Short Abstract

This panel explores material citizenship politics along infrastructures and technologies against the background of revived nationalisms, anti-migration and trends towards authoritarianism and by including all types of acts of citizenship and relations with formal citizenship.

Description

The productive convergence of critical migration studies, critical citizenship studies, and STS, has increasingly shed light on the changing techno-politics of nation states and their subjects. Emerging technologies and infrastructures are reshaping the socio-material assemblages of identity systems, (e-)governance, migration and border control, and asylum procedures while also transforming the core practices of citizenship.

Citizenship as a legal status granted by nation states and “cast in the language of inclusion, belonging, and universalism” (Isin & Turner, 2002, p. 3) has historically excluded social groups from rights and continues to do so. Critical citizenship studies reorient citizenship toward acts through which rights are claimed – moments of rupture through which subjectivities of rights-bearing people emerge in the first place. Combined with STS, the material citizenship politics concept was developed to describe how infrastructures and technologies constrain or enable how migrants subjectivities are constituted through rights claims (Amelung et al., 2020).

This panel deepens the analytical potential of the material citizenship politics concept in two ways. First, by confronting it with recent political changes: How can it be understood against the background of revived nationalisms, anti-migration and trends towards authoritarianism, and increasingly contentious civil rights? Second, by expanding the definition to include all acts of citizenship (of migrants, stateless persons, and de jure citizens): How can material citizenship politics describe aspects and relations with formal citizenship and include non-human agency?

How can we capture socio-materiality without losing political critique, and learn from other theoretical frameworks and debates?

We invite contributions that address material citizenship politics of

- Performative Citizenship, Rights Claims, Citizenship as Practice

- State control (Surveillance, Tracking, Databases, Biometrics, AI)

- Legislative Processes (EU and National formulation of Laws and Directives)

- (Digital) Identification, Registration, Authentication,

- Asylum, Detention, Deportation

- (Ir)regularity and (Il)legality

- Civil Registration and Vital Statistics, Birth and Death Registration

- (Data) Activism and Contestation

Propose paper