368 research outputs found
Citizenship, Justice and the Right to the Smart City
This paper provides an introduction to the smart city and engages with its idea and ideals
from a critical social science perspective. After setting out in brief the emergence of smart
cities and current key debates, we note a number of practical, political and normative
questions relating to citizenship, justice, and the public good that warrant examination. The
remainder of the paper provides an initial framing for engaging with these questions. The first
section details the dominant neoliberal conception and enactment of smart cities and how this
works to promote the interests of capital and state power and reshape governmentality. We
then detail some of the ethical issues associated with smart city technologies and initiatives.
Having set out some of the more troubling aspects of how social relations are produced
within smart cities, we then examine how citizens and citizenship have been conceived and
operationalised in the smart city to date. We then follow this with a discussion of social
justice and the smart city. In the final section, we explore the notion of the âright to the smart
cityâ and how this might be used to recast the smart city in emancipatory and empowering
ways
The emergence of 'citizenship' in popular discourse:The case of Scotland
The 2014 Scottish Referendum gauged public opinion on the possibility of Scotland leaving the United Kingdom, raising significant questions about the legitimacy of claims to citizenship in the event of independence. Through a mixed methods survey, this study explored the ways in which citizenship emerged in popular discourse in the lead up to the Scottish referendum. Findings point to an emphasis in public discourse on a commitment to and participation in society, instead of the more traditional citizenship markers of ancestry, birthplace or residency. Data indicates a view of citizenship encompassing status and practice, while identity was framed in terms of more static notions of birthplace and ancestry. The salience of social participation was noticeably greater in respondentsâ assessment of othersâ potential Scottish citizenship than their own. Specifically, the study highlights the salience of relational aspects of citizenship in popular discourse, with an emphasis on social citizenship in preference to legal citizenship. The study constitutes a significant contribution to ongoing discussions about âparticipatory citizenshipâ in the field of Citizenship studies, by providing much needed empirical data on social conceptualizations of citizenship
Citizenship and Inclusion: Rethinking the Analytical Category of Noncitizenship
The paper problematises the category of noncitizenship. It traces its trajectory in accounts of inclusive citizenship and argues that it is difficult to theorise it as a distinct theoretical category outside of citizenship. To support this argument, the paper distinguishes between a pluralist, political and democratic variant of accounts of inclusive citizenship and it shows how they all end up reducing noncitizenship to a journey to citizenship. To overcome this limit, the paper develops the idea of subversive politicisation and suggests that injustices and inequalities can be challenged without falling back on the vocabulary of citizenship
Provocation: Technology, resistance and surveillance in public space
The introduction of technologies that monitor and track individuals to attribute suspicion and guilt has become commonplace in practices of order maintenance in public space. A case study of the introduction of a marker spray in Dutch urban public transport is used to conceptualise the role of technology in everyday resistances against surveillance. The introduction of this technology made available alternative subject positions. The notion of provocation is proposed for the opening up of social spaces by a technology. Through provocation, issues that do not find their expression in commonly accepted protocols and means of evidence are given a voice as a result of defiant, emotional and provisional technology usage. Attending to visible and defiant usages also opens up an agenda for examining the varying intensities at which technology operates
State work and the testing concours of citizenship
Anyone trying to be a citizen has to pass through a set of practices trying to be a state. This paper investigates some of the ways testing practices calibrate citizens, and in doing so, perform âthe state.â The paper focuses on three forms of citizenship testing, which it considers exemplary forms of âstate work,â and which all, in various ways, concern âmigration.â First, the constitution of a âborder crossing,â which requires an identity test configured by deceptibility. Second, the Dutch asylum process, in which âbeing gayâ can, in certain cases, be reason for being granted asylum, but where âbeing gayâ is also the outcome of an examination organized by suspicion. And third, the Dutch measurement of immigrantsâ âintegration,â which is comprised of a testing process in which such factishes as âbeing a member of societyâ and âbeing modernâ surface. Citizenship is analyzed in this paper as accrued and (re)configured along a migration trajectory that takes shape as a testing concours, meaning that subjects become citizens along a trajectory of testing practices. In contributing both to work on states and citizenship, and to work on testing, this paper thus puts forward the concept of citizenship testing as state work, where âstate work is the term for that kind of labor that most knows itself as comparison, equivalency, and exchange in the social realmâ (Harney, 2002, pp. 10â11). Throughout the testing practices discussed here, comparison, equivalency, and exchange figure prominently as the practical achievements of crafting states and citizens
Citizenship of Love: The Politics, Ethics and Aesthetics of Sexual Citizenship in a Kenyan Gay Music Video
Against the background of the current politicisation of homosexuality and the policing of sexual citizenship in Kenya and other African countries, this article offers an analysis of the Kenyan gay music video Same Love, released by the band Art Attack in 2016. Employing the concept of acts of citizenship (Isin and Nielsen 2008), the article foregrounds the political, ethical and aesthetic aspects through which the lyrics and images of Same Love perform an act of sexual citizenship mediated through art. It argues that as an artistic intervention, the video interrogates popular narratives of homosexuality as un-Kenyan, un-African and un-Christian and creates a sense of a citizenship that is yet to come: a pan-African, Christian and queer citizenship of love. Thus, the article explores the new possibilities of cultural, sexual and religious citizenship created through popular culture and public space in contemporary Africa
Troubling the exclusive privileges of citizenship: mobile solidarities, asylum seekers, and the right to work
This article discusses asylum seekers and the right to work in the UK. Differential access to the labour market is one of the ways in which the state maintains a distinction between British citizens, who âbelongâ, and non-citizens who do not. While such a policy approach garners widespread support amongst the general public of citizens, it does not go uncontested. This article discusses a UK-based campaign, âLet Them Workâ, which has sought to influence the government in extending the right to work to asylum seekers. In doing so, it demonstrates the ways in which the stratified regime of citizenship rights is contested politically, and explores how such contestation troubles the exclusive privileges of citizenship by enacting mobile solidarities from marginalised spaces
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