Acts, ambiguities, and the labour of contesting citizenship

Abstract

This afterword discusses a variety of approaches to exploring the contestation of citizenship, and foregrounds the spatial politics that underpin forms of contestation, struggle and claims making. Beginning with a reflection on how recent work has sought to explore citizenship ‘from below’, this afterword asks how citizenship studies might begin to accommodate an expanded range of sites, subjects and practices in the contestation of citizenship. Studying acts of citizenship and the minor interventions that surround such acts, the often ambiguous nature of citizenship claims and the prosaic learning that goes into producing the conditions for contestation, all offer useful directions to explore. However, addressing the contestation nature of citizenship requires both exploring these practices in relation to one another, and exploring how established and normative models of citizenship variously incorporate, co-opt and manage forms of contestation as they continue to ‘make citizens’. I conclude by reflecting on how the governmental process of ‘making citizens’ is also one of constructing spaces, mobilising materials and producing affective responses of hope, fear, hatred and desire.

Keywords:

• Acts of citizenship
• contestation
• rights
• migration
• urban politics
• pedagogy