the refugee and the immigrant worker. Migrants challenge this framing and the precarity of controls created by it through imperceptible tactical interventions that allow them to provisionally escape the inhospitable conditions of reception at Brazilian borders. In their attempts to resist and redefine the terms of their presence, Haitian migrants have actualized a web of solidarity networks that have fostered alternative understandings of migration management and its relation with citizenship as a site of political struggles. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Existing political theory, particularly which deals with justice and/or rights, has long assumed citizenship as a core concept. Noncitizenship, if it is considered at all, is generally defined merely as the negation or deprivation of citizenship. As such, it is difficult to examine successfully the status of noncitizens, obligations towards them, and the nature of their role in political systems. This article addresses this critical gap by defining the theoretical problem that noncitizenship presents and demonstrating why it is an urgent concern. It surveys the contributions to the special issue for which the article is an introduction, drawing on cross-cutting themes and debates to highlight the importance of theorising noncitizenship due to both the problematic gap that exists in the theoretical literature, and the real world problems created as a result of noncitizenship which are not currently successfully addressed. Finally, the article discusses key future directions for the theorisation of noncitizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper focuses on the experience of one specific group of Taiwanese women married to Chinese Malaysian men to examine the contestational process of bidding for citizenship status in an ethnicized polity. Positioned within a trajectory of transnational linkages between origin and host countries, they achieve success through making use of networking links with co-ethnic Chinese Malaysian women who are well-positioned within government bureaucracy, while forwarding an argument based on familial ideology and the (reproductive) citizenship rights of their Malaysian husbands. As noncitizens, they nevertheless engage in socially contributive ‘acts of citizenship’ that signify their suitability as citizens, nonthreatening to social cohesion. Furthermore, they enhance their strategy by ethnic boundary-making efforts aimed at distancing themselves from People's Republic of China wives who constitute a stereotyped and stigmatized ‘other.’ The discussion makes a contribution to the literature on ethnicity, citizenship, and gender. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent advances in citizenship and migration studies have demonstrated the need to explore noncitizens' social, political and legal relationships to the state in their own right. Such a rethinking inevitably requires analysing how both 'citizenship' and 'the state' are enacted and performed in the negotiation of substantive rights. This special issue follows an unexplored path by scrutinizing these interactions between 'citizenship' and 'stateness' in the domain of procedural law, procedural safeguards, and perceptions of procedural justice among a variety of actors. The contributions explore empirically how procedural rules are invoked, altered, disregarded, or reinvented in different sites of interaction, ranging from asylum determination and adjudication to immigration and municipal registration offices. This interactionist approach not only recasts procedural rules as an integral part of citizenship struggles, thereby shedding light on the co-constitution of state and noncitizenship, but also stresses the importance of nuanced analyses of the nexus between procedural and substantive rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In migration law, being informed about legal and administrative procedures constitutes an essential procedural safeguard. Yet, in practice, the transparency of legal practices is often structurally undermined, resulting in the curtailment of procedural safeguards and potentially affecting perceptions of procedural justice. Building on our multi-sited ethnographic research in Germany and Switzerland, we first argue that migrants find it often difficult to anticipate how laws work, contradicting the key procedural law principle of legal certainty. Second, a general trend towards acceleration in migration administration allows limited time for information to reach migrants on the ground, leaving them uninformed about legal procedures. Third, migration law is implemented in an atmosphere of suspicion, which has a negative impact on trust between migrants and state officials – and on transparency. We thus demonstrate how procedural safeguards become empty and routinised, aggravating the structural violence at the heart of the distinction between citizens and non-citizens in interactions with the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Special Issue analyses how forced migrants' and non-citizens' kinning and de-kinning practices and their struggles of 'doing family' constitute navigations of citizenship. Forced migrants and non-citizens need to manoeuvre an intersecting net of different bureaucratic, political and legal, but also kin-related social and cultural regimes. In their encounters with state authorities, bureaucrats, and humanitarian workers, and through the material cultures these engender, forced migrants and non-citizens are marked and categorised – often with wide-ranging consequences for themselves and their significant others. This Special Issue traces how legal and bureaucratic inscriptions derive from, but also shape forced migrants' and non-citizens' familial status and intimate ties to fictive, legal or consanguineal kin. Centring on migration and displacement to and in Europe and the Middle East, we combine analytical debates from anthropology, gender, migration and citizenship studies. Collectively, this Special Issue suggests that the nation-state and its migration regime are experienced in relational ways, and impact on migrants' ability to care for and be in relation with significant others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As two of the major countries that received Syrians during the exodus led by the civil war, Turkey and Germany have responded to this wave of migration with different asylum and migration management schemes. These responses have created a significant disparity between the family constellations of Syrian refugees in these countries and have produced different outcomes at the intersections of familial care arrangements and citizenship statuses. This article foregrounds kinship as a system of relatedness founded on gendered care practices, and the 'kin-contract' as the patriarchal scaffolding of familial entitlements and obligations in the lives of Syrian migrants. Based on ethnographic research in Istanbul and narrative research in Berlin and Leipzig, it compares the effects of the migration and citizenship regimes of Turkey and Germany on the experience and consequences of this 'kin-contract' in refugees' lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In The Birthright Lottery, I explored how birthright access to citizenship operates as a distributor (or denier) of opportunity on a global scale. Today, 97 percent of the global population gains access to citizenship solely by virtue of where or to whom they are born. This article shifts the gaze from the automatic transmission of citizenship (which I call the initial allocation), to deciphering the code, or underlying logic, that governs the secondary allocation: the process of naturalization. Counter to predictions of waning sovereignty, tremendous investment is placed on regulating mobility, migration, and access to membership. I identify three core sorting mechanisms that produce overt and covert inequalities in the acquisition of citizenship, which I call the trinity of the territorial, the cultural, and the economic. These intersecting yet analytically distinct dimensions allow governments to develop sophisticated ways to 'filter' admission of different populations, placing a heavy burden on those seeking it. The discussion lays bare the mistaken assumption that we live in a world wherein mobility is purely chosen and easily available—irrespective of race, gender, class, power, and legal regulation. It further suggests ways of reinvigorating the political imagination for rewriting the rules governing access to membership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anticolonial and Black feminist scholars and artists have made a convincing case that political and social legibility for racially marked peoples requires active and multi-sensory reiteration. To presence what has been effaced or distorted, images, numbers, and texts must be redacted, annotated, rescaled, reframed, relocated, and repurposed. In dialogue with this work, this piece discusses the vernacular of the diasporic art made in English hospices with Black and Brown migrants at the end of their lives. I suggest that such outsider art makes and rehearses migrant belonging in two interrelated ways: by creating temporary niches for rest, recovery, and pleasure; and by bringing into appearance the quotidian, heterogenous times of Black and Brown diasporic belonging that are out of sync with the rights and timelines of formal citizenship. The critical possibilities that attunement to rest and pleasure can precipitate in citizenship studies is an underlying theme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critiques of 'fantasy citizenship' include calls to migrantize the citizen and denationalize citizenship and migration studies. In response, this essay proposes 'precarious legal status trajectories (PLSTs) as method', with a focus on the work of legal status. This approach captures changes in sociolegal status trajectories, including illegalization, and builds a 'thicker' approach to trajectories. The work of status refers to effort, time, money, and other resources devoted to being present in a jurisdiction, and/or gain access to services and protections. The approach also considers work that does not produce changes and is not counted, and interactions with other actors. This contributes to understanding how precarious legal status trajectories are assembled and contribute to inequalities in citizenship and dynamics of differential inclusion. It migrantizes the citizen in a context where the share of citizens who were precarious noncitizens continues to rise, and when methodological nationalism occludes PLSTs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to the scholarship on marriage migration and citizenship by drawing attention to an under-studied group of single marriage migrant mothers who are widowed, divorced, or separated from their citizen-husbands. It examines the ways in which nation-states regulate the dissolution of cross-border marriages and allocation of citizenship rights to single marriage migrant mothers. Drawing on the experiences of 25 mainland Chinese single marriage migrant mothers, this article unravels the dynamic process of citizenship negotiation between top-down state hegemony and single marriage migrant mothers' bottom-up resistance to the exclusionary immigration system in Hong Kong by claiming maternal citizenship through state discretion. As the article illuminates how discretion has been used as a strategic mechanism by both the state and single marriage migrant mothers to negotiate the boundaries and substance of citizenship, it offers insights into how the family becomes a critical site where citizenship is experienced, negotiated, and contested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the burgeoning scholarship on marriage migration and citizenship, extant studies have tended to approach citizenship as an individual-centred concept linked to the nation-state, thus fading the family domain into the background. Focusing on cross-border marriages within Asia, this special issue points to the importance of going beyond the state-individual nexus to conceptualise the family as a strategic site where citizenship is mediated, negotiated and experienced. In this Introduction, we draw attention to the gendered mode of familial citizenship and explicate how it operates locally and transnationally to limit the rights and agency of marriage migrants. We then illustrate how the link between marriage migration and citizenship is mediated through the family as a significant site of negotiation and contestation, and as an important lens for understanding the intergenerationality of citizenship. Collectively, this special issue calls for a rethinking of citizenship from an individual-centred proposition to a family-level concept. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While mixed marriage can act as a 'facilitator of integration' for migrants, feminist scholars have argued that in Asia, pathways to citizenship for marriage migrants are precariously ridden with negotiations around gender, ethnicity, nationality and class. In this context, the family sphere lies between the individual migrant and the state, and features as a strategic site where citizenship categories take effect on migrant lives on the one hand, and where citizenship claims are mediated, negotiated and contested on the other. Drawing on two ethnographic studies of Southeast Asian women marrying Singaporean men belonging to lower socioeconomic strata, we show how the host nation-state's hierarchical control interacts with family processes in producing marriage migrants as partial citizens with limited rights to work, residency and citizenship. We also demonstrate how marriage migrants find leverage in negotiating the paradox of being responsible affinal subjects of the family and partial citizens of the nation-state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The so-called migration and refugee 'crisis' has seen a wide-spread phenomenon across the world where people come together to build relationships to enact their visions of community, regardless of different ways in which they are included in or excluded from the citizenship regime. This special issue contributes to the studies of these political struggles to explore how such encounters of people are facilitated, negotiated, and contested, from the angle of language. In particular, we use the everyday as a lens to explore how spaces for agency are mobilised and practices of community-making take place. Drawing on a range of geographical locations as well as disciplinary backgrounds, the contributions look at multiple sites of seemingly uneventful and mundane social interactions. The authors collectively demonstrate the critical role language plays in these various everyday interactions, through which the boundaries of community, between 'us' and 'them', are contested, reproduced, and negotiated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By examining how Turkey has strategically leveraged its immigration detention practices in its relationship to the EU, this article draws scholarly attention to the neglected international dimensions of detention policy-making. While narratives of national security bolster the justification for detention of asylum seekers and other migrants, this article focuses on additional roles that Turkey calls on detention to play in its relationship with the European Union. In particular, the article discusses 'transit migration' as a policy discourse Turkey has strategically adopted and leveraged to its advantage when dealing with the EU. As form of 'premature labelling', this discourse undermines the claims of belonging that foreign nationals labelled as transit migrants have in Turkey. Thus, it provides a narrative for justifying detention expansion. This international dimension of detention policy-making must be taken into account for future discussions around how to curb or abolish the practice at the borders of Europe and elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue focuses on what a standpoint of carceral abolitionism brings to citizenship studies, with immigration detention as the key case study. The nine articles and editorial introduction probe the intersections of detention with current and potential forms of citizenship. The contributions collectively emphasize what citizenship studies also documents: similar to how the prison is a site of social control, immigration control is a nation-building site where access to permanent status and citizenship is closely filtered along racial, gender, class, ableist, and other lines of discrimination. Employing a plurality of case studies spanning North America, Europe, and Asia, and coming to the subject from a spectrum of interdisciplinary backgrounds, all contributors nonetheless foreground the recognition that deprivation of liberty is one of the most serious harms that someone can experience. Like the activists protesting police brutality around the world, the special issue contributors are thinking across the spectrum of de-funding policing, overhauling the 'criminal justice' system, eradicating prisons (penal abolitionism), and doing away with all forms of containment (carceral abolitionism). The collective findings reaffirm that neither the prison nor the detention centre are inevitable in the modern, democratic order. Abolishing all forms of immigration detention would open the door for the emergence of new visions of justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bridging prison and immigration justice is of utmost importance, and an obvious and strategic point of encounter for dialogue among activists and scholars working on these issues is immigration detention. But as penal and carceral abolitionists have taught us, we cannot tackle prison injustice without addressing broader issues in policing, criminal law and other means of coercive social control. Taking my cues from this work, I suggest that we move upstream and look at the role of immigration policing in detention and deportation. The article draws from records obtained mostly through Access to Information (ATI) and Freedom of Information (FOI) requests to map out collaboration between the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) and municipal police forces in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. In looking for ways to limit police involvement in internal border control, the article discusses strategies to promote a culture of non-collaboration with immigration enforcement and build alternative means of ensuring community safety and well-being in the spirit of police and border abolitionism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article stiches together a conceptual discussion on 'humanitarian infrastructure' with research amid Venezuelan migrants, asylum seekers, army personnel, governmental officers and envoys of humanitarian agencies responsible for implementing 'Operation Shelter' – described by the Brazilian government as a large humanitarian task force offering assistance to Venezuelans entering Brazil's province of Roraima. The article's goal is to explore the material and normative renderings of humanitarian infrastructure that enables migrants' desire to move, while also governing and making sense of Venezuelan mobility. We suggest that the bureaucratic split of Venezuelans into two temporally different migration figures – asylum seeker and humanitarian migrant – is illustrative of an ambivalence of enacting control and freedom. We explore how such ambivalence is manifested in attempts to discipline migrants' bodies and movements along built, technological and logistical humanitarian infrastructure, with consequences for engagements between border authorities and migrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several authors have contended recently that the rationality of contemporary migration control can be most adequately grasped by the notion of 'containment', conceived as the redirection of people's autonomous movement into restricted and defined pathways. Following this idea, this article proceeds in three steps. First, it proposes an analysis of the 'infrastructures' through which containment is enforced, showing the plural dimensions (regulatory, humanitarian, commercial, social) of which they are composed. Second, analysing two cases of transnational mobility towards (and across) the EU, it shows the effect of containment on people's spatial and existential trajectories. And third, through the analysis of such cases, it contends that the ultimate effect of containment is the fragmentation of citizenship into a variety of intermediate 'latitudinal' positions characterised by partial and conditional access to rights, which are functional to several forms of exploitation, including labour but also profit extraction through the operations of containment infrastructures themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to explore the multiple uses and consequences of different technologies and infrastructures in the context of migrations and how such uses and consequences inhabit and transform migrants' rights and subjectivities. It reviews relevant literature at the intersection of citizenship, critical migration studies and science and technology studies (STS), focusing in particular on the current debates underway within critical citizenship studies that examine how technologies and infrastructures shape the ability to acts of citizenship. By mobilizing insights from STS, we focus on how these political subjectivities are shaped by certain sociomaterial and epistemic practices. By introducing the notion of material citizenship politics, the article outlines a way to differentiate three different constitutive forms between technologies, infrastructures and citizenship in migrations. Technologies and infrastructures can (1) constrain acts of citizenship in migration and border regimes; (2) constitute contestation and participation over citizenship; or (3) enable and shape alternative acts of citizenship in migration and border regimes. As it provides a theoretical background to the special issue, the article also serves as the introduction to the issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes an original critique at the nexus of public art, activism (i.e. public artivism) and migration alongside the promotion of inclusive change. It pushes at transdisciplinary boundaries by integrating geohumanities scholarship on socially engaged public art whilst adopting a queer theory approach to foreground and interrogate the socially marginalised. The focus is on Schellekens & Peleman's multi-site Inflatable Refugee installation, in response to the topical migration question, and the public performances and discourses that surround the migrant figure. An in-depth critical discourse analysis drawing from an interview with the collective and key documentation critically probes into the uses of public art(ivism) to raise issues particularly around the (mis)represention of this migrant figure. The case study evinces ambiguous modus operandi of public artivist practice. Although it may promote inclusive citizenship through 'queering' identity politics and migrant hyper-visibility, the material and socio-spatial affordances (along with limitations) of public artivism do not necessarily develop its full potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Western Balkans/EU bordering and debordering practices through a borderscape method in the context of the geopolitical positionality and (de)institutionalization of migrant housing in Serbia. From this perspective, a new 'border variation' can be seen emerging after the securitarian turn, transforming the external borderscape of the EU into a space of circular movement. The article sheds light on discourses, practices and places that constitute these spaces of circular movement within the EU external borderscape. In particular, the Western Balkans borderscape is investigated with reference to Serbian migrant housingscapes emerging at the intersection of state-run camps and migrant collective self-organized squatted housing. The focus on migrant housingscapes points to the interconnectedness of camps and squats in the process of facilitating circular movement by the state, the production of mobile commons as a debordering practice, and the production of visual representations of the external border as stabilized 'scape' for the EU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analysis the socio-political form of the migrant squats, and the socio-spatial interactions they foster and generate. Drawing on empirical research, it focuses on the Athenian context where, since September 2015, political groups belonging to the anti-authoritarian and Left-libertarian movement, occupied some empty buildings to host migrants in transit through the country. From a political perspective, the squats are interpreted here as strategies of struggle to gain access to the space of the city and they also constitute instances of migrant activism and resistance to the European border regime. Moreover, migrant occupations represent practices and sites for contesting citizenship, intended as a category of political status; as such, they exceed the limits of this category and move beyond the boundaries of the nation-state, originating practices of citizenship 'from below', while at the same time they produce subjectivities that choose to 'opt out' of citizenship as a legal status. This article is situated within the contextualisation of space and autonomy. Migrant squats are looked at from the angle of the 'gaze of autonomy', since they are aimed both at contesting citizenship as an exclusionary feature, and at revindicating the activists' (both migrants and non) presence in the space of city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea of consummation as definitive of a marriage seems antiquated today. Yet, consummation operates as a central criterion in determinations of a 'genuine marriage' in Canadian immigration law. Drawing on the marriage and migration literature, theorizations of sexual citizenship, and critical multiculturalism, we explore recent judicial considerations of consummation in Canadian family sponsorship adjudications. We searched the CanLII database (a Canadian database of legislation and judicial records) for the keywords 'non-consummation' and 'genuine marriage' and identified 68 cases. Of these cases, three primary themes emerged: the use of consummation as a 'technology of love' – a requirement for assessing the authenticity of the spousal relationship and hence the worthiness of sponsorship; the discursive construction of sexual and gendered norms in expectations around marital intimacy, and the articulation of liberal tolerance and the cultural other in the assessments of genuine marriages among primarily racialized Canadians or permanent residents and their foreign spouses. We challenge these discursive narratives and conclude by arguing that instead of consummation as the basis for genuine marriage, the Law Commission of Canada's 'close personal relationship' model is a better way to assess the 'genuineness' of relationships for determining Canadian citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses academic literature on acts of citizenship and performative citizenship to investigate the contestation, protest, and resistance actions carried out by the Marea Granate collective in defence of the citizenship rights of Spanish citizens living abroad. Marea Granate (Maroon Wave) is a transnational network of young Spanish emigrants that emerged in 2013 as a result of the recent widespread emigration provoked by the economic crisis and austerity politics in Spain. Based on their shared identity as economic exiles and demanding the right to participate in Spanish political life to change the conditions that led them to emigrate, the members of this organization have been carrying out innovative, creative citizenship acts that are breaking conventions and causing ruptures in the Spanish citizenship regime. These 'transformative acts of recovering', the term used to refer to Marea Granate's demands and struggles for citizenship, have proven to be capable of being a driving force for change and also reveal the fluid and contested nature of citizenship in the contexts of austerity and emigration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In line with studies of dual citizenship that point to the need for in-depth understanding of the reasoning behind this legislative change, this study provides an analysis of the discourse that lawmakers parlayed during the debate that resulted in the passage of the Philippine citizenship retention and reacquisition law in 2003. Because of the constitutional prohibition against dual allegiance, legislators constructed a narrative with emotive force to justify emigration as well as naturalization in the destination, the latter act portrayed as devoid of political love that Filipinos supposedly reserve for the homeland. Emblematic of affective citizenship even while the state actually instrumentalized it, the passage of the law affirmed a traditional notion of exclusive singular citizenship, while concomitantly providing indirect tolerance of dual, nonexclusive citizenship for conationals overseas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I explore the memory narratives of political migrants who fled the Greek junta in the 1960s and 1970s and established an anti-dictatorship movement in Toronto, Canada. Drawing from recent contributions in cultural sociology, I track the political genealogies that emerge in accounts and highlight the evaluative grammars that underpin both representations of the past and understandings of the contemporary economic crisis in Greece. In doing so, I make a case for approaching diasporic memory as a form of boundary work. I argue that former activists mobilize a complex set of moral criteria when drawing lines between themselves and others and that these portrayals have no resemblance to representations of this group in the academic literature. This article further demonstrates the need for ethnographically thick treatments of diasporic memory practices as well as the contributions gained by placing theories of (e)valuation in dialog with memory studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Walters developed the concept of domopolitics to refer to the ways in which the securitisation of migration contributes to the construction of the UK as a ‘national home’. Domopolitical policies and discourses produce the UK as the ‘national home’ of ‘neoliberal citizens’; they thus serve as tools of neoliberal governmentality, disciplining both citizens and migrants into displaying qualities associated with neoliberal citizenship, especially economic productivity. However, the concept of ‘home’ has a particular genealogy within liberal discourses of citizenship. As Pateman contends, the political ‘public’ sphere of liberal citizenship is constructed in opposition to an apolitical ‘private’ sphere. The public sphere has been coded as the domain of men, while women have been relegated to the private ‘home’. Consequently, women have been deemed responsible for the reproduction of both the private, and the ‘national’ home, a construction which has persisted under neoliberalism. While often superficially gender-neutral, domopolitics actually relies upon, and reinforces, these gendered understandings of neoliberal citizenship. Domopolitical policies and discourses construct migrant women’s reproductive practices as a legitimate and necessary site of state intervention, disciplining migrant women to ensure they ‘correctly’ reproduce the neoliberal ‘national home.’ [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the case of the Barcelona Anti-Rumour Network, an initiative promoted by the City Council and social organizations, in order to deal with the uncontrolled proliferation of rumours, prejudices and stereotypes about immigration. Rumours convey false information with the aim of exploiting the fears of citizens often disconcerted in the face of the changes brought about the arrival of a considerable number of foreign immigrants. The article analyses, through policy analysis and in-depth interviews, the role of communication in immigration policies and the concept of citizenship that exists behind this strategy. Such policies can run the risk of focusing too much on the denial of rumours rather than on the affirmation of rights, as this may question the eligibility of the immigrant population to obtain the status of citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]