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Paper short abstract

This article advances a spatial reconceptualization of citizenship, arguing that space is constitutive of citizenship practices. Drawing on long-term research on migrant-led SMOs in Italy and Germany, it applies Lefebvre’s triadic framework to analyze lived, conceived, and perceived space.

Paper long abstract

This article contributes to sociological and anthropological debates on social movements by advancing a spatial reconceptualization of Isin’s (2008) notion of “acts of citizenship.” For anthropology in particular, this concept is valuable insofar as it (a) moves beyond understandings of citizenship confined to formal public spheres – spheres that many social groups cannot materially access – and (b) foregrounds political subjects historically marginalized and ideologically excluded from dominant definitions of citizenship, such as racialized individuals and migrants’ descendants. Drawing on ten years of empirical research on the political practices of two social movement umbrella organizations (SMOs) composed of racialized activists, the article demonstrates, however, that the role of space in shaping citizenship practices remains insufficiently theorized in Isin’s framework. This long-term engagement reveals that spatial conditions are not merely contextual but constitutive of how citizenship is enacted, claimed, and contested. The analysis shows that focusing exclusively on “acts of citizenship” risks obscuring the complex entanglement of emotional, material, and ideological dimensions that structure activists’ engagements. I therefore argue for the necessity of a spatial lens, premised on the assumption that political interventions never occur outside their material, symbolic, and experiential spatial conditions. To operationalize this perspective, the article mobilizes Lefebvre’s (1991) triadic framework of perceived, conceived, and lived space. This approach enables a more precise analysis of citizenship practices by accounting for material infrastructures of everyday environments, the collectively produced meanings attached to them, and the ways these spatial configurations are subjectively lived and experienced by activists.