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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 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).