Subjectivity Citizenship And Belonging In Law

This collection of articles critically examines legal subjectivity and ideas of citizenship inherent in legal thought. The chapters offer a novel perspective on current debates in this area by exploring the connections between public and political issues as they intersect with more intimate sets of relations and private identities. Covering issues as diverse as autonomy, vulnerability and care, family and work, immigration control, the institution of speech, and the electorate and the right to vote, they provide a broader canvas upon which to comprehend more complex notions of citizenship, personhood, identity and belonging in law, in their various ramifications.

This collection of articles critically examines legal subjectivity and ideas of citizenship inherent in legal thought. The chapters offer a novel perspective on current debates in this area by exploring the connections between public and political issues as they intersect with more intimate sets of relations and private identities. Covering issues as diverse as autonomy, vulnerability and care, family and work, immigration control, the institution of speech, and the electorate and the right to vote, they provide a broader canvas upon which to comprehend more complex notions of citizenship, personhood, identity and belonging in law, in their various ramifications. Chapter 7 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

The notion of equality in the American system is explored through individual discussions of race, sex, religion, ethnic background asking the question who belongs?

Weaving together theoretical, historical, and legal approaches, this book offers a fresh perspective on the modern revival of the concept of allegiance, identifying and contextualising its evolving association with theories of citizenship.

This edited volume is the first to focus on how concepts of citizenship diversify and stimulate the long-standing field of law and literature, and vice versa. Building on existing research in law and literature as well as literature and citizenship studies, the collection approaches the triangular relationship between citizenship, law and literature from a variety of disciplinary, conceptual and political perspectives, with particular emphasis on the performative aspect inherent in any type of social expression and cultural artefact. The sixteen chapters in this volume present literature as carrying multifarious, at times opposing energies and impulses in relation to citizenship. These range from providing discursive arenas for consolidating, challenging and re-negotiating citizenship to directly interfering with or inspiring processes of law-making and governance. The volume opens up new possibilities for the scholarly understanding of citizenship along two axes: Citizenship-as-Literature: Enacting Citizenship and Citizenship-in-Literature: Conceptualising Citizenship.

This book outlines a critical theory of citizenship, with an emphasis on how citizenship institutes power relations and organises the rights and obligations of those who become its subjects. Whether it is the question of the rights of animals, children, migrants, minorities, mothers, or mountains, and whether such rights are protected or guaranteed by national law, international law, or human rights law, the issue of citizenship has already indelibly marked the 21st century. As an institution, citizenship governs the relationship between a polity and its peoples by dividing them into citizens and noncitizens, with differentiated rights and obligations. So necessarily, this book argues, citizenship is an institution of domination and emancipation that brings into play the struggles of those who want to protect certain privileges and the struggles of those who are against being caught in either second-class or noncitizen categories. Deconstructing dominant theories and practices of citizenship, a critical theory of citizenship must, therefore, not only analyse intersecting rights, but also connect citizenship to these broader social struggles. For it is these struggles, the book maintains, that give meaning to citizenship itself. The book will be of interest to scholars and students in sociolegal studies, sociology, politics, and as well as those working in citizenship, migration, and refugee studies.

"This book outlines a critical theory of citizenship, with an emphasis on how citizenship institutes power relations and organizes the rights and obligations of those who become its subjects. Whether it is the question of the rights of animals, children, migrants, minorities, mothers or mountains, and whether such rights are protected or guaranteed by national law, international law, or human rights law, the issue of citizenship has already indelibly marked the 21st century. As an institution, citizenship governs the relationship between a polity and its peoples by dividing them into citizens and noncitizens, with differentiated rights and obligations. So necessarily, this book argues, citizenship is an institution of domination and emancipation that brings into play the struggles of those who want to protect certain privileges and the struggles of those who are against being caught in either second-class or noncitizen categories. Deconstructing dominant theories and practices of citizenship, a critical theory of citizenship must, therefore, not only analyse intersecting rights, but also connect citizenship to these broader social struggles. For it is these struggles, the book maintains, that give meaning to citizenship itself. The book will be of interest to scholars and students in sociolegal studies, sociology, politics, and as well as those working in citizenship, migration and refugee studies"--

Weaving together theoretical, historical, and legal approaches, this book offers a fresh perspective on the modern revival of the concept of allegiance, identifying and contextualising its evolving association with theories of citizenship.

This book presents an answer to the question of why modern legal institutions and the idea of citizenship are important for leading a free life. The majority of views in political and legal philosophy regard the law merely as a useful instrument, employed to render our lives more secure and to enable us to engage in cooperate activities more efficiently. The view developed here defends a non-instrumentalist alternative of why the law matters. It identifies the law as a constitutive feature of our identities as citizens of modern states. The constitutivist argument rests on the (Kantian) assumption that a person's practical identity (its normative self-conception as an agent) is the result of its actions. The law co-constitutes these identities because it maintains the external conditions that are necessary for the actions performed under its authority. Modern legal institutions provide these external prerequisites for achieving a high degree of individual self-constitution and freedom. Only public principles can establish our status as individuals who pursue their life plans and actions as a matter of right and not because others contingently happen to let us do so. The book thereby provides resources for a reply to anarchist challenges to the necessity of legal ordering.