Citizenship studies: An introduction

About the book: From women's rights, civil rights, and sexual rights for gays and lesbians to disability rights and language rights, we have experienced in the past few decades a major trend in Western nation-states towards new claims for inclusion. This trend has echoed around the world: from the Zapatistas to Chechen and Kurdish nationalists, social and political movements are framing their struggles in the languages of rights and recognition, and hence, of citizenship. Citizenship has thus become an increasingly important axis in the social sciences. Social scientists have been rethinking the role of political agent or subject. Not only are the rights and obligations of citizens being redefined, but also what it means to be a citizen has become an issue of central concern. As the process of globalization produces multiple diasporas, we can expect increasingly complex relationships between homeland and host societies that will make the traditional idea of national citizenship problematic. As societies are forced to manage cultural difference and associated tensions and conflict, there will be changes in the processes by which states allocate citizenship and a differentiation of the category of citizen. This book constitutes the most authoritative and comprehensive guide to the terrain. Drawing on a wealth of interdisciplinary knowledge, and including some of the leading commentators of the day, it is an essential guide to understanding modern citizenship

Religion and the modernization of the body

Discourse analysis, social constructionism, rhetorical studies, literary studies and in general the linguistic turn have hijacked the actual, living breathing, recalcitrant and difficult body for research on texts. Of course, bodies are open for interpretation, but there is an important difference for example between age and ageing. In this discussion Bryan S. Turner looks at actual bio-medico-technical changes to the body and the consequences for religions

Contemporary Citizenship: Four Types

The paper begins with an examination of three ideal types citizenship which are not necessarily mutual exclusive. The first type is national citizenship, typically associated with ethno-nationalism. The second form is social citizenship or ‘welfare citizenship’ refers to the creation of social rights and is closely connected to civil-society institutions rather than to the state or market. The third form of citizenship identifies the citizen with participation in the work force emphasizing self-reliance and autonomy. In this discussion, I argue that with economic globalization and the development of neo-liberal strategies the various forms of citizenship have converged towards a new model of passive citizenship in which the state is or has withdrawn from commitment to full employment and the provision of social security, especially universal provision of welfare services, and civil-society institutions have been eroded. The result is the emergence of the apolitical,isolated citizen as consumer. The fourth model of citizenship presupposes a consumer society, a weak state and the decline of civic institutions, where the passive citizen becomes a consumer of privatized goods and services. The rise of a fourth model of citizenship – the consumer-citizen – can be interpreted as a logical consequence of financialization.1 1 Some aspects of this chapter first appeared in Bryan S. Turner (2010), ‘Ralf Dahrendorf on Citizenship and Life Chances’, Citizenship Studies, 14 (2): 237–43

Vulnerability and entitlements

The article examines the merits of both human rights and citizenship as systems to protect vulnerable individuals. The idea of vulnerability is presented as a more reliable concept than the dignity of the individual in comparative research. The body is basic to vulnerability

Mary Douglas on Purity and Danger: An Interview

This interview with Mary Douglas took place at Lancaster University in the Religious Studies Department. The main focus of the interview was her recently published book, Purity and Danger, which had already become a classic of British anthropology. The questions and answers ranged mainly over the differences between the physical body, representations of the body, the body as a classificatory system, and social constructivism. Douglas’s early academic years and the influences on her work, such as the role of Roman Catholicism in her childhood and youth, were discussed. The interview concluded with speculation about the connections between anthropology and colonialism, and how she responded to those developments

Globalization east and west

© Bryan S Turner & Habibul Haque Khondker 2010. Do we confuse globalization for Americanization? What are the distinctive elements in the interplay of the local and the global?This much needed book is the first full length text to examine globalization from the perspective of both the West and the East. It considers globalization as a general social and economic process, and the challenges it presents for Western social science. The meaning of a global perspective is explored through various concrete examples: religion, migration, medicine, terrorism, global disasters, citizenship, multiculturalism, media and popular culture. Introduced with a forward from Roland Robertson the book is brimming with novel interpretations and fresh insights that will contribute to illuminating the practical realities of globalization

Cittadinanza, multiculturalismo e pluralismo giuridico: diritti culturali e teoria del riconoscimento critico

Abstract not availabl

Fractured identities: injury and the balletic body

Social worlds shape human bodies and so it is inevitable that there are strong relationships between the body, professional dance and identity. In this article we draw on Bourdieu’s notions of habitus, and various forms of capital, as the main theoretical framework for our discussion. Our ethnography of the balletic body elicited dancers and ex-dancers’ perceptions of their bodies and sought to reveal some of the facets of their embodied habitus. The sheer physicality of their working lives - of feeling exhausted, sweaty and out of breath - is something dancers (like all athletes) become ‘addicted to’. Ageing and injury can reveal this compulsion to dance and so dancers invariably find it very difficult to, for example, give up class once they retire from the stage; or miss a performance if they have a ‘slight injury’. In other words, the vocational calling to dance is so overwhelming that their balletic body is their identity. In addition, there is an unremitting loop between individual habitus and institutional habitus (the ballet company), which affects both the meaning and management of injury. All our informants at the Royal Ballet (London: n = 20) had suffered dance injuries. The injured, dancing body is perceived as an inevitable part of a career in ballet. Everyone spoke of the improved athleticism of dancers, and of the expansion in facilities to maintain healthy dancers. However, most dancers can expect several major injuries during their careers. Such epiphanies force dancers to confront their embodiment, and their thoughts invariably turn to their body, career and self. Critical injuries threaten to terminate a dancer’s career and so endanger their embodied sense of self. On a more everyday level, dancing and performing with painful, niggling injuries is the norm

The thinking citizenship series

The introduction to the new series of articles in Citizenship Studies

Pandangan Barat terhadap Masyarakat Sipil dalam Islam

Masyarakat madani (civil society) memang wacana Barat yang terus berpengaruh di dunia, termasuk dunia Islam. Berikut adalah pendapat Bryan S. Turner