ASOA15070U Those who have and those who dont - Critical citizenship studies, migration and democracy

What is the meaning of ‘citizenship’ in liberal democratic states where migrants provide cheap labor without gaining access to basic civic rights or education? In 2016, the population of non-EU migrants in the European Union grew up to 22 million, but EU member states granted citizenship to less than 1 million persons. According to the UN’s Global Compact proposal governments will take more active efforts to integrate and settle 25.4 million refugees worldwide, but asylum seekers are not mentioned in the treaty.

Studies on critical citizenship show that access to refugee status, permanent residency or citizenship in Denmark and other EU countries have become restricted to few, socially privileged individuals given rising standards for language requirements and citizenship tests that restrict access particularly for women and vulnerable groups. At the same time, some countries, like Canada, contain right wing populist parties by granting migrants early access to voting and education. Self-organized migrants groups and activists in U.S. cities, in Italy, the UK, Denmark, Austria, Germany or Sweden use protest, strike, blockades, disruptive action, or hunger strikes and marches to ‘enact citizenship’ (Isin) symbolically gaining media support for political claims. However, migrants’ access to public voice and solidarity by majority citizens is limited through explicit and implicit boundaries of race/ethnicity, language, and ‘deservingness’ standards. Given that political theorists still disagree whether and if democracy depends on a shared national or local language, what is the impact of multilingual digital media in Danish, English, Arabic, Farsi and other migrant languages? Do new forms of cosmopolitan solidarity and translation challenge monolingual standards of citizenship? How did historic workers and feminist movements influence the struggle of current refugee families in the US or in Europe? The course approaches single themes from an interdisciplinary perspective based on empirical, cross-national comparison using mixed methods and single case studies on different regions and based on non-western, feminist and postcolonial perspectives of citizenship and democracy.