Towards cultural citizenship? Cultural rights and cultural policy in Taiwan

This article reviews existing literature on the construction of cultural citizenship, and argues that cultural citizenship expands the concept of ‘citizenship’, promotes citizens' consciousness and ensures the protection of minority rights. Since the 1990s, three cultural policies have arisen related to cultural citizenship in Taiwan: ‘Community Renaissance’, ‘Multicultural Policy’ and the ‘Announcement of Cultural Citizenship’. ‘Cultural citizenship’ has expanded the concept of citizenship in two ways. First, it has led to the consideration of the minority rights of Taiwanese indigenous peoples, the Hakkas, foreign brides and migrant workers in ‘citizenship’; and second, it has placed emphasis on ‘cultural rights’ in addition to civil rights, political rights and social rights. This article begins by exploring what approach to cultural citizenship is used in cultural policy, and what approach is suitable for practising cultural citizenship in Taiwan. I argue that minority groups practise their cultural rights with the public participation of Community Renaissance. Taiwan's case bears out Stevenson's view: a society of actively engaged citizens requires both the protection offered by rights and opportunities to participate. Finally, this article shows the challenges and contradictions of cultural citizenship in Taiwan: the loss of autonomy and the continuation of cultural inequality.     

Citizenship education in divided societies: teachers' perspectives in Northern Ireland

This article aimed to investigate in what ways teachers' developing understandings of citizenship education in a divided society reflect discourses around national citizenship and controversial issues. Based on thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with 13 post-primary teachers in Northern Ireland undertaking an in-service programme in citizenship, findings indicate that the controversial nature of past conflict maintains its sensitivity in the educational context though other categories of potential exclusion, such as race and sexuality, compete for space in educational discourse and teaching. Few teachers used controversial issues identified as challenging hegemonic beliefs as an opportunity for role modelling citizenship. However, teachers rarely explored the complex interlinkages between traditional and alternative categories of exclusion. It is argued that this may render teachers' understandings of citizenship and societal conflict disconnected, which in turn may hinder the potential for citizenship education to address societal divisions and to promote active peace in the long term.     

Incorporating immigrants as foreigners: multicultural politics in Japan

With the growth of immigrant population over the past couple of decades, a ‘multicultural’ discourse has emerged in Japan. A notable point is that immigrants are expected to be incorporated into the host society primarily as foreigners rather than as Japanese nationals with full citizenship rights. The purpose of this article is to understand this prevailing mode of immigrant incorporation and to consider the comparative implications. By examining the discursive aspects of claims-making on behalf of both old-timer and newcomer immigrants, I argue that the underlying opportunity structures have been reproduced in each phase of immigration-related development in Japan, facilitating the use of the ‘foreigner’ category in advocacy efforts. Official recognition of the category has also helped to further institutionalize it as the main target of immigrant policy. In comparative perspective, ‘incorporation as foreigners’ can be understood as a variant of the ethnic model of immigration regimes in that it tends to reinforce the dominant ethnocultural conception of Japanese nationhood.     

Abjects or agents? Camps,contests and the creation of ‘political space’

The ‘Urdu-speaking population’ in Bangladesh, displaced by the Partition in 1947 and made ‘stateless’ by the Liberation War of 1971, exemplifies some of the key problems facing uprooted populations. Exploring differences of ‘camp’ and ‘non-camp’ based displacement, this article represents a critical evaluation of the way ‘political space’ is contested at the local level and what this reveals about the nature and boundaries of citizenship. Semi-structured and narrative interviews conducted among ‘camp’ and ‘non-camp’ based ‘Urdu-speakers’ found that citizenship status has been profoundly affected by the spatial dynamics of settlement. However, it also revealed the ways in which ‘formal’ status is subverted – the moments of negotiation in which claims to political being are made. In asking how and when a ‘stateless’ population is able to ‘access’ citizenship, through which processes and by which means, it reveals the tension, ambiguity and conceptual limitations of ‘statelessness’ and citizenship, unearthing a reality of partial, shifting and deceptively permeable terrain. In doing so, it also reveals the dissonance and discord (constitutive of an ‘us’ and ‘them’ divide) upon which the creation of ‘political space’ may rely. Citizenship functions to exclude and, therefore, it is very often born of contestation.     

Mothering as a citizenship practice: an intersectional analysis of ‘carework’ and ‘culturework’ in non-normative mother–child identities

In this article, a comparative analysis is presented of two ethnographic case studies on mothering practices in Belgium. Interviews with, and participant observation among, both undocumented migrant mothers from the South and Belgian white adoptive mothers of black Ethiopian-born children provide an insight into the way in which mothering plays an important role in the pursuit of citizenship. In our analysis, we draw on critical theorizations of citizenship from feminist, multicultural and globalization perspectives, and of care, intimacy and the affective in order to show how mothering can be viewed as a citizenship practice that transcends boundaries of the private, public and the nation. In their ‘carework’ and ‘culturework’, both undocumented migrant and white adoptive mothers negotiate prevalent ideologies of mothering that are often exclusionary of their own and their children's sense of identity and belonging. Their mothering involves building new networks and strengthening their children's identities in culturally creative ways. We argue that although these mothering practices are embedded in a multiplicity of intersecting privileges and inequalities, within restraints imposed by the nation-state context, this carework attests to the agentic capacity of mothering and its potential to affect politics of inclusion, recognition and changing hegemonic understandings of citizenship and belonging.     

Negotiating new conjunctures of citizenship: experiences of ‘illegality’ in Burmese-Rohingya and Bangladeshi migrant enclaves in Karachi

In this article, I examine aspects of recent shifts in Pakistani citizenship norms and the implications for migrant populations. In doing so, I investigate how the coalescing of national security concerns with broader issues of immigration has brought ‘illegal’ migrants like the Burmese-Rohingya and Bangladeshis into the state's documented embrace. My purpose is threefold: to record the modalities of change through the discourse of ‘illegality’ which articulate the exigencies of the ‘war on terror’; to explore the implications of such change on certain Muslim migrant populations resident in Pakistan for several decades; and, through these discussions, to show how citizenship and belonging have played out in a very different way for them. The subject of immigration/migration and illegality in Pakistan, especially in the post-9/11 frame, has remained largely below the threshold of academic attention.     

Citizenship as a weapon

The focus of this article is on citizenship in its juridical sense. Other theorists, especially communitarians and civic republicans, have attempted to expand the idea of citizenship to include a social/political sense; they advocate expanding citizenship beyond its juridical confines to include civic participation as one of the hallmarks of citizenship. A new stage of expansion has begun; it is represented by those who want to make citizenship more multiple and flexible, to see citizenship in a more ethical/normative sense. These expansionist approaches do not jettison the juridical sense of citizenship. In fact, they build upon it. Therefore, these conceptions of citizenship become problematic to the extent that the juridical building block becomes problematic. Thus, the first task is to problematize this juridical sense of citizenship. This article explores a different critical path than the ones typically taken. It pushes the envelope by thinking about citizenship as a weapon. While more exposés of administrative and political abuses involving citizenship claims and issues are needed, this analysis unearths deeper, more fundamental problems with the concept of citizenship. Minimally, it pushes the debate beyond how inclusive or expansive citizenship should be made. It calls for a radical reappraisal of citizenship by recognizing citizenship as a weapon.     

Through the European looking glass: citizenship tests in the USA,Australia, and Canada

Discussing new or recently reformed citizenship tests in the USA, Australia, and Canada, this article asks whether they amount to a restrictive turn of new world citizenship, similar to recent developments in Europe. I argue that elements of a restrictive turn are noticeable in Australia and Canada, but only at the level of political rhetoric, not of law and policy, which remain liberal and inclusive. Much like in Europe, the restrictive turn is tantamount to Muslims and Islam moving to the center of the integration debate.     

Workers without rights as citizens at the margins

This article presents a normative account of citizenship which requires respect for labour rights, as much as it requires respect for other human rights. The exclusion of certain categories of workers, such as domestic workers, from these rights is wrong. This article presents domestic workers as marginal citizens who are unfairly deprived of certain labour rights in national legal orders. It also shows that international human rights law counteracts the marginal legal status of this group of workers. By being attached to everyone simply by virtue of being human, irrespective of nationality, human rights can complement citizenship rights when both are viewed as normative standards. The example of domestic work as it has been approached in international human rights law in recent years shows that certain rights of workers are universal. Their enjoyment cannot depend on citizenship as legal status or on regular residency. The enjoyment of labour rights as human rights depends, and should only depend, on the status of someone as a human being who is also a worker.     

Women's interpretations of the right to legal abortion in Mexico City: citizenship,experience and clientelism

In April 2007, after a period of intense social debate, the Mexico City Legal Assembly legalized abortion during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, which was an unprecedented development in women's rights in Mexico. Within the context of a proliferation of public discourses about women's citizenship rights changes in women's social status in Mexico, this article explores the extent to which the newly legalized character of abortion is interpreted by women as a right. Drawing on 24 interviews with women who had a legal termination of pregnancy between 2008 and 2009, this research shows that legalization opens up new and complex relationships between women as subjects of rights and the state. Such relationships are expressed as three discursive figures: legal abortion (1) as a concession from the government, (2) as ‘excessive’ tolerance by the state, and (3) as a right to be protected and guaranteed. The analysis shows that women's interpretations of the right to legal abortion are mediated by profound transformations, which Mexican society is currently undergoing. These include changes related to a shift from a clientist political culture to one more framed in terms of citizenship, the subjective effects of family planning policies, and their ambivalent relationships with Catholic notions of women and motherhood, and the effects of feminist discourses of women's citizenship, abortion, and reproductive rights.