The present project draws on recent work in philosophy--primarily that of Alain Badiou--in order to re-conceptualize the concepts of "citizen," "citizenship" and "nation." I aim to recuperate the notion of universal citizenship and reframe the immigration debate in the U.S. by proposing a conception of citizenship that does not rely on identity or state recognition. I define the citizen as a collective subject made up of anyone who in a given juridico-political situation transforms that situation on the basis of an affirmation of equality. I propose that citizenship, to the extent that it transforms the basic organizational coordinates of a situation, is itself on the border of legality/illegality. In chapter one, I theorize universal citizenship as an egalitarian democratic act foundational of a new order and, drawing on Habermas (1995) and Hobsbawm (1992), identify in the French Revolution two articulations of the relationship between citizenship and nation: one that sees nation as pre-existing and determining citizenship, and another that takes citizenship to be constitutive of nation. I argue that these conceptions still underpin competing understandings of politics today, especially with regard to the role of identity in politics. In chapter two, I analyze the confluence between the criminalization of undocumented immigration in the U.S. and neoliberal governmentality. I argue that a politics thought from the perspective of the undocumented immigrant also points to the necessity of affirming a political logic over economic imperatives. I claim that the 2006 immigrant rights protests in the U.S. can be understood as instances of universal citizenship to the extent that they included undocumented people and thus challenged a statist distinction foundational of U.S. political order: the difference between citizen and non-citizen as regulating access to the legal right to act politically. In the last chapter, I read Oscar Zeta Acosta's The Revolt of the Cockroach People as proposing a generic, and thus non-identitarian and universalistic, conception of the political collective in the very category of "cockroach." I highlight the ways in which it resonates with the revolutionary idea of nation identified by Hobsbawm and Habermas.

Submitted by Maicon Juliano Schmidt (maicons) on 2015-03-21T16:56:42Z No. of bitstreams: 1 LaraNasi.pdf: 1632734 bytes, checksum: 42c5c0b1571392e86d55223ce73fa83b (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2015-03-21T16:56:42Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 LaraNasi.pdf: 1632734 bytes, checksum: 42c5c0b1571392e86d55223ce73fa83b (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012-03-21 / CAPES - Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / Esta dissertação busca compreender os usos da internet por organizações e redes de migrantes na articulação do Fórum Social Mundial das Migrações (FSMM), de modo a compreender o papel das Tecnologias da Comunicação e da Informação para a construção de uma agenda comum entre atores sociais ligados a diferentes territorialidades. A partir da compreensão de que, no contexto deste Fórum, as redes de migrantes adotam uma postura contrária à globalização hegemônica e apresentam a pauta da cidadania universal, estruturamos o referencial teórico em três partes, que abordam, respectivamente, a construção da pauta da cidadania universal, as reconfigurações da ideia de território a partir da globalização e as possibilidades abertas a partir das tecnologias e da internet e ainda as migrações como movimento social. Para a investigação empírica sobre os usos da internet, o percurso metodológico é construído a partir da observação de sites que compõem o campo de estudo, pesquisa documental e entrevistas em profundidade com integrantes de redes que participam da proposição do FSMM. A análise busca reconstruir e compreender os usos da internet por estes atores e aponta para dois principais eixos: ao mesmo tempo em que se constitui como o espaço para a articulação das diferentes redes que fazem parte do Fórum, a internet é também um espaço de emissão para dar visibilidade à agenda dos migrantes e difundir discursos contra-hegemônicos. / This research aims to understand the social uses of internet in the proposition of the World Social Forum on Migrations (WSFM), in order to understand the role information and communication technologies play to build a common agenda among social actors related to different territorialities. From the understanding that migrant networks of the Forum are against hegemonic globalization and propose the agenda of universal citizenship, we structure the theoretic discussion in three parts, which comprehends: 1) the construction of the global citizenship agenda, 2) other kinds of comprehension about the idea of territory in global societies and the new possibilities of technologies and internet, and 3) the migrations as a social movement. Methods for empirical investigation are built from the observation of websites, documental research and semi-structured interviews with migrants that take part on the organization of WSFM. The analysis tries to understand the uses of the internet made by these actors. Two categories emerge: at the same time internet becomes a space for the articulation of different networks, it is also conceived as a place for emission, in order to allow the visibility of the migrants agenda and diffuse counterhegemonic discourses.