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- Convenors:
-
Martin Roy
(Laboratoire d'anthropologie politique (LAP-EHESS-CNRS), Joint PhD EHESS (Paris) - University of Ottawa)
Elena Apostoli Cappello (ULB Universié Libre de Bruxelles)
Piotr Goldstein (German Centre for Integration and Migration Research (DeZIM), Berlin)
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- Chair:
-
Catherine Neveu
(IIAC (CNRS-EHESS))
- Formats:
- Panel
- Mode:
- Face-to-face
- Sessions:
- Thursday 25 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Madrid
Short Abstract:
This panel, proposed by AESA network ''Anthropology and Social Movements'', is part of an ongoing discussion about how a political anthropology perspective on citizenship can provide new ways of practicing anthropology without losing the politic(s) of the fieldwork when looking for ''alternatives''.
Long Abstract:
From an anthropological perspective, the use of ‘‘citizenship’’ as an analytical tool serves a critical purpose: looking for alternative practices of citizenship in order to notice and better understand ongoing global ‘‘crisis’’ from a local and political perspective and unravel the normative knots of our own way of understanding citizenship processes. Such a task is often put to work to address the ‘‘politics of future(s)’’ through the account of the ‘‘political possibilities’’ woven into alternative practices of citizenship. Yet, what looking for such ‘‘alternatives’’ does to anthropology as a craft?
Lately, many anthropologists of social movements have been using Engin Isin’s notion of “acts of citizenship” in order to grasp such alternatives. Those uses rest on varying implicit set of normative rules – mainly conflicting with Isin’s theory (Roy and Neveu 2023) – deriving from normative shifts rarely discussed by anthropologists. Only by addressing these shifts can we critically engage with the politic(s) of anthropology, understood as a craft in the making.
A political anthropology perspective would suggest these shifts should be justified by the politic(s) of the fieldwork. Not doing so, we risk reducing our field to our own desire of extracting ‘‘alternative(s)’’ and losing the very meanings in which the ‘‘crisis’’ being dealt with in a ''citizenshiply'' manner on the field. We would suggest that the category of ‘‘ordinariness’’ (Neveu 2015) might play as a significative analytical tool to prevent such a reduction.
We expect proposals to question the normativities anthropologists have about citizenship when looking for ''alternatives''.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 25 July, 2024, -Kathleen Coll (University of San Francisco (USFCA))
Paper short abstract:
This paper considers collaborative research and testimonio as key methodological and epistemological tools for community organizers and academic researchers analyzing citizenship, violence, and transformation in immigrant women’s lives and political subjectivity in the San Francisco Bay Area, USA.
Paper long abstract:
This paper considers collaborative research and testimonio as key methodological and epistemological tools for community organizers and research on citizenship, violence, and transformation in immigrant women’s lives and politics. Mujeres Unidas y Activas (MUA) is an immigrant women-led grassroots organization in the San Francisco Bay Area (California, USA) with over thirty years of history working with survivors of multiple forms of structural violence including racism, xenophobia, economic and gender-based violence. In early 2020, a research team co-led by community leaders and academics began a multiyear study to document and analyze MUA’s approach to political engagement and transformation. Women come to MUA seeking different forms of assistance and finding peer support and critical analytic tools to understand and address the impact of violence in their lives. Sharing testimonios within the group builds trusting relationships, collective knowledge and belonging. Public testimonios in turn become citizenship acts that connect personal healing with political engagement and policy advocacy. Key organizational values of mutuality and care, including dialogue and testimonio, guided the research team’s practices as well. Testimonio and reflective dialogue helped make team meetings opportunities for healing and support for the MUA staff carrying out the research alongside their political work during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the realities of research partnerships that spanned multiple lines of inequality and privilege were also complex, uncomfortable and laborious, reflecting some of the everyday dynamics of citizenship we sought to study democratically and collaboratively.
Non-presenting coauthors: Juana Flores (Mujeres Unidas y Activas), Alison K. Cohen (University of California, San Francisco), Maria Jimenez (Mujeres Unidas y Activas), and Gabriela L. Ruelas (University of San Francisco, California).
Catherine Conlon (Trinity College Dublin) Kate Antosik-Parsons (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland) Fiona Bloomer (Ulster University) Emma Campbell (Ulster University)
Paper short abstract:
This study explores how abortion seekers, providers and advocates on the island of Ireland activate newly legalized abortion care, mobilising new formations of doing citizen while undoing longstanding formations of reproducing bodies/re-producing Irishness.
Paper long abstract:
Until 2019, abortion was illegal, with little exception, on both parts of the island of Ireland with the laws dating from the Offences Against the Person Act (1861), a vestige of British colonial law. However, in each country, very different approaches changed the law. In the Republic of Ireland, the process involved a Citizens Assembly, a government committee and a referendum of all citizens. In Northern Ireland, as the Northern Ireland Assembly was suspended, the UK government, based in Westminster, introduced new legislation. This study explores how these different processes are shaping how abortion seekers, providers and advocates activate newly legalized abortion care; mobilizing new formations of doing citizen while undoing longstanding formations of reproducing bodies/re-producing Irishness. Legalising abortion on the island of Ireland entails mobilising, enacting and doing reproductive citizenship towards a new ordinary. An ordinary Irish abortion. The paper sketches out conceptual frameworks we are plugging in to fieldwork including narrations of abortion and artistic interventions effecting doing/undoing new and old formations of reproductive citizenship.
Martijn Koster (Wageningen University)
Paper short abstract:
Political anthropology often conceptualises the position of marginalised urban residents vis-à-vis the state as non-standard or non-fully-fledged citizenship. This paper, instead, goes beyond citizenship and approaches the interactions between residents and the state as a politics of the periphery.
Paper long abstract:
The ways in which residents of urban peripheries position themselves in relation to the state is often conceptualised as non-standard or non-fully-fledged citizenship, for example as incomplete, half, pseudo, informal, uncertain, vulnerable, insurgent, transgressive, or contentious citizenship. While these residents are marginalised by the state, theorisations of their politics still centre upon the state and its social contract. However, for many marginalised urban residents, the political language of citizenship does not offer a solution to their daily predicament. Moreover, the notion of citizenship does not resonate with their experiences and understandings of their relationship with the state. In doing so, existing theories risk contributing to epistemic injustice as they conceptualise resident-state relations as deviating from or even ‘less than’ the state and its citizenship regime. Instead, I set out to reconceptualise periphery-state interactions from the vantage point of the periphery. I approach the variety of practices inherent in the interactions between marginalised residents and the state as a politics of the periphery, a diverse politics in its own right and on its own terms that emerges from local modes of agency. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in low-income neighbourhoods in Recife, Brazil, I use emic political and moral notions to understand residents' relationship to the state beyond citizenship. Finally, I consider the impact this may have on political anthropology's focus on citizenship.
Miguel Diaz-Barriga (University of Richmond) Margaret Dorsey (University of Richmond)
Paper short abstract:
The Mexican descent population of South Texas thread border security both at checkpoints and in everyday life. The citizenship of border residents is unwound by state surveillance and diminished rights. Under these circumstances what does it mean to explore alternative citizenship practices?
Paper long abstract:
Social movement scholarship has focused on alternative expressions of citizenship as a means for understanding and generating social change. This search for alternatives, as a mode of ethnographic research, has led to an overemphasis on novel grassroots practices while overlooking ordinary expressions of citizenship and power. In this paper, we explore how state agents constantly question the citizenship of residents on the U.S. Mexican border and how legislators have limited the rights of border citizens. For one, electronic surveillance in the U.S.-Mexican borderlands link data that drones, ground sensors, automated license plate readers, and video surveillance gather along the international border with data collected at the interior checkpoints to create a surveillance net extending up to 100 miles inside the United States. For another, this surveillance net materializes at checkpoints through the presence of surveillance technologies and armed agents. In recent years, personnel and technology at interior border patrol checkpoints (well within the United States) have mushroomed while the rights of U.S. citizens living on the border, especially with regard to search and seizure, have been curtailed. We theorize this tense process of passing through checkpoints and security technology as threading and interpret threading with multiple meanings: to make one’s way cautiously and something that suggests the process of being forged, as in the threading of a bolt or a nut. This winding and unwinding of citizenship practices forms a part of the ordinary experiences of border residents and forms a basis, we argue, for reimagining the relationships between citizens and the state.
Veronica Pastorino (University of Bologna, Radboud University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper aims to reflect on the normativity behind the application of Isin's "acts of citizenship" and its connection to the Lefebvrian concept of the "droit à la ville" through the examples of two social movements organizations composed of people with a migratory background.
Paper long abstract:
Isin’s understanding of citizenship as a set of practices (Isin/Wood 1999) is used as a critical interpretative tool within my current research on two social movements organizations composed of people with migratory backgrounds: the National Coordination of New Italian Generations (CoNNGI) and the New German Organizations (ndo). The concept plays in the research a central role not only because it allows framing as “acts of citizenship” the discursive and not discursive collective practices implemented by the actors of CoNNGI and ndo independently from their formal status as citizens but also because it enables the analysis of these practices as detached from the spatial level taken into consideration, therefore allowing a comparison between acts of citizenship beyond the statal borders in which they are enacted. Finally, it enables to engage not only with the several and partially overlapping meanings of citizenship and their actualizations (Isin/Nyers 2014) but also with the relationship between citizenship practices and democracy. In particular, the paper shows how Isin’s concept is strictly connected to the Lefebvrian droit à la ville (Lefebvre 2014) that emphasizes a conception of citizenship that is not - or not only - limited to formal legal recognition, but it reveals the importance of (both ideological and physical) space and the possibility of participation and access to it. The paper will, therefore, discuss how the concept of “acts of citizenship” can be a valid alternative to a concept of citizenship linked to the nation-state's historical and spatial dimension.
Tamara Hernández (Utrecht University)
Paper short abstract:
This presentation delves into what it means to be political in the context of Chile through the eyes of migrant activists. Drawing from ethnographic work, I analyze their belonging narratives and citizenship claims; sometimes as political subjectivity, others understood as political commitment.
Paper long abstract:
This presentation explores the political landscape in Chile, focusing on migrant activists. Based on ethnographic research with over 12 migrant organizations across Chile, I examine their narratives of belonging and citizenship claims. The fact that the notion of citizenship was vigorously sustained by formally non-citizens was interesting to me and led me to ask, as a starting point, what it meant for them to use this notion.
Migration challenges democratic societies to address inclusivity, xenophobia, and racism. This highlights the need for policies balancing democratic principles with globalization realities. Understanding migrants' defiance against a discriminatory society involves considering the political order, specifically Chile's transition to democracy and its impact on social movements.
The political formation within migrant organizations raises questions about the meaning of citizenship for them and its implications for democratization in Chile.
This papers responds to the importance of portraying the rich variety of the citizenship notions encountered, from political subjectivity to commitment, often intertwined with dignity and the pursuit of a more dignified life. Ordinary works of care, mutual assitance and festive protests within these organizations serve as new arenas of political contention and belonging; street, carnival and community centres serve as a spaces where an alternative narrative and citizenship for those excluded from the national narrative in contemporary Chile.
Rosa Burc (German Center for Migration and Integration Research (DeZIM, Berlin) and Center on Social Movement Studies (COSMOS, Florence))
Paper short abstract:
This paper investigates Kurdish mobilization, focusing on emotions, affect, societal transformation. It explores the concept of society-building as an alternative mode of citizenship. The anthropological study examines alternative modes of representation and belonging amid persistent state violence
Paper long abstract:
Kurdish revolutionary mobilization in the SWANA demonstrates a strong case to understand the role of emotions, affective legacies, and representations in not only how it impacts the persistence of mobilizations amid multi-scalar state violence in the region’s complex (geo)political landscape, but also how movement strategies are developed, practiced, and become affective legacies themselves. This paper examines the Kurdish struggle for societal transformation and submits that emotions and affect are pivotal within emancipatory movements when it comes to consolidating the idea that, even in the face of systematic and enduring state violence, the revolutionary struggle cannot be defeated. Based on extensive empirical material, I argue (1) the contemporary Kurdish movement’s strategy of centring the motivational frame of mobilization around the aspect of society-building, meaning the nurturing of social ties across diverse ethnic and religious groups, as well as genders has accelerated a transformative process that emancipates from the traditionally ascribed dominance of the state. Within this context, I show, how (2) spaces of radical representations are created, in which the processes of recognizing each other’s unique identities and positionalities become potent modes of survivance against state violence, which has persistently perpetuated a lasting emotion among Kurdish populations of being subjects of non-belonging, non-recognition and non-protection. Unlike common perspectives driven by methodological nationalism, which are confined within the physical and epistemic boundaries of statehood, this paper demonstrates how an inward-looking revolutionary process of transregional society-building has culminated in the reconstruction and rebuilding of social relations, eventually helping survivors of violence regain agency.
Adam Veng (University of Copenhagen)
Paper short abstract:
Zones of friction (Tsing 2005) between social movements and political institutions are where alter-politics of citizenship (Hage 2015) are rendered proportional (Jimenez 2007) and turned into policy. They are sites of importance if anthropologists ought to engage with how alternatives are co-opted.
Paper long abstract:
In contemporary anthropological discourse, “citizenship” is understood not as a defined “status”, but as a “practice”: an “act” of rupture with the current order (Isin 2008), emerging through “political projects” (Clark et al 2014) remaining always “unfinished” and “in the making” (Balibar 2001). In this view, mobilizations of citizenship imply the alter-politics of “finding a possibility of a different life outside a given order of things” (Hage 2013:63), and the expressions and need for such possibilities are to be studied from the ‘ordinariness’ of such civic engagement (Neveu 2015, Das 2007). While agreeing with this approach, I approach the question of “studying up” (Nader 1972) and scaling the social and political life and assemblies of alter-political possibilities: In what political assemblages are they immersed, through which negotiations are unfinished possibilities turned into stable policy, by whom and with which consequences?
Built on a case study of political mobilizations by residents in the Danish social housing sector, examined through the methodological tradition of situational analysis of the Manchester School (Kapferer 2010, Zigon 2014), I propose to study the events where the ordinary organization of citizenship collide and mutate in assemblies with a given political order. Paying attention to the friction in such processes, and the negotiations of proportionalities of the possible (Jimenez 2007) in a neoliberal context, might allow anthropologist to engage in timely debates of the consequences of co-optation of alter-politics in times of ‘soft’ (Thrift 1997) and ‘cannibal’ capitalism (Fraser 2022).
Theodoros Kouros (Cyprus University of Technology)
Paper short abstract:
This study explores "tactical citizenship" in Cyprus, where citizens adapt to a flawed state through informal strategies and social networks, redefining traditional citizenship beyond formal rights and duties. It uses "multicontextual ethnography" to analyze these dynamics in various social spaces.
Paper long abstract:
This paper delves into the concept of tactical citizenship as it unfolds in Limassol, Cyprus, exploring how citizens navigate their relationship with a state perceived as arbitrary, corrupt, inefficient, and unfair. Through the lens of “tactical citizenship,” I examine the ways citizens adapt and respond to the challenges posed by their everyday interactions with street-level bureaucracy. The concept is anchored in the premise that each encounter with the state—whether casual or confrontational—serves as a moment of political learning, shaping citizens' expectations and perceptions. The study breaks new methodological ground with its "multicontextual ethnography," investigating the phenomenon across diverse social spaces: private, public, bureaucratic, and commercial. This approach provides a rich, nuanced understanding of citizens' tactics to compensate for the state's shortcomings. These tactics include the private and informal provision of services that should be publicly and formally supplied, appropriation of public spaces, leveraging cultural intimacy, utilizing social networks, adopting slantwise lifestyles, and employing rhetorics of conformity. Tactical citizenship is proposed as a novel term to capture dynamic, everyday practices, contrasting with traditional notions of citizenship defined by formal rights and duties. This paper argues that these tactical encounters with the everyday state are not just survival strategies but constitute a distinct form of citizenship deeply embedded in the social fabric of the society of the Republic of Cyprus. Through this exploration, the study offers a rethinking of citizenship in contexts of state inefficiency and societal distrust, shedding light on the complex interplay between the citizens and the state in Limassol.
Roxana Bucata (Central European University)
Paper short abstract:
Citizen-led projects aimed at taking control of energy production are growing in numbers. Ethnographic work conducted in France with an energy cooperative's staff and members shows how energy alternatives are embedded in a global capitalist society that incorporates them into the logic of profit.
Paper long abstract:
Community energy is a fast-spreading global movement of citizen-led projects aimed at taking control of energy production and distribution. Both an environmental project that promotes clean energy and a political-economic shift towards a collective type of ownership and governance, community energy has various expressions: from a small group of neighbors who produce and consume their own renewable energy to the re-municipalization of energy production. In my paper, I focus on an energy cooperative and the social relations engendered by the production, distribution, and consumption of renewable energy in a system designed and controlled by citizens. Enercoop Midi-Pyrénées (Toulouse, France) is a cooperative founded by 15 citizens and counts more than 4,000 members who contribute to building and operating solar parks. Apart from its mission to decarbonize the energy system by producing green energy, the cooperative also aims to create a community of “energy-citizens”, people who take an active role in changing the profit-centered energy system through collective ownership and decision-making, ethical consumption, financial investment in solar parks, and volunteer work. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2023 with Enercoop Midi-Pyrenees staff and members, I argue that while the cooperative claims to represent an alternative to the fossil fuel-based, centralized, capitalist energy system, the cooperative and its members are embedded in a global capitalist society which incorporates and subjects this alternative to the logic of profit.