(En)gendering the Political: Citizenship from marginal spaces

What is the relationship between being political and citizenship? What might it mean to be marginalised through both the practices and knowledge of citizenship? What might citizenship look like from a position of social, political and cultural exclusion? This book responds to these questions by treating marginalisation as a political process and position. It explores how different lives, experiences and forms of political action might be engendered when subjects are excluded, made vulnerable and invisible from contemporary forms of citizenship. It aims to contribute to the growing body of literature on the politics of resistance by investigating how complex forms of marginality are not only produced by dominant forms of citizenship but also actively challenge them. Modernist approaches to politics tend to see the citizen as the ideal type of political agent and citizenship as the zenith of struggles over rights, representation and belonging. This edited volume challenges this approach to political subjectivity by showing how political acts work for but also against/beyond citizenship claims, towards different orientations and as ‘acts’ of (non)citizen. By bringing together diverse theoretical and empirical contributions, and exploring the emergent politics of marginalised subjects, this collection challenges how we think about citizenship and opens up space for alternative imaginaries of political action and belonging. This book was originally published as a special issue of Citizenship Studies.

Table of Contents:
1. Introduction: (En)gendering the political: Citizenship from marginal spaces Joe Turner 2. Unfamiliar acts of citizenship: enacting citizenship in vernacular music and language from the space of marginalised intergenerational migration Aoileann Ní Mhurchú 3. Contestations in death – the role of grief in migration struggles Maurice Stierl 4. Troubling the exclusive privileges of citizenship: mobile solidarities, asylum seekers, and the right to work Lucy Mayblin 5. Governing the domestic space of the traveller in the UK: ‘family’, ‘home’ and the struggle over Dale Farm Joe Turner 6. Between safety and vulnerability: the exiled other of international relations Amanda Russell Beattie 7. Ethiopianism, Englishness, Britishness: struggles over imperial belonging Robbie Shilliam 8. Beyond the nation state: the role of local and pan-national identities in defining post-colonial African citizenship Gemma Bird

About the Author :
Joe B. Turner is a Research Fellow in International Migration in the Department of Politics at the University of Sheffield, UK. He is interested in the politics of citizenship and how internal/external borders emerge and are governed in (post)colonial states such as the UK. His work lies at the cross-section of IR, political sociology and historiography. Joe has previously published work in journals such as British Journal of Politics and International Relations and Citizenship Studies.