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In 2006, the committee that developed the National Health Policy for the Black Population (NHPBP) chose sickle cell disease as their “flag to demand health rights.” The drafting of this policy was official recognition from the Ministry of Health for racial differences of its citizens in order to address certain inequalities in the form of racial health reparations. Through an ethnographic study which consisted of participant observation, life-story and semi-structured interviews, and surveys in the urban centers of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Salvador, Belo Horizonte, and Brasília between November 2013 and November 2014, I introduce a new conceptual approach called biocultural citizenship. It is a flexible mode of enacting belonging that varies depending on disease status, skin color, social class, recognition of African lineage, and other identifiers. Using empirical evidence, this article explores how people living with sickle cell disease (SCD), civil society, and the Brazilian government—at state and federal levels—have contributed to the discourse on SCD as a “black” disease, despite a prevailing cultural ideology of racial mixture. Specifically, I demonstrate that the SCD movement strategically uses Blackness to make claims for health rights. Biocultural citizenship is dependent on the idea of biological and cultural difference that is coproduced by the State and Afro-Brazilian citizens. The use of biology to help legitimate cultural claims, especially in the Black Atlantic, contributes a new and distinct way to think about how race and skin color are used as tools of agency for diasporic communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the meaning of pledging state and national allegiance at a multiethnic public school in Texas. An analysis of students’ metapragmatic discourses about various ‘styles of citizenship’ illustrates how female ‘preps’ typically viewed the Pledge as a seamless part of their white, middle-class, neoliberal lifestyles, thus positioning themselves, in accordance with institutional definition, as lawful and patriotic citizens. Yet institutional conflations of patriotic , lawful , and neoliberal citizenship styles were challenged by non-preps, who valued alternative transnational , dissenting , and cool styles of political membership. At the same time, hegemonic modes of belonging were not wholly dismantled; alternative citizenship styles sometimes complemented, rather than conflicted with, students’ patriotic stances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses discourse among French teenagers of pan-immigrant, peripheral, and specifically southern descent that evokes the widely circulating spatial concept called le bled, a French word of Arabic origin. Drawing upon theories of cultural citizenship, this paper explores the connections that teens broker through le bled in two, divergent discourses that link French citizenship with modernity and race. The first discourse is one that conceptualizes le bled as less modern than France, which is ultimately a racially exclusive model of French citizenship because it typically treats le bled as a racialized and inferior place. The second discourse involves the conceptualization of France as a modern and racially inclusive place, seeking to assimilate people from various places (even though in reality, many of these policies that claim inclusiveness are exclusive). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]