This thesis is about the possibility of political transformation from the margins through language and language classes in the context of citizenship management, migration controls and exclusionary language policies in the European Union. To enquire into this argument, the thesis analyses the work of three different language classes projects in the UK, Germany and Spain, which, amongst other practices, teach the language to undocumented migrants and foster political mobilisation for their rights. By means of challenging exclusionary logics and dualisms, and pursuing a dialogic analysis of la~guage and politics from the margins through understanding citizenship as enactment, this thesis reworks the relationship between language, agency, and political transformation in the context of restrictive use of language tests and classes, making it possible to understand the transformative capacity of the practice of language classes. This work argues that language functions as site in which citizenship as exclusionary can be reproduced (e.g. through language tests for accessing citizenship), but also as a site for dialogue, interaction and political organising for claiming one's rights, and for the transformation of citizenship as we know it. The possibility of engendering new political sUbjectivities and transformation from the margins through enhancing dialogue makes of any language class, official or not, a potential site of transformative citizenship. The work of the projects analysed demonstrates how, through language and language classes, migrants who are excluded from citizenship and the realm of the political actually may engage in enacting, disrupting and transforming citizenship. Whilst it recogmses the unpredictability of language and its possible oppressive effects, this thesis ultimately reads these language classes and some of their practices and actions as fragile but nevertheless transformative 'acts of citizenship' from the margins.

This thesis examines the relationship between practices of citizenship and the challenges associated with the pursuit of, and threats to, security of individuals in contemporary Jamaica. This approach is accompanied by an unpacking of the ways in which people, occupying different spaces in Jamaican society, position themselves vis-a-vis the state. I argue that the security problem in Jamaica has to be understood in the context of a widening citizenship deficit, and the fact that there is a separate way, outside of the formal context of the state, of pursuing citizenship at the community level in what are referred to as garrison communities. This separate way has emerged in response to the failure of the Jamaican state to provide both citizenship and security to its most disadvantaged and disenfranchised members. The state, the legal rights it is expected to provide, and the universalistic discourses which form the basis of citizenship in the West, have not served as the primary means by which citizenship has been constituted for all Jamaicans. The character citizenship assumes is rooted in Jamaica's colonial past, and since the postcolonial period has been tied to a rather uneven and unequal developmental trajectory, influenced by colour/class relations, spatial formation, political culture and identity, as well as neoliberal policies and noticeable state failures. Through extralegal, dialectic, and contested practices, garrison communities have become essential sites for realising citizenship. The local practices that inform the social order of the garrisons are decidedly in conflict with, and contest, the state's legal-rational institutions, calling its legitimacy and the veracity of the social contract - derived from Rousseau - into question. The theme of the thesis is pursued through an in-depth, multi-sited study, carried out in three communities, that explore the particularities, the everyday security experiences and discourses of people occupying different places and spaces in Jamaican society, and through consideration of the security policies and perspectives of policy elites and policy managers.

In 'The Book of Laughter and Forgetting', Milan Kundera stated famously that " ... the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting" (1996: p4). What roles do memory and forgetting have to play in moves toward reconciliation, was V. S. Naipaul correct when he wrote that heritage gets transmitted only in "dead countries, or secure and by-passed ones - where men can cherish the past and think of passing on furniture and china to their heirs [places like Sweden and Canada] .... Everywhere else .... the past can only cause pain"? (cited in Lowenthal, D. 1998: p.23) This PhD analyses how through interventions in their urban fabric, nations narrate their histories by re-constructing, conserving, neglecting and destroying their built heritage. It will illustrate how in post-conflict, multi-ethnic states the built environment becomes a contact zone where different pasts and events are constantly being (re-)negotiated. Heritage case studies from post-conflict, recently independent nation-states in the former' Yugoslavia will be discussed in an attempt to understand the interrelationship between political power and the chimeric concepts of heritage, memory and identity. In order to contextualise the competing narratives informing current intervention decisions the paper will chronicle how religious heritage, as the physical manifestation of differing identities, was subject to urbicide as ethno-nationalist desires were writ large on former Yugoslav cityscapes.

Many kinds of social, participatory and citizen oriented platforms make up today's media landscape. Many claim that open source and collaborative media change the ways we think about citizenship (Jenkins). Tim O'Reilly claims that Web 2.0 applications "have a natural architecture of participation" (2005). Yet social constructionists, feminists and sceptics caution against attributing new technologies with these kinds of natural characteristics. Drawing from the cultural history of early internet and mobile technologies, this research asks what, is meaningful about technologically specific ideas of citizenship. In order to answer this question, I draw from theories of standard and cultural citizenship; analyze a sample of technologically specific ideas of citizenship (e.g. netizenship, e-citizenship, technological citizenship, cyber citizenship); and conduct in depth empirical analysis of two case studies. Theoretically, this research synthesizes and builds upon citizenship theories beginning with T. H. Marshall and followed by cultural citizenship (e.g. Pakulski 1997; Isin and Wood 1999; Stevenson 2001; 2003). From this conceptual frame, the empirical patterns of connection are analyzed along three primary axes: membership systems; rights and obligations; and participatory strategies. Technologically specific ideas of citizenship fit well with theories of cultural citizenship and cultural rights closely resemble most of those rights that are also technologically specific such as rights to: participate, ideational and symbolic spheres, voice, to representation and to innovate. The cases are of two citizenship initiatives using internet or mobile platforms: the BBC's iCan project and Proboscis' Urban Tapestries project. While these projects emerged on the cusp of social media, both cases are early iterations of participatory media. Both cases provide insights into articulations of changing ideas of citizenship and participatory practices. Technologically specific ideas of citizenship are conditional. Project users engage different kinds of membership than producers and there is an uneven distribution of cultural rights which favours producers. As a result, users engage different and mostly shallow patterns of public participation. In contrast, producers have broader membership networks, stronger protection of rights and show more variation in deeper more collectively oriented participatory strategies. In the case of limited or partial forms of participation, findings suggest that citizenship language is used as an active manipulative strategy to centralize media organizations as dominant public sites. I argue that the characteristics of technologically specific ideas of citizenship mark a distinct moment in the history of media and citizenship; a moment characterized by the emergence of "public citizenship." The idea of public citizenship attempts to capture the ways in which technologically specific ideas of citizenship, at least in practice, involve making space for ordinary people in cultural institutions.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

This thesis explores and compares the ways in which citizenship during the interwar period was formulated through an understanding of both the damaging effects, yet also potential benefits, of living in the modern city. In both Manchester and Chicago, municipal government and local voluntary associations cooperated in an attempt to create citizens who were physically healthy and imbued with the spirit of urban community. This understanding of citizenship challenges the recent historiography of Britain and the US, which has emphasised the rising importance of national identity between the wars, and the linking of citizenship to the democratic responsibility of exercising the right to vote. As a comparative analysis, it argues for viewing the urban variable as the key point of convergence in both places. The city was not a neutral or passive container; it was the development of the urban environment and its government that directed the form that citizenship took. Fears in both cities surrounding issues like the impact of the slums, the emergence of new forms of leisure, growing segregation and social stratification, and a perceived escalation of political radicalism encouraged associations and government to intervene and create new environments of health and cooperation. This urban notion of citizenship was apparent in the variety of linked areas that the thesis analyses: the educational materials used to incite civic loyalty; the evolution of the ‘youth problem’ in the 1920s; the design of schools arising from scientific investigation of the physiology of children; the design of public housing in Britain after the Housing Act of 1919 and in the US through the Public Works Administration after 1933; the public ritual enactments of city community during civic festivals; and the facilitation of welfare distribution following central government legislation across the period in Britain and during the New Deal of the 1930s in the US. The thesis however also recognises the fundamental differences in context between the two; most notably, the extensive power of municipal government in Manchester, the level of racial animosity in Chicago, and the rapid rather than piecemeal rise of the central state in the US. I make three related arguments. Firstly, although other forms of national citizenship were evident, the urban was still vitally important to citizenship in the interwar period. While contemporaries argued that it was the modern city that damaged the health and morals of its inhabitants, both the city and its government were concurrently reimagined as something to be proud of, and responsible for, due to its guarantor status for the life and health of its citizens. Secondly, citizenship was produced through policies and activities that focused on the body of citizens in relation to their immediate environment. In youth clubs, public housing, state-provided schools, and the distribution of charity, contemporaries tried to instil ideals of personal health and collective interaction and belonging. Finally, these environments and policies were created and managed through a civic culture of voluntary associations and government, primarily local but increasingly central. While the central state was growing during this period, it reinforced rather than negated the power of urban association and citizenship, by providing the funds and physical structures for urban citizenship to be created. After 1945 however, with the establishment of the classic welfare state in Britain and the rise of civil rights facilitated through the courts in the US, notions of citizenship moved further toward the national and broke from the interwar emphasis on the city and its governance. By acknowledging the differences between the two cities and countries, yet concentrating on the similar operation of civic culture and the shared importance of the urban environment, this comparative approach reveals the fundamental characteristics of citizenship formation in Britain and the US during the interwar period.

Naturalisation, the process whereby a non-national becomes a citizen, is a space where the national boundaries are demarcated institutionally and symbolically. Despite this, social psychology has generally disregarded citizenship as a topic of research. Against this background, this thesis argues that citizenship is a dynamic concept embedded in a system of self-other relations. The thesis examines processes of national identity construction within the naturalisation context of the United Kingdom. In particular, this research explores representations of citizenship held by three key stakeholders: naturalised citizens, citizenship officers and the British government. Thirty-three interviews with new British citizens, twenty interviews with citizenship officers and four key policy documents on earned citizenship have been analysed. Building on the theory of social representations and on a dialogical understanding of human thinking and identity, the thesis draws links between identity and processes of knowledge construction. Identity is defined as a process of positioning towards social representations and others. In studying processes of identity construction and negotiation, emphasis is placed on the quality of self-other relations and on the antinomic and argumentative nature of thinking about the social world. This research shows that Britishness, within this context, is constructed on the basis of the opposing themes of progress and decline. Consequently, identity construction takes the form of a complex negotiation between opposing positions or voices. For new citizens, 'becoming British' is constructed as both enrichment for the self and as identity threat. Furthermore, for citizenship officers, migrants are seen as both a resource and a burden, which resonates with the official distinction between skilled (elite) and unskilled (non-elite) migrants. These findings illustrate the interplay between the symbolic and institutional aspects of positioning processes and highlight the need for further social psychological study of citizenship.

This thesis is a study of statelessness in Kuwait between 1959 and 2009. The population of Kuwait includes over 100,000 biduns, or stateless/paperless people, representing 10% of the nationals. With their origins in the tribes of Northern Arabia, they are undistinguishable from Kuwaitis but have failed to obtain nationality. Despite their role in the construction of the modern state, the biduns were classified as 'illegal migrants' in 1986. By highlighting the transnational foundations of the Kuwaiti society, this research argues that the persistence of statelessness is part of the dynamics of transnational or non-state actors in the region. Statelessness resulted from a conflict over naturalisation: Kuwaiti Arab nationalists sought support among Arab migrants, whereas the ruling family used the tribes and their transnational solidarity networks to enlarge its legitimacy basis. Biduns could mobilise cross-border resources that risked upsetting the balance of Kuwaiti society. The thesis broadens the International Relations definition of transnational actors to include solidarity networks as 'non-institutionalised' non-state actors. It challenges the liberal view that considers transnationalism, in its 'institutionalised' form, as the inevitable result of increasing global integration, arguing that states engage in a two-way process with non-state actors. This research is based on fieldwork conducted between 2005 and 2008 in Kuwait. Press archives, starting in 1972, were used in order to capture the terms of the internal debate. Further material was drawn from repeated semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders, including individual stories of biduns. These primary sources were complemented by the findings of international human rights organisations. While contributing to the understanding of hidden transnational actors, this thesis adds a critical perspective in emerging Gulf studies. By labelling biduns as 'illegal migrants', Gulf monarchies have sought to portray themselves as facing the common challenge of migration while preserving their international reputation on which their security depends.