The session recording will be archived on the site until June 25th, 2023

This session was streamed but not recorded

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Description:

At what scale does “citizenship” matter? How is it experienced, performed, imagined, and contested? Traditional approaches to citizenship frame it at the scale of the territorial state. This reflect the fact that contemporary practices of citizenship are monopolized by state institutions: they govern biopolitical tools like passports, birth certificates, residency permits, tax systems, voting rights, education, medical care, and more. Popular understandings of citizenship are likewise dominated by statist thinking, whereby one’s citizenship is typically seen as defined by one state only. But a growing number of people around the world have citizenship from more than one country, while even more people have access to formal citizenship from one country and informal citizenship in another country where they reside. Others mix and match the bureaucratic resources and obligations of citizenship of different countries as they must or, in the case of the ultra-wealthy, as they are able, to best navigate the state-based political structure to achieve their personal goals and ambitions. Meanwhile, movements questioning the state’s legitimacy in defining and controlling citizenship have started to gain popularity around the world. Covering diverse ideologies, these include Indigenous sovereignty movements in settler colonial states, various strands of left-wing anarchism and right-wing libertarianism, and new conspiracy-theory fueled movements like the U.S. “sovereign citizens” and German “Reichsbürger.” As such, not only the idea itself but also the scale of citizenship remains extremely fluid. This session explores the many scales at which citizenship matters, including how specific ideas and practices of citizenship continue to uphold or explicitly reject the traditional state-based system.

Non-Presenting Participants