Citizenship as Method

According to Hannah Arendt, the only truly universal right is 'the right to have rights' (1951: 376). That is, a right to belong to a rights-bearing political community: citizenship. The problem is, Arendt's formulation sets up a contradiction between rights that are supposedly universal and particular citizenship regimes that exclude others. Consequently, to be stateless is to be rightless. In a contemporary context, the irregular migrant exemplifies the contradictions of the right to have rights. While not formally stateless, the insecure legal and political standing of many irregular migrants means they often live in liminal zones between legality and illegality. This legal insecurity regularly results in migrants being unable to access the rights that should be theirs according to the declarations, charters and treaties on human rights (Anderson, 2013; De Genova, 2010; Sigona, 2016).

Building on research undertaken during my PhD, this project starts from the premise that in order to address the problem of rightlessness it is necessary to rethink citizenship. I do this by developing a new conceptual approach: citizenship as method. Citizenship as method is a post-foundational framework for analysing the constitution, contestation and re-articulation of citizenship. This research will use the figure of the rights-claiming migrant as the locus around which to explore the contradictions between universal rights and citizenship as well as the political processes through which citizenship is challenged and resignified.

Using the framework of citizenship as method, this project provides a set of resources for the practical negotiation of contemporary citizenship: a rights-claiming analytic for navigating particular discursive articulations and a new account of the sites at which transformational practices of citizenship occur. As such, citizenship as method not only contributes to the field of citizenship studies but has practical importance, resonating with the concerns and objectives of migrant rights policy-makers and activists. The three journal articles that I will submit set out the conceptual framework of citizenship as method and outline the contributions of my research in two specific fields: social and legal theory, and democratic theory.

The new research undertaken during this fellowship will allow me to further develop and test the conceptual framework of citizenship as method by investigating a new research area identified in my doctoral thesis and by addressing a (necessary) limitation in my PhD work. In order to develop a generalisable conceptual framework, my doctorate utilised a series of different illustrative examples. However, I suggested that further testing of citizenship as method requires using a different methodology by applying it to a single case study over a longer duration of time. As such, I will use the fellowship to start this process by undertaking preliminary research into the Abolish ICE movement and writing applications to fund further research.

Citizenship as method is not a normative proposal; however, one of the outcomes of the research is a set of analytic resources that can be deployed to make strategic interventions in particular cases. The two proposed stakeholder workshops demonstrate the impact value of this approach. The first workshop, based on the Sanctuary movement, will utilise my research on critical legal theory and the Hostile Environment. It will look at: how the 2014 and 2016 Immigration Acts shape racialised citizenship practices (OHCHR 2019); how the Sanctuary initiative inhabits 'a-legal' (Harnecker 2007; Hughes 2019) citizenship spaces; and how it can be used to invent new forms of citizens (Cranshaw and Hughes 2019) and citizenship practices. The second workshop will be undertaken in partnership with LFM. It will build on the outcomes of my preliminary research into the Abolish ICE movement in order to make concrete and efficacious policy proposals.