Call For Papers
AAG 2017 Boston (April 5-8, 2017)
Session title: Practicing Citizenship: What Roles for Conformity? Dissent? Protest?
Citizenship is often promoted as a way of consolidating a public or a polity that might otherwise seem divided or fractured. In this way, citizenship is imagined as more than a public or legal standing, but is promoted as a practice and way of being together that can provide a salve for a society’s wounds. This is evident in a range of contemporary settings, from the citizenship education programs in many western school curricula to international efforts to foster citizenship in post-conflict settings.
Used in this way, citizenship can seem to imply conformance with a set of rules and expectations about how an individual should be in public, encompassing their comportment, the ideas and arguments that are acceptable, and ways of relating to each other. Critics have argued that encouraging citizenship as a salve for conflict and division, however, is a way of challenging dissent, depoliticizing it, and of delegitimizing dissent and protest. In this way, citizenship is enrolled in post-political consensus. Yet around the world, we see expressions of dissent and protest, often invoking agents’ rights as citizens or attempting to expand the boundaries of citizenship and the possibilities for dissent and challenges to political structures and institutions. These examples often highlight the hegemony of particular assumptions about and practices of citizenship; in so doing, they enable nuanced understandings of the relationships between apparent conformity, dissent, and citizenship.
We invite paper submissions that address the practice of citizenship, the acceptability and legitimacy of behaviors, and the political challenges that citizenship – as an idea, a practice, and a set of values – enables and constrains. Topics might include, but are not limited to:
* The values that implicitly underpin citizenship discourses and practices
* Protest and dissent in authoritarian or ‘non-democratic’ states
* The relationships between a politics and ethic of care, citizenship and dissent
* The conditions under which the right to dissent and protest are legitimately challenged
* The ways in which dissent and protest are managed in conflictual or divided societies
* The possibility that apparent conformity may be used to challenge political assumptions and practices
* The relationships between citizenship, belonging and democracy
If interested in participating in these sessions, please send abstracts of 250 words to Lynn Staeheli (lynn.staeheli@durham.ac.uk) or Sandy Marshall (djmarshall@email.arizona.edu) by 10 October 2016.