From ‘Norwegian citizens’ via ‘citizens plus’ to ‘dual political membership’? Status,aspirations, and challenges ahead

The Norwegian citizenship regime has gradually changed to accommodate some of the demands voiced by or on behalf of the Sami. This article describes and analyses these changes in terms of changing citizenship status for the Sami as a gradual move from ‘Norwegian citizens’ via ‘citizens plus’ to ‘dual citizens’. Sami who are registered in the electoral roster for elections to the Sami Parliament possess political rights connected to two different political systems in Norway: one with membership based on territoriality, the other with membership based on descent. The author argues that the ‘people-to-people’ approach that currently seems to guide Sami aspirations for the political future ignores the condition of dual political membership and is thus ill-suited as a point of departure for discussions of the desirable scope of the future constitutional space of the Sami Parliament in Norway.     

Contested Citizenship and Social Exclusion: Adolescent Arab American Immigrants' Views of the Social Contract

Drawing from social contract theory, we explore how some adolescent Arab immigrants' (n = 99) sensitivity to the image of their ethnic group as enemies of America colors their interpretation of the social contract. Analyses of data collected in 1997 reveal that those youth who reported that the American media portray Arab people and nations as enemies of the United States are more attuned to personal experiences of prejudice based on their ethnic identity and are more dubious that the tenets of the social contract apply equally across groups. Negative images of Arab Americans were well in place prior to September 11, 2001, a pivotal moment that altered the lives of Arab Americans as well as the discourse on immigration and citizenship.     

Developing sociopolitical consciousness of race and social class inequality in adolescents attending progressive and no excuses urban secondary schools

Sociopolitical consciousness refers to an individual’s ability to critically analyze the political, economic, and social forces shaping society and one’s status in it. A growing body of scholarship reports that high levels of sociopolitical consciousness are predictive in marginalized adolescents of a number of key outcomes including resilience and civic engagement. The present study explored the role that urban secondary schools can play in fostering adolescents’ sociopolitical consciousness through a longitudinal, mixed methods investigation of more than 400 adolescents attending “progressive” and “no excuses” charter high schools. Analyses revealed that, on average, students attending progressive high schools demonstrated sizeable shifts in their sociopolitical consciousness of racial inequality, and students attending no excuses high schools demonstrated sizeable shifts in their sociopolitical consciousness of social class inequality. Qualitative interviews with participating students offered insight into the curriculum, programming, and practices that these youth perceived as contributing to these differences in their sociopolitical consciousness.     

Positive youth development profiles of cross-age peer mentors

To engage more youth in service, we require further research on the characteristics of youth who serve, particularly disadvantaged youth with limited access to formal service opportunities. This study investigated the positive youth development characteristics of New Zealand youth who decided to mentor younger peers in the Stars program for the first time (n = 109), those who returned to mentor for a subsequent year (n = 48), and similar youth not involved in Stars (n = 51) to determine what characteristics differentiate these groups. Returning mentors had the highest levels of social competency and involvement and a strong leadership orientation. New mentors had the second highest levels of leadership orientation but the lowest levels of social competency and involvement. The propensity for leadership in mentors was associated with having many positive adult role models. Strategies to engage more young people in service as cross-age peer mentors are discussed.     

The apple,the tree,and a space to grow in

The idea for the study presented in Spanish Legacies: the coming of age of the second generation was sparked by the series of unrests from immigrant youths in a number of cities across Europe. The discontent expressed by the young generation of immigrants presented a sharp indicator of how little is known about young people of foreign origin growing up as immigrant residents in Europe, despite their significant number (10 per cent in France, 13 per cent in Spain and 15 per cent in Ireland by 2010). The success or failure of immigrants’ integrational processes, considering cultural factors and language barriers as challenges experienced by immigrants, can have major political and social impact on the regions where they reside. It is these challenges that are investigated in depth, in this book.     

Queer in America: Citizenship for Sexual Minority Youth

Sexual minority youth face many challenges in their daily lives. This article considers the barriers that hinder their opportunities for citizenship development in 3 key developmental domains: family, faith, and education. Theoretical perspectives on sexuality and citizenship provide a lens through which to view examples of settings in which sexual minority youth have created new spaces within which to explore their identities, develop community, and create social change. These settings include online communities for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning youth, and high school Gay-Straight Alliances.     

Paperwork,patronage, and citizenship: the materiality of everyday interactions with bureaucracy in Tamil Nadu,India

This article explores the material practices through which lower-caste and poor villagers engage with bureaucracy in contemporary India. We take documents and paperwork – such as ration cards and community certificates – as a ‘lens’ through which to explore how paper materiality is infused with the politics of power, patronage, and identity. The article brings ethnography from rural Tamil Nadu, South India, in conversation with two bodies of literature: one on the materiality of bureaucracy and one on the nature of political mediation in contemporary India. We demonstrate how everyday engagements with paperwork as well as processes of applying, form filling, and securing recommendations are constitutive of social and political relationships and, ultimately, of citizenship itself. Political mediation around paperwork and bureaucracy generates a hierarchy of citizens rather than equal citizenship for all, yet ordinary villagers transpire as anything but passive. Drawing on patronage networks, engaging in affective performances, and navigating a politics of identity, they actively negotiate access to the state in an attempt to claim their rights as citizens.     

Disciplinary citizenship in South Korean NGOs' narratives of resettlement for North Korean refugees

This article explores how non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in South Korea articulate and implement disciplinary citizenship in the resettlement of North Korean refugees. Fieldwork based on in-depth interviews reveals that NGOs play a pivotal role in carrying out the state-led resettlement project at the local level. As disciplinary agents, NGOs mirror the state's policy in their emphasis on self-sufficiency and workfare as they encourage North Koreans to become economically productive citizens. Concomitantly, they emphasize civic contributions and volunteerism as a remedy for improving the social reputation of North Koreans as welfare recipients to that of contributing citizens. This focus on active, responsible citizenship aims at disciplining North Koreans to become docile subjects at the bottom of the social ladder, despite persistent economic difficulties and social marginalization in South Korea. Thus, refugees are pressured not only to achieve economic self-sufficiency, but to contribute to society in order to claim their sociocultural citizenship.     

Gender and nation

The article outlines some of the main dimensions in which gender relations are crucial in understanding and analysing the phenomena of nations and nationalism, and the specific boundaries of inclusions and exclusions that they construct. Three major dimensions of nationalist projects that relate to citizenship, culture and origin are differentiated. In each of them gender relations play specific roles and have mobilized specific struggles. The article looks at the dualistic nature of women's citizenship, as both included and excluded from the general body of citizens. Even when there is a formal equality of women in their political rights as citizens, other modes of exclusion in the political, social and civil spheres continue to operate. The particular ways in which the entry of women into the military has been linked to struggles for women's equality as citizens are examined in this context. In relation to national cultures, both secular and religious, the article examines the ways in which women play the roles of cultural transmitters as well as cultural signifiers of the national collectivity. The last part of the article examines the role of women as biological reproducers of ‘the nation’ and how a variety of means are taken in order to ensure that the biological reproduction will fall within the legitimate boundaries of the collectivity.     

Transnationalism or assimilation? Patterns of sociopolitical adaptation among Canadian business immigrants

This study analyses patterns of sociopolitical incorporation among immigrant entrepreneurs in Ontario who entered Canada under the auspices of the federal Business Immigration Program [BIP] between 1984 and 1994. The analysis focuses specifically on issues of transnationalism, adaptation to mainstream social and political institutions, and citizenship. In-depth interviews of a sample of BIP entrepreneurs reveal that, over a period of eight to eighteen years, respondents generally achieved a high level of political awareness, maintained weak transnational ties, and naturalized at an extraordinarily high rate. In the process of sociopolitical integration, respondents relied primarily on human forms of capital, especially English language proficiency and business skills, rather than on the social capital that inheres in ethnic communities and networks.     

Citizenship, migration and formations of class in urban France

This paper is an exploration of the configurations of citizenship that prevail in Paris, a globalizing city where the processes of capitalist change and transnational migration converge. I will focus on the ways that different class segments of its migrant population exercise citizenship in a context in which the ideologies of belonging and membership are being redrawn under the demands of neoliberal transformation. My argument is that efforts made to rework models of citizenship under neoliberalism contribute not only to the realignments of class, but they also galvanise ethnic divisions and sentiments of nativism in France and more broadly in Europe. In making this argument, I draw on the notion of citizenship regime to focus attention on the political, economic and ideological forces that condition the orientations of the state, policies and citizenry in the context of crises and change under capitalism while also problematizing the state capital nexus in relation to the formation of subjects as citizens. This article is a continuation of a larger scholarly project that seeks to explore the ways in which the analytical paradigms of political economy advance our understanding of the different dimensions of migration and capitalist change.     

Law and ‘race’ in the citizenship spaces of Myanmar: spatial strategies and the political subjectivity of the Burmese Chinese

As Myanmar undergoes political and societal transition, observers are asking questions about citizenship and ethnic identity. How does one think about citizenship and people's negotiations with law in political-legal regimes that do not subscribe to liberal democratic norms? This paper investigates how law marginalizes the Burmese Chinese minority in Myanmar and the nature of their legal participation. Since law asserts cultural power impacting the way people think and behave, we engage with the concept of legal consciousness to understand how perceptions of legal vulnerability shape political subjectivity ambivalently. The paper highlights the spatial strategies and everyday practices that the Burmese Chinese deploy to navigate oppressive laws, but signals that internal social divisions and geopolitical considerations deter collective action towards rights assertion. It argues that studying the multiple sites and scales through which law is engaged contributes towards recovering citizenship aspirations where engagement with power and authority are articulated differently from Western norms.     

Effects of the Positive Action Program on Indicators of Positive Youth Development Among Urban Youth

This study evaluated effects of Positive Action, a school-based social-emotional and character development intervention, on indicators of positive youth development (PYD) among a sample of low-income, ethnic minority youth attending 14 urban schools. The study used a matched-pair, cluster-randomized controlled design at the school level. A multiple-measure self-report protocol assessed four key strengths and resources for PYD: self-concept, peer affiliations, ethics, and social skills. Students (n = 1170) were assessed from grades 3 to 8; the duration of the intervention, with drop-outs and late entrants was included in analyses. Growth curve analyses revealed evidence of favorable program effects on each of the four types of resources. The study contributes to PYD research by providing evidence for school-based interventions in low-income, urban contexts for ethnic minority youth.     

Exposure and Exclusion: Disenfranchised Biological Citizenship among the First-Generation Korean Americans

Based on fieldwork with a highly uninsured and underinsured Korean American population, this article maps how the current healthcare system in the United States disenfranchises those of marginal insurance status. The vulnerability of these disenfranchised biological citizens is multiplied through exposure to disproportional health risks compounded by exclusion from essential healthcare. The first-generation Korean Americans, who commonly work in small businesses, face the double burden of increased health risks from long, stress-laden work hours and lack of access to healthcare due to the prohibitive costs of health insurance for small business owners. Even as their health needs become critical, their insurance status and costly medical bills discourage them from visiting healthcare institutions, leaving Korean Americans outside the ??political economy of hope?? (Good, Cult Med Psychiatry 52:61?C69, 2001). Through an ethnographic examination of the daily practice of doing-without-health among a marginalized sub-group in American society, this paper articulates how disenfranchised biological citizenship goes beyond creating institutional barriers to healthcare to shaping subjectivities of the disenfranchised.     

Faking it or making it: the politics of consumption and the precariousness of social mobility in South Africa

This article critically explores the complex and contradictory meanings attached to conspicuous consumption in an informal settlement on the outskirts of Johannesburg. It examines why un(der)employed young people, especially young Black men, view the trappings of wealth in their midst and dismiss them as ‘fake’. The article shows how the widespread concern with ‘faking it’ indexes the unstable links between consumption, status, and class differentiation in a time of generalized economic insecurity. Accordingly, it maintains that the accusation of ‘fakery’ is not only about jealousy and the dangers of being seen to accumulate money without redistributing it, but also a product of the precariousness that characterizes young people's lives. Ultimately, the article shows how consumption affords a unique window into the values, aspirations, and anxieties of young un(der)employed Black men in a context where ‘proper’ pathways to social mobility are, for most, completely out of reach.     

Hyphenated Selves: Muslim American Youth Negotiating Identities on the Fault Lines of Global Conflict

In the wake of the events of September 11, Muslim-American youth found that the multiple cultures within which they live were suddenly and alarmingly in conflict. The developmental consequences of living in a world fractured by religious and ethnic terror have yet to be determined for Muslim youth in the United States. This exploratory, mixed-method study begins to examine how Muslim youth negotiate their identities in these challenging times. Documented in the surveys, narrated in the interviews, and drawn into their identity maps, Muslim-American youth (n = 70) ages 12 to 18, vividly portrayed their interior lives as a dialectic labor of psychological reconciliation – piecing together what we call hyphenated selves. The results show that Muslim youth experience discrimination, sometimes to an extreme degree. We observed diversity in how youth deal with the challenges of growing up Muslim in post 9/11 US, ranging from “telling nobody” to policing each other within the Muslim community. In addition we found that males and females negotiate their Muslim and American identities in different ways.     

Adolescent Characteristics by Type of Long-Term Aim in Life

Surveys were administered to adolescents (N = 144) to determine if young people varied based on the type of long-term aims they held. Using cluster analysis, four groups emerged from the data: youth without clear long-term aims, youth with self-oriented long-term aims, youth with other-oriented long-term aims, and youth with both self- and other-oriented long-term aims. The latter two clusters represent potentially purposeful youth and the self-oriented cluster represents youth with meaning in their lives. Therefore, the authors were able to compare potentially purposeful youth to youth with meaning and to youth with neither purpose nor meaning in their lives. Youth with other-oriented long-term aims were more likely to be searching for a purpose, to have identified a purpose, to report higher levels of life satisfaction, and to score higher on openness. Implications for understanding the purpose construct and for fostering purpose among adolescents are addressed.     

Strategic citizens of America: transnational inequalities and transformation of citizenship

This article analyses the process whereby ‘natural' citizens of one country mobilize their resources so that their children receive by birthright, the citizenship of a rich liberal democracy. Utilizing the case of Turkish upper classes, who give birth in the USA in order to benefit from the jus soli principle, we trace the emergence of new inequalities at the intersection of multiple citizenship regimes. We show that, by mobilizing resources in markets of health care, travel, and real estate, those with means can acquire US citizenship for their children in expectation of future benefits. Because they are able to access ‘valuable' citizenships, these actors can strategically combine privileges within nation states with inequalities between citizenship regimes at the global level for the children. Their differential access to citizenship enhances the gate-keeping functions of citizenship. Based on these observations, we draw an analogy between citizenship and property regimes, understood broadly.     

‘Keeping silent’: the problem of citizenship for Lilian Thuram

Abstract

Drawing upon translations of the football player Lilian Thuram's critiques of French racism and immigration, as well as other English language sources on the condition of banlieue life in France, this essay explores the relationship between citizenship and representation. Rather than merely reading Thuram as an athlete, I situate him as a political figure. The essay reads Thuram philosophically: as a figure who is familiar with and thinks the French and European political through its philosophical history. It is argued that Thuram's critiques are inexplicable unless they are understood as a redress to the very philosophical core of European modernity. Instead of presuming an inevitable relationship between citizenship and representation, this essay seeks to understand how representation works in relation to questions of citizenship and the limits of citizenship in contemporary Europe for those who are defined as Berber, black or Arab.     

Under the cover of the kippah: on Jewish settlers,performance, and belonging in Israel/Palestine

What can a kippah – the Jewish head cover – reveal about settlers’ politics of belonging in the Israeli-Palestinian space? During fieldwork among settlers and Palestinians in the West Bank, I selectively put on and took off the kippah, using it to control social identity and interactions, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. This article interrogates my use of the kippah as a reflexive means of highlighting its powerful meanings and effects within the Israeli-Palestinian space. In showing how the wearing and removal of the kippah bears upon the social construction of Jewish identity, this article offers new insights into the sociopolitical significance of sartorial practices in Israel/Palestine. These insights contribute more broadly to debates at the intersection of studies of settler colonialism, material culture, identity, and performativity.