Backdoor Broadcasting Company

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Event Date: 7 February
Christodoulou Meeting Room 11
Walton Hall campus
Open University,
Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA

Opening the Boundaries of Citizenship

The conference addresses the performative and creative side of social movements, practices of identity negotiation and political participation questioning the meaning of citizenship. Which actors, sites and rights are constituted in contemporary power struggles redefining ‘the political’? Which neo-colonial or neo-imperial nodes emerge from the analysis of issues such as democracy or secularism? Under this light, how is the language of law challenged and remoulded?

Panel 20: New Cartographies of Citizenship

Dr Kim Rygiel (Wilfrid Laurier University) – Camp cartographies: Forging transgressive citizenship in transit

The proliferation of migrant and refugee camps, in which increasing numbers of people now live, challenges the insistence within international relations as a discipline in its privileging of the state, and to a lesser extent the city, as the designated site of politics and citizenship. This paper begins by exploring the question of the relationship of the camp to the citizen. How do camp spaces enable the reproduction of spaces of “normal politics” and the constitution of the citizen in relation to sedentarism, defined through the legalized residence on state territory? Given that increasing numbers of people find themselves living in space of the “camp” (migrant and refugee camps, detention centres, shanty towns etc.), can we think about camp spaces as proto-types of other political spaces and different forms of citizenship? Rather than situate the camp, as Agamben does, as a space of exceptionality outside and separate from the space of the citizen, this paper argues for the need to investigate the camp through a politics of citizenship as a political, economic and social space that is productive of political subjects and forms of citizen-subjectivity. One way in which the camp emerges as a site of the political and productive of transient and potentially transgressive forms of citizenship is as a space that provides encounters with difference, leading to the forging of social relations that can be understood collectively as generating a “politics of connectivity” (Ash 2004). This paper explores this idea by looking at how artists, activists and migrants use the camp as a site of building new radical cartographies in order to politicize migrant rights and political subjectivities. Such cartographies juxtapose representations of various forms of mobility (people, transport, and technological) from Africa to Europe with spaces of containment, as represented in detention and migrant camps, and juxtapose control of mobility with migrant perspectives of using mobility as a means of survival and a resource of connectivity in building transnational communities that potentially transgress territorial and communal borders.

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______

Event Date: 7 February
Christodoulou Meeting Room 11
Walton Hall campus
Open University,
Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA

Opening the Boundaries of Citizenship

The conference addresses the performative and creative side of social movements, practices of identity negotiation and political participation questioning the meaning of citizenship. Which actors, sites and rights are constituted in contemporary power struggles redefining ‘the political’? Which neo-colonial or neo-imperial nodes emerge from the analysis of issues such as democracy or secularism? Under this light, how is the language of law challenged and remoulded?

Panel 20: New Cartographies of Citizenship

Dr Nacira Guénif-Souilamas (University Paris-Nord/13) – Blurred citizens. An orientalist mapping of other beings, belongings and becomings

The question as to whether young people of colonial and immigrant descent may and/or should be/become, for example, French is irrelevant, as many of them already are and all of them are always-already French, for they are born within or connected to the former borders of colonial France. Such paradoxical citizenship is subsequent to the colonial rule morphed into a new imperial order. According to this assumption, sovereignty does no more follow national borders but rather breathes through embodied boundaries. This reticular and rhizome-like configuration requires unusual ways of qualification. Some sort of proofreading, dedicated to human beings under condition of recognition, becomes a mandatory checkpoint. Each and every potential alien-citizen (i.e. citizen of a new (human)kind and/or of colonial descent) has features and attributes bound to undergo a random test, along a vast range of pixelized modes. Starting with birthplace, whitewashed color skin, wrist bones size, face visibility, fashionable black dress code, race profiling and body search, undocumented narratives, fluent accent-free idiomatic expression, sexual availability.

In order to understand the rules of this endless set of tests, one has to connect the dots left after each completion, whether successful or failed. One thus sees a map of various modes of belonging and their vicissitudes appear before one’s eyes. Yet the political translation of this set of tests is reversible, either leading to recognition or to dismissal: signs of “integration” may highlight a dangerous proximity potentially preceding an invasion; conversely signs of “lack of integration” point at the same threat. Just as resemblance is integral to Orientalism, in all the dangerous encounters it promises and calls for, blurred citizenship is coextensive to new national perimeters. Become unpredictable and therefore under suspicion, the Other citizens are caught in the web of a refreshed Orientalist predicament. Since they no longer sit on national borders but rather travel through bodily experiments, these blurred citizens relocate themselves. Their escape from the limits and limitations comprised in this citizenry of another kind is likely and challenging, expected and dubious. In any case this citizenry idiosyncrasy is political because it points at the long-term invisible race and gender fault lines it was build upon and the class divides it has triggered and lived with.

Race and ethnicity, class and gender provide us with combined observation lenses to explore a Europe made stranger to oneself. Along this process, citizenry is metamorphosed. Its old components are reworked and crafted so that nationality becomes irrelevant, homeland exchangeable, belonging plastic, and embodiment replicable and replaceable. How then does this new political entity, still called citizen, spell itself?, what does it rely on, if ever, to stand by itself?, what kind of bounds and ties does it choose and/or comply with? These are some of the questions I suggest to document and unfold through iconic and discursive items chosen from the provincialized Europe visual and written archive. Eventually, they may lead to another set of questions: why citizenship is still desirable and worth fighting for? What precious privilege, intrinsic quality, attached to it, makes it so invaluable and unquestionable? A close look at southern Arab blurred borders may then prove useful.

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Event Date: 7 February

Christodoulou Meeting Room 11

Walton Hall campus

Open University,

Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA

Opening the Boundaries of Citizenship

The conference addresses the performative and creative side of social movements, practices of identity negotiation and political participation questioning the meaning of citizenship. Which actors, sites and rights are constituted in contemporary power struggles redefining ‘the political’? Which neo-colonial or neo-imperial nodes emerge from the analysis of issues such as democracy or secularism? Under this light, how is the language of law challenged and remoulded?

Panel 20: New Cartographies of Citizenship

Dr Brenna Bhandar (Queen Mary University London) – Metamorphic property: Practices of ownership in Palestine

In Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing, Catherine Malabou refers to the transformational masks described by Claude Lévi-Strauss in The Way of the Masks as a material metaphor for the recombinant nature of thought itself (pp2-3). “[R]ather than disguising a face, the masks reveal the secret connection between formal unity and articulation, between the completeness of form and the possibility of its dislocation.” One half of a mask is folded back and replaced with another, producing a potentially infinite variety of forms. Malabou engages this material metaphor in order to illustrate the force and dynamic of circulation that animates the plastic nature of thought. That is to say, the relations between different forms of thought (deconstruction, destruction, dialectics) are enlivened by the circulation of different threads and traits of each of these forms, through each other. Thought thus exhibits an inherent mobility. Forms (of bodies, of thought) are open (and vulnerable) to collapse, to contamination, to explosion. Plasticity presents an immensely powerful way of thinking about forms of knowledge and ways of being that are not so much intimately connected to one another as continually in a mobile process of re-constitution. Shifting from forms of thought to knowledge, I consider the forms of knowledge that produce property ownership, in the legal laboratory of the colonial settler context of Israel/Palestine. I reflect on how ownership, comprised of different forms of knowledge (political, economic, anthropological), different ways of being, and practices of control, use, appropriation and dispossession, and movement, exhibits a plastic quality. I conclude the paper with considering how, insofar as plasticity has the capacity to explode form, there may also lie in the recombinant nature of ownership, the capacity to reconfigure practices of ownership altogether. What if private property relations were bent out of shape, beyond recognition? What might the deconstruction and implosion of property ownership look like?

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______

Event Date: 7 February
Christodoulou Meeting Room 11
Walton Hall campus
Open University,
Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA

Opening the Boundaries of Citizenship

The conference addresses the performative and creative side of social movements, practices of identity negotiation and political participation questioning the meaning of citizenship. Which actors, sites and rights are constituted in contemporary power struggles redefining ‘the political’? Which neo-colonial or neo-imperial nodes emerge from the analysis of issues such as democracy or secularism? Under this light, how is the language of law challenged and remoulded?

Panel 19: Colonial Legacies and Migration

Catherine Neveu (LAIOS – IIAC) – Rescuing citizenship from its theories: Anthropological perspectives

In their call for papers, the Conference organizers stress the fact that in most of the recent debates on citizenship, “the question over the Euro-American assumptions for conceiving citizenship remained out of scope”.
Indeed such assumptions exist, and they do have effects as to the ways citizenship is conceived of and analysed. This is certainly the case in France, where “citizenship” has historically been a particularly powerful keyword, and where its “weight” has slowed the development of heterodox approaches to it, and especially of processual ones, that consider citizenship not strictly as a status, but as sets of relationships that manufacture its meanings and uses. This paper will explore some of the effects of such assumptions on the ways French academic literature shape and discuss citizenship, by critically analysing recent debates.
But if there is indeed a need to disclose such implicit framings, a number of research having tried to do so have fallen in the reverse trap, or indeed the same gross generalisation: that of considering there would be one and only one “Western model”, generally the liberal one, as if political struggles and mobilisations around citizenship were always framed by such a specific model.
My main argument will thus be that efforts to better grasp contemporary reconfigurations of citizenship require not only to pay attention to other ways to define and practice it, especially among postcolonial minorities and in non-Western sites; but also to adopt new tools and standing points from which to explore citizenship processes in the “West” itself, tools and standing points that should avoid to subsume the complexity of citizenship struggles to one or another theoretical “model”. In other words, the much needed destabilising work in citizenship studies is not just about enriching the picture with views and practices that challenge established meanings; it is also about adopting a political and academic standpoint that reframe citizenship in general, and clearly contextualise it, as well as its theoretical discussions. Anthropologically inspired approaches, with their empirically based bias and their habit of never taking for granted political categories, might be particularly well equipped for such an exercise. Arguments in this paper will rely on the author’s recent research on social movements and mobilisations, as well as on recent anthropological literature on citizenship.

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______

Event Date: 7 February
Christodoulou Meeting Room 11
Walton Hall campus
Open University,
Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA

Opening the Boundaries of Citizenship

The conference addresses the performative and creative side of social movements, practices of identity negotiation and political participation questioning the meaning of citizenship. Which actors, sites and rights are constituted in contemporary power struggles redefining ‘the political’? Which neo-colonial or neo-imperial nodes emerge from the analysis of issues such as democracy or secularism? Under this light, how is the language of law challenged and remoulded?

Panel 19: Colonial Legacies and Migration

Professor Parvati Nair (Queen Mary University London) – Immigration, indignation, integration: Reinventing citizenship and democracy in Spain

This paper seeks to consider the recent popular protests at the economic crisis as experienced in Spain in light of an ongoing history of economic immigration to Spain from the countries of the global south in Africa, Latin America and, more recently, Asia. I shall explore the emergence of a common ground of dispossession and discontent between citizens devoid of economic advantage and immigrants who are non-citizens seeking alternatives to economic degradation in their home countries. Following four decades of dictatorship in Spain, the Transition to democracy and subsequent membership of the European Union combined with Spain’s geographic position at the edge of Europe to turn this southern European nation into an entry point for immigrants seeking to enter Fortress Europe. Over the past three to four decades, immigration has been a major phenomenon in Spain, testing the limits of tolerance and democracy, both in practice and in law. The majority of immigrants occupy interstitial and marginal positions in Spanish society, eschewed by the mainstream and often vilified both by the media and politicians. More recently, the movement of indignation in Spain has led to the occupation of city spaces in popular protest at the effects of the economic crisis. Many of the claims of the indignados incorporate those of immigrants and question democracy as currently practised. The commonality of dispossession and abandonment by the state exposes the extent to which citizenship and democracy, formulated and imagined within the framework of capitalism, fail to vindicate subjects who embody the failures of capital.
I shall analyse the ways in which, in both cases, the presence of bodies of the dispossessed in public space and the physical occupation of the latter reinvents the public sphere through bodily performance. If immigrants were the indignados of yesteryear, then today they are joined by a substantial economic underclass of subjects deprived of the privileges of citizenship through the failures of the prevailing economic system. Interestingly, the latter have incorporated the former’s struggle for rights and recognition into their claims for justice and socio-economic reform. The means for achieving these ends have, in both cases, been through physical presence in public and especially urban spaces. In this way, the bodies of the disenfranchised weave their way through and against the mainstream, thereby ensuring that marginality remains not on geo-social peripheries but rather as a visible feature of the everyday. I shall argue that both groups should be viewed not as separate from the practices of capital but as fields of resistance that test, challenge, deconstruct and expose the limits of citizenship and democracy when defined by capitalist ideology. The fundamentally non-violent nature both of recent protests and the non-violent movements of non-citizens coalesce to reinvent the public sphere in terms of a democratic praxis that is performative in its appropriation and refiguring of democracy.

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______

Event Date: 7 February

Christodoulou Meeting Room 11

Walton Hall campus

Open University,

Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA

Opening the Boundaries of Citizenship

The conference addresses the performative and creative side of social movements, practices of identity negotiation and political participation questioning the meaning of citizenship. Which actors, sites and rights are constituted in contemporary power struggles redefining ‘the political’? Which neo-colonial or neo-imperial nodes emerge from the analysis of issues such as democracy or secularism? Under this light, how is the language of law challenged and remoulded?

Panel 18: Religion and the Political

Professor Trygve Wyller (University of Oslo) – The spatial and the religious: The emergence of an embodied ‘act of citizenship’?

The paper will discuss whether religiously based citizenship activities can in any way contribute to a non-orientalist notion and practice of citizenship. Traditionally, there are thousands and millions of Christian social practice activities in the world, all aiming at the improvement of the life standard for one or more kind of “groups”. Often these activities are motivated by classical Christian discourse, such as compassion, charity and love. But historical experience and research has taught us that much of this work is more disciplinary than really liberating. Is it still possible to reconstruct a the language of compassion as an interpretation of religiously founded practices for the sanspapiers?
Based on the reflections developed in the book Heterotopic Citizen (2009, T.Wyller ed.) the paper will take some experiences from a religiously based activities for undocumented immigrants (sans papiers) in Gothenburg as the starting point for the discussion.  In Gothenburg the Philantropic organization Rosengrenska Stiftelsen cooperates with a local church, Bergsjøen, in the development of health,social and legal advices for undocumented staying in Sweden. The practices for the sans papiers are obviously a case of what Isin calls “Acts of Citizenship”, but the question is whether these practices also might be labelled a post-colonial expression of compassion? Agamben claims that the way Western societies meet the sans papiers is nothing but cruel violence. But is there, then, alternatives to this violence? Focusing on the body as space might be a way out.
The paper will ask whether the religious discourse still expresses experiences, which the more cognitive, rational discourse of justice and rights lack. One way of approaching this is connected to a spatial discourse. This theoretical approach to discuss this will start from Kim Knotts The Location of Religion. A Spatial Analysis (2005)
Knott connects to the spatial theories developed from Foucault, Lefebvre and Soja and takes them into a discussion in the religious field.  Based on the short fieldwork from Gothenburg the paper will discuss whether and how bodies and body relation in this area can be the starting point of a non-orientalist act of citizenship and thereby renew the religious discourse of grace and compassion.
The central argument in the paper will be that instead of the language of law or of the liberal discourse ethics, the ethical demand for citizenship should be discovered in the demand coming from the body – heterotopias. This is an argument following Foucault, but developing his spatial theory to the body as a topos and to the impact for the developing theory of citizenship.

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______

Event Date: 7 February

Christodoulou Meeting Room 11

Walton Hall campus

Open University,

Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA

Opening the Boundaries of Citizenship

The conference addresses the performative and creative side of social movements, practices of identity negotiation and political participation questioning the meaning of citizenship. Which actors, sites and rights are constituted in contemporary power struggles redefining ‘the political’? Which neo-colonial or neo-imperial nodes emerge from the analysis of issues such as democracy or secularism? Under this light, how is the language of law challenged and remoulded?

Panel 18: Religion and the Political

Dr Ian Morrison (Wilfrid Laurier University) – ‘Like a mighty wind’: Locating the apolitical Buddhist subject within orientalist narratives of citizenship

In recent years, numerous projects have explored the manner through which various subjectivities and practices have been forgotten, marginalized and/or depoliticized as a result of the dominance of orientalist conceptions of citizenship and the political. Scholars such as Talal Asad (2003, 2005, 2006), Wendy Brown (2006), Engin Isin (2005; 2008), Sabah Mahmood (2005, 2006, 2008), Bryan Turner (2003) and others have conducted important studies that demonstrate the historical construction of the dominant discourse of citizenship through its differentiation from its Oriental other. The focus of much of this literature has been on the ways that the dominance of orientalist conceptions of citizenship serve to make subjects and practices associated with Islam or Islamic societies appear as non-political and their presence in the political realm as a threat to the political. These studies reveal the manner in which practices and subjects associated with Islam fail to be recognized as properly political. Instead, they are viewed as either ‘merely’ religious or are disqualified from the political due to their dangerous failure to differentiate the political and the religious. Whether deemed ‘merely’ religious or dangerously religious, subjects and practices associated with Islam appear as non-political.
My proposed paper will assert the importance of focusing on the different mechanisms through which particular subjects and practices are made to appear as the other of citizenship and the properly political within dominant discourses of citizenship. As such, it will focus on the mechanisms through which subjects and practices associated with Buddhism are depoliticized. While orientalist narratives of citizenship and the political construct subjects and practices associated with Islam as non-political, those associated with Buddhism appear as apolitical. They appear as a turn away from the political or a rejection of the political.
My paper wishes to explore the manner in which this discourse came to be formed, the way in which it has been deployed, and the possibilities for political subjectivity that it may keep hidden. First, I explore the manner in which subjects and practices associated with Buddhism came to appear as apolitical within dominant anthropological, philological and sociological discourses of the nineteenth century. Second, I point to the manner in which these discourses have been deployed, both by those demanding rights and those seeking to deny these claims in recent events in Burma, Thailand and Tibet.

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______

Event Date: 7 February
Christodoulou Meeting Room 11
Walton Hall campus
Open University,
Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA

Opening the Boundaries of Citizenship

The conference addresses the performative and creative side of social movements, practices of identity negotiation and political participation questioning the meaning of citizenship. Which actors, sites and rights are constituted in contemporary power struggles redefining ‘the political’? Which neo-colonial or neo-imperial nodes emerge from the analysis of issues such as democracy or secularism? Under this light, how is the language of law challenged and remoulded?

Panel 18: Religion and the Political

Dr Suhraiya Jivraj (Oxford Brookes University) – Faith School Values: Interrogating Religion and Citizenship in British Education Policy

The former New Labour Government facilitated the expansion of faith schools in England despite strong criticisms in the wake of 9/11 and the 2001 ‘race-riots’ in the North of England. Their support was based on the seeming academic success of faith schools and their role in promoting citizenship and community cohesion; both of which were (and continue to be under the current government) attributed to the religious values and ethos of these schools.

In this paper I sidestep the debate on whether faith schools should be state funded or not or whether they contribute to divisiveness within society. Rather, I examine the socio-political work of ‘religion’ in New Labour’s citizenship and communities (including social cohesion) agendas as well as its continuation under the current conservative government. Through an exploration of social capital and communitarian theory I argue that the New Labour reification of faith schools’ ethos and values is viewed as engendering civil-ising values, norms and community (religious networks), understood as vital for nurturing children to be responsible and productive citizens. Drawing on the intersections of critical race/religion, citizenship and feminist theory, I explore the implications of this faith based, yet also universalising values discourse, in the regulation of non-Christian communities and subjects.

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______

Event Date: 7 February
Christodoulou Meeting Room 11
Walton Hall campus
Open University,
Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA

Opening the Boundaries of Citizenship

The conference addresses the performative and creative side of social movements, practices of identity negotiation and political participation questioning the meaning of citizenship. Which actors, sites and rights are constituted in contemporary power struggles redefining ‘the political’? Which neo-colonial or neo-imperial nodes emerge from the analysis of issues such as democracy or secularism? Under this light, how is the language of law challenged and remoulded?

Panel 20: New Cartographies of Citizenship

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Dr Brenna Bhandar (Queen Mary University London)
Metamorphic property: Practices of ownership in Palestine
[AUDIO HERE]

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Dr Nacira Guénif-Souilamas (University Paris-Nord/13)
Blurred citizens. An orientalist mapping of other beings, belongings and becomings
[AUDIO HERE]

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Dr Kim Rygiel (Wilfrid Laurier University)
Camp cartographies: Forging transgressive citizenship in transit
[AUDIO HERE]

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Panel 20 Questions

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The presentations are part of the International Conference ‘Opening the Boundaries of Citizenship’ by the ERC funded Oecumene project (www.oecumene.eu)

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Event Date: 7 February
Christodoulou Meeting Room 11
Walton Hall campus
Open University,
Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA

Opening the Boundaries of Citizenship

The conference addresses the performative and creative side of social movements, practices of identity negotiation and political participation questioning the meaning of citizenship. Which actors, sites and rights are constituted in contemporary power struggles redefining ‘the political’? Which neo-colonial or neo-imperial nodes emerge from the analysis of issues such as democracy or secularism? Under this light, how is the language of law challenged and remoulded?

Panel 19: Colonial Legacies and Migration

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Professor Parvati Nair (Queen Mary University London)
Immigration, indignation, integration: Reinventing citizenship and democracy in Spain
[AUDIO HERE]

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Catherine Neveu (LAIOS – IIAC)
Rescuing citizenship from its theories: Anthropological perspectives
[AUDIO HERE]

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Panel 19 Questions

PLAY

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——————————————-

The presentations are part of the International Conference ‘Opening the Boundaries of Citizenship’ by the ERC funded Oecumene project (www.oecumene.eu)