CFP: Negotiating citizenship across (post)colonial borders
RGS-IBG Annual International Conference, London, 30 August - 2 September 2016.
Deadline for abstracts: 12 February 2016
In a context of growing global mobility, and often fraught negotiations over in/exclusion from the nation-state at borders and in borderlands, the concept of citizenship – which lies at the heart of these negotiations – has been addressed in a variety of ways. These have included proposals for reformulated normative models of citizenship (Benhabib, 2004; Baubock, 1994; Soysal, 1994), but also an increasing call for explorations of citizenship as it is practised and lived in the everyday across borders (Ho, 2008; Staeheli et al., 2012). The everyday practice of citizenship may be especially complex in contexts where borders were demarcated by colonial powers in a particularly arbitrary manner, taking into scant consideration the indigenous groups inhabiting what became ‘borderlands’. Likewise, a continuing colonial present (Gregory, 2005) may impact profoundly on negotiations of citizenship between those from former colonies and former colonial powers.
Taking this as a starting point, this session seeks to examine citizenship through a postcolonial lens, unpacking the relationship between individuals and the nation-state and how it may change through crossing borders or inhabiting borderlands in (post)colonial contexts. In so doing, it aims to advance critical geographical scholarship on citizenship and the (post)colonial by interrogating the ways in which lingering colonial legacies have impacted and may continue to impact on how the nation-state attempts to control and govern bodies in space, and how this may be resisted. How do top-down and bottom-up understandings of citizenship interact in these contexts? How do individuals who cross borders or live in borderlands that can be considered (post)colonial negotiate citizenship? In what citizenship practices, both formal (e.g. voting, applying for residence) and informal (e.g. participating in social movements), do those attempting to cross or inhabiting (post)colonial borderlands engage? How do their social identities, such as ethnicity and gender, hinder or enable access to citizenship?
We would be interested in exploring these questions through papers addressing issues including the individual sense of citizenship in relation to terra, subalternity in the borderlands, political movements that address borders and belonging, and ethnicity/indigeneity and citizenship. We welcome papers that take historical or contemporary perspectives, and those that address (post)colonial borderlands and migration in both South-North and South-South contexts.
This session is organised by Cordelia Freeman (University of Nottingham) and Megan Ryburn (LSE)
Please email proposals (title with 200-250 word abstract) or queries to us at [log in to unmask] and [log in to unmask]
Dr Cordelia Freeman
School of Geography | University of Nottingham
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