Inclusive Citizenship: Realizing the Potential1

¹ This article is dedicated to the memory of Iris Marion Young (1949–2006) whose work did so much to challenge exclusionary expressions of citizenship and to contribute to more differentiated, inclusive forms.

Abstract

Citizenship has been described as a “momentum concept”. One important development over the past decade has been the various ways in which scholars and activists have developed citizenship's inclusionary potential. The first part of the article explores these developments in general terms with regard to the values underpinning inclusive citizenship; the implications of the notion of cultural citizenship; and the theorization of differentiated forms of citizenship, which nevertheless appeal to universalist principles. These principles provide the basis for the citizenship claims of people living in poverty, a group largely ignored in citizenship studies. Other lacunae have been disability and, until recently, childhood. The second part of the article discusses how citizenship studies has reworked the concept in a more inclusionary direction through the development of a multi-tiered analysis, which pays attention to the spaces and places in which lived citizenship is practised. It focuses in particular on the intimate and domestic sphere, with particular reference to debates around care and citizenship, and on the interconnections between the intimate/domestic and the global, using “global care chains” and ecological citizenship as examples.

Notes

¹ This article is dedicated to the memory of Iris Marion Young (1949–2006) whose work did so much to challenge exclusionary expressions of citizenship and to contribute to more differentiated, inclusive forms.

² The case studies in the South (in Bangladesh, Brazil, India, Mexico, Nigeria, Peru and South Africa) were part of an international research partnership—the Development Research Centre on Citizenship, Participation and Accountability—based at the Institute of Development Studies in the UK (www.drc.citizenship.org).

³ Angharade E. Beckett, however, notes that not all disabled people want to be seen as different and that analysis of the UK disability movement raises the possibility that some “individuals may be inaccurately labelled as ‘different’ not only by dominant ‘outsiders’ but also by dominant voices internal to the group” (2005, p. 417, emphasis in original).

⁴ An edited collection on Children and Citizenship, edited by Clutton, Invernizzi and Williams, is also due to be published by Sage in 2007 or 2008.

⁵ An embodied understanding also emerges from the work of disability theorists.

⁶ With regard to adults, some disabled feminists have also challenged the very language of care as undermining disabled people's autonomy and hence their citizenship (see, for instance, Morris, 2005).

⁷ This issue is explored in more depth in Lister (2007b).