Geoforum 64 (2015) 325–332
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Geoforum journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum
Editorial
Geographies of citizenship and everyday (im)mobility Justin Spinney a,⇑, Rachel Aldred b, Katrina Brown c a
School of Planning & Geography, Cardiff University, United Kingdom Faculty of Architecture and Built Environment, University of Westminster, United Kingdom c Social, Economic & Geographical Sciences, James Hutton Institute, United Kingdom b
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history: Received 27 August 2014 Received in revised form 12 October 2014 Accepted 28 April 2015 Available online 21 May 2015 Keywords: Citizenship Mobility Practice Identity Materiality
a b s t r a c t This introduction and the collection of papers it introduces seek to progress debates on the intersections between citizenship, practice, materiality, and mobility. In contrast to more static framings of formal citizenship where subjects are considered equal in terms of enjoying the same safeties and freedoms, in this introduction citizenship is conceived of as a set of processual, performative and everyday relations between spaces, objects, citizens and non-citizens that ebbs and flows. Through the papers that comprise this collection we see the process of citizenship becoming fragmented in both urban and rural mobility spaces. We also see it as being shaped by particular technologies and artefacts which construct and relate mobile subjects to each other and the state in particular ways. Our key contribution lies in outlining three related areas where work informed by the mobilities turn could focus: Firstly we seek to demonstrate that far from being a product of citizenship status, mobility must be seen as actively constituting citizenship relations. Secondly we seek to demonstrate the roles that styles of movement and the ‘stuff’ of mobility play in shaping the extent of citizenship for particular mobile publics. Thirdly we illustrate the ways in which cross-border flows relating to concepts such as cosmopolitan and ecological citizenship can act through mobility practices to challenge locally held notions of appropriate mobility and inevitably citizenship. Ultimately what we argue and intend to demonstrate is that mobility is such an important, pervasive and politicised element of late modernity that the ways in which we move and confer meanings on movement, cut across and even over-ride more established relationships between social and cultural identity, citizenship and the state. Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction Whilst dominated by Law and Political Science, citizenship is an inter-disciplinary area of study to which geographers have made a strong theoretical and empirical contribution (Aldred, 2010; Barnett and Low, 2004; Bell, 1995; Blunt, 2007; Cresswell, 2006b, 2013; Painter and Philo, 1995; Sassen, 2009; Sheller and Urry, 2006; Smith, 1990; Valentine and Skelton, 2007; Valentine, 2007, 2008a, 2008b). Employing insights primarily from Mobilities studies and Science and Technology Studies, this collection seeks to progress debates on ‘actually existing citizenship’, by demonstrating how rather than being seen as passive outcomes of citizenship, forms of mobility – in relation to objects, subjects and places actively constitute citizenship as both a status and set of relations. Citizenship has traditionally been more concerned with the relationship between individuals, communities and the ⇑ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses:
[email protected] (J. Spinney),
[email protected]. uk (R. Aldred),
[email protected] (K. Brown). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2015.04.013 0016-7185/Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
nation-state, and the ways in which rights and responsibilities are distributed. The papers in this collection seek to build upon more recent theorisations of citizenship (Cresswell, 2013; Desforges et al., 2005; Isin and Wood, 1999; Painter and Philo, 1995) conceptualising this relationship as a diffuse, ‘‘‘social-cul tural’ form of becoming wrapped up in questions about who is accepted as a worthy, valuable and responsible member of an everyday community of living and working’’ (Painter and Philo, 1995:115). In contrast to more static theorisations where citizens are considered equal in terms of the same safeties and freedoms (Lewis, 2004:9), and ‘finished’, here citizenship is conceived as a set of processual, performative and everyday relations between spaces, objects, citizens and non-citizens that ebbs and flows (2004:3). When exploring the relationship between citizenship and identity, scholarship has focused overwhelmingly on racial, ethnic, class, gender and sexual social identities (Browne and Nash, 2013; Valentine, 2008b), and on the relationship between groups/ individuals and the nation/state (Billig, 1995; Ehrkamp and Leitner, 2006; Kofman, 1995; Yuval-Davis, 2003). Here mobility has been
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the focus, the emphasis has been on national border crossings; migration, trans-nationality and disapora (Blunt, 2007; Kobayashi, 1995). However, it is now widely recognised that intensifications of cross border flows and mobility are transforming institutions, social structures and group identities (Urry, 2000) not only across national borders but within borders. Indeed as Cresswell (2013) has argued, whilst citizenship is produced at many different ‘sites’, it is increasingly the relations between these which are under scrutiny, and the ways in which differently mobile subjects struggle to become equal citizens. Central to these struggles are the ways in which different mobility practices, materialities and technologies inform the ways in which movement makes up the subject. As Latour (2008) has convincingly argued, objects and artefacts ‘push back’ on humans, shaping their conduct and how others relate to them in particular ways. Even the seemingly universal identity of being human is troubled by the range of technologies with which mobile identities are performed (Barratt, 2011). Accordingly, it is important to avoid the trap of assuming parity in the ability to construct a group or individual identity (Isin and Wood, 1999:21). Rather citizenship is theorised not as a fixed right and privilege but an ongoing relational negotiation of identity and difference where the resources required for success are unevenly distributed (22). Modern citizenship has conferred the legal right to strive for certain things but has not conferred the right to possess them (28). Thus we take seriously notions of mobile materiality and practice and the work they do in ‘making up the citizen’ (Cresswell, 2013:81). What we argue and intend to demonstrate through this set of papers is that mobility is such an important, pervasive and politicised element of late modernity, that the ways in which we are mobile and come to think about mobility, cut across and even over-ride more established relationships between social and cultural identity and citizenship. In this collection we see the process of citizenship becoming fragmented in both urban and rural mobility spaces. We also see it as being shaped by and distributed amongst particular technologies and artefacts which construct and relate mobile subjects to each other and the state in particular ways. The key contributions of the assembled papers lie in three related areas: Firstly we seek to illustrate the importance of ways of being mobile in producing subjects who are more or less ‘citizen’. Secondly we seek to demonstrate the ways in which particular groups mobilise representations, artefacts and technologies to conduct mobility and define the extent of citizenship for particular mobile publics. Thirdly we illustrate the ways in which cross-border flows relating to concepts such as cosmopolitan and ecological citizenship intersect with and transform everyday mobile practices and social identities. Very briefly the papers in this collection are summarised as follows. Spinney, Kullman and Golbuff explore the ways in which Heavy Goods Vehicle (HGV) drivers are increasingly constructed as less-than citizen ‘safety’ technologies, urban spaces and the image of the ecological citizen-cyclist. Flemsæter, Setten and Brown explore different conceptualizations of appropriate outdoor recreational conduct through lenses of national identity and situated mobile practices, demonstrating the tensions between national and local, ‘traditional’ and emergent articulations of good citizenship. Gaete-Reyes examines how female wheelchair users struggle with other mobile citizens in attempts to become mobile, visible and ultimately claim a degree of citizenship. Jungnickel explores the materiality of the bloomer in legitimising women’s presence in outdoor spaces whilst cycling. The structure of this introduction is as follows: Firstly we introduce citizenship as a concept, dwelling in particular on its relationship with identity. We then go on to discuss the ‘mobilities turn’ and some of the ways in which it informs our understanding of citizenship(s). These are
comprehensively discussed in three further sections; citizenship as practiced, the materials of citizenship, and citizenship across borders. 1.1. Citizenship in flux Despite its prevalence in everyday discourse, not all mobilities scholars or indeed geographers will have a firm understanding of what citizenship means, hence it is useful to briefly define what we mean by citizenship. As Glenn (2011) states, ‘‘at its most general level, citizenship refers to full membership in the community within which one lives. Membership, in turn, implies certain rights in and reciprocal obligations toward the community’’ (3). However, not only are there many different citizenships (Isin and Wood, 1999), it is a concept in flux as we will demonstrate here. Indeed as Staehili (2010) points out, despite a substantial literature citizenship remains a contested concept; simultaneously a claim, legal category, ideal, identity and tool for nation building (393). However, a useful starting point is that given by Turner (1993) who defines citizenship as: ‘‘that set of practices (juridicial, political, economic and cultural) which define a person as a competent member of society, and which as a consequence shape the flow of resources to persons and social groups (1993:2 in Urry, 2000:168). This definition is a useful starting point for a number of reasons; it emphasises the cultural and social components of citizenship; the fact that citizenship is not just a pre-existing legal status or identity but comes into being through practice; and that it is produced in conjunction with societal membership and hence norms regarding conduct. Isin and Wood argue for a definition of citizenship where there is no sharp distinction between citizenship as political identity and other identities (1999:13). Indeed, we would suggest in line with Isin and Wood that citizenship as a political identity is produced through other identities and practices. Moving on from the definition supplied by Turner (1993) then, any discussion of citizenship entails exploring claims of a fragmented, decentred subject in amongst shifting group rights and identities (Isin and Wood, 1999:13). Thus we take as our starting point Isin and Wood’s (1999) rich and multi-layered conception of citizenship as an ‘ensemble’ of different and unstable belongings rather than that of a unitary and fixed one (21). Through this unsettling of citizenship as a stable entity it becomes much more evident that just because equality of rights are legally enshrined, it does not follow that this is the case in practice (Wolff, 2006). Despite the universalist rhetoric, citizenship has always been a group concept but has never been expanded to all members of a polity; as Isin and Wood (1999) state, many ‘members’ are denied the legal status of citizenship based on their place of birth or are excluded from the scope of citizenship even if they are legally entitled to its benefits (20). What flows from such an understanding is that behind the veil of universal citizenship and the legal equality this implies, it is widely recognised that systemic forms of domination and oppression marginalise particular groups and their ability to claim substantive citizenship (Glenn, 2011:2). Whilst Legal scholars and Political Scientists have studied citizenship as a legal status, and anthropologists and historians have tended to study its discursive and symbolic construction (Glenn, 2011:2), both Preston et al. (2006) and Ehrkamp and Leitner (2006) suggest the need for a broader notion of citizenship that takes in participatory aspects of citizenship, lived practices and identities shaped by norms and values (Blunt, 2007:688). Indeed as Isin (2009) points out, ‘‘citizenship is a dynamic. . .institution of domination and empowerment that governs who citizens (insiders), subjects (strangers, outsiders) and abjects (aliens) are and how these actors are to govern themselves and each other in a given body politic’’ (Isin, 2009:371). Accordingly Staehili argues
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that citizenship should not be conceptualised as membership but rather a relation governing the conduct of the differing subject positions that constitute it (2011:394). A key point of tension therefore is the difference between and within legally and normatively defined conceptions of rights, particularly when these do not derive from the nation state (Isin and Wood, 1999:45). As Isin (2009) goes on to state, ‘‘‘What is called citizenship?’ is itself a call to investigate how political thought is embedded in acts as claims for justice’’ (370). The production of mobility in the courtroom, Cresswell demonstrates how citizenship is produced unevenly because ‘‘particular modes of mobility are enabled, given licence, encouraged and facilitated while others are, conversely, forbidden, regulated, policed and prevented’’ (2006b:735). For Cresswell, the citizen is a subject that both moves, and must be protected from others who move differently (2013:86). Such an insight builds on work in critical social and feminist geography (e.g. Browne and Nash, 2013; Kobayashi, 1995; Preston et al., 2006; Valentine, 2008b; Chouinard, 2009 for overview) that in recent decades has demonstrated how citizenship is constituted through embodied, ongoing and contested processes and practices. Thus citizenship formation is seen as emerging through practices of everyday encounter ‘‘within multiple spaces of daily life and across multiple spatial scales’’ (Chouinard, 2009:110; Dickinson et al., 2008; Valentine, 2008a). For Cresswell (2013) and Staehili (2010), citizenship is constituted not just through the ability and means through which we move across borders but through relational processes of bordering within specific sites (394). As a result, struggles over citizenship entitlements are geographically constituted and differentiated, repositioning the state as only one of many critical sites of struggle. Certainly when conceptualised as a relation, citizenship emerges less as a negotiation between what is legally enshrined and more from the norms and values produced through particular social identities, materialities, spaces and communities of practice. 1.2. Mobilising citizenship According to Desforges et al. (2005), to understand these ‘extra-legal’ forms of citizenship that operate beyond the nation-state requires more than political theory; it requires a knowledge of everyday social practices which in important ways are increasingly mobile (447; Szerszynski and Urry, 2006), but in other ways increasingly involve fixity and constraint regarding how differently embodied subjects can access and move within public space (Blomley, 2004; Cresswell, 2006b; Mitchell, 2003; Imrie, 2000). The mobilities turn in the social sciences has demonstrated that the intensification of flows, movements, and networks are significantly changing social structures many of which evidently mediate citizenship entitlements (Urry, 2000:2). Indeed according to Urry we must see the social itself as constituted through mobility (2000:2) and thus any theorisation of citizenship needs to take mobility and immobility seriously (Adey, 2010; Cresswell, 2006b, 2013; Sheller and Urry, 2006; Urry, 2000). Accordingly, the key contention that we seek to develop in this collection is the notion that rather than mobility being positioned as a ‘passive’ outcome of already existing citizenship status (for example not having a driving licence and thus having to cycle), citizenship is actively constructed through movement and mobility. Isin (2009) amongst others has shown how an increasingly global economy has facilitated mobility, producing ‘more adaptable, moveable people’ (368, see also Sassen, 2009). Likewise Urry (2000) has been at pains to illustrate how intensifying flows and mobilities have instituted new processes and institutions which are remaking citizenship across different societies (2000:167). Indeed as Urry (2000) goes on to note, in late modernity there is
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a ‘‘fundamental contestation over what are the appropriate rights and duties of citizens living within, and moving around, the contemporary world’’ (163). Yet despite movement being an integral component of recent discussions of citizenship, these have generally explored implications for moving across national and regional boundaries: when we think about mobility in relation to citizenship, the most voluminous literature relates to migration, diaspora and transnationality (Bauder, 2014; Blunt, 2007; Muller, 2010; Sheller and Urry, 2006). Though some attention has been given to citizenship as constituted through geographically situated bodily dispositions and conduct, there has been little sustained emphasis on the negotiation and articulation of citizenship through everyday mobile practices such as driving, walking, cycling and passengering (though see Aldred, 2010; Packer, 2008; Urry, 2000). Whilst under-explored, everyday experiences of mobility have implications for how we conceive of citizenship as a constantly negotiated performative process. As Mansvelt (2008) has pointed out, mobility challenges notions of citizenship as a bundle of rights and responsibilities conferred by the state because it emphasises the contingent nature of citizenship as uncertain and unfolding. Through movement, difference is constantly thrown into relief by being brought together in different configurations and relations, and thus citizenship is theorised as always becoming; as topological and diverse, and based on continual, sometimes conflicting, negotiation (Massey, 2004 in Desforges et al., 2005:443). Indeed Desforges et al. (2005) cite Amin’s (2004), politics of propinquity, suggesting that citizenship is ‘‘shaped by the issues thrown up by living with diversity and sharing a common territorial space’’ (39 in Desforges et al., 2005:443). Cresswell meanwhile argues that because of their entanglements and movements within the spaces of the city, the modern citizen-subject is more accurately constituted in relation to the city rather than the nation-state (2013:85). Accordingly he goes on to propose the categories of ‘denizen’ – those who are resident but not legal citizens, and ‘barely citizens’ – those who are legal citizens but whose cultural differences deny them particular benefits of citizenship (88). This latter category in particular speaks to the kinds of citizens that are often produced through mobility. Key to these debates are questions of inequality regarding the possibilities, ease, and experience of movement for different people in public and private spaces. As Painter and Philo (1995:115) state, if people cannot occupy spaces ‘without feeling uncomfortable, victimised and basically ‘out of place’’, then can we (or they) regard them (selves) as equal. . .’’ (see also Cresswell, 1996, 2010; Imrie, 2000). As this suggests, whilst recent studies of citizenship have been attentive to the contingent nature of citizenship, there remains a tendency for empirical explanations to focus on ‘places’. For example, in their account of citizenship, Desforges et al. (2005:442) flag courtrooms and townhalls and Staehili (2010:396) flags schools as places where citizenship is articulated. Not only are these places of ‘dwelling’, but they are not everyday spaces for most of us. In such readings citizenship tends to be enacted in place, across national borders, or through ‘events’, rather than through ‘mundane’ mobility within borders. As Isin (2009) argues, ‘‘acts through which claims are articulated and claimants are produced create new sites of contestation, belonging, identification and struggle. These sites are different from traditional sites of citizenship contestation. . .Bodies, courts, streets, media, networks and borders have also become sites of contestation for citizenship.’’ (Isin, 2009:371). As this implies, public spaces of transit are also an important channel for the enactment of citizenship and anti-citizenship. Here the category of the ‘barely citizen’ (Cresswell, 2013:94) seems most apposite to describe the ways in which mobile practices constitute subjects as more or less citizen. Yet thus far empirical explorations lack a sustained
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engagement with the notion of ‘spaces of mobility’ – of streets, roads, paths, trails for example – as everyday landscapes where citizenship is acted out and citizens are – more or less – ‘made up’. This is in part the legacy of a sedentarist metaphysics (Cresswell, 2006a), that fails to see meaningful associations as taking place whilst on the move (Auge, 1995; Sennett, 1994), but also the product of a historical tendency to theorise citizenship as something that only matters or is made meaningful in relation to the crossing of geopolitical borders. With regard to daily mobility, automobility has garnered the most attention in relation to citizenship (Merriman, 2006; Packer, 2008; Sheller and Urry, 2006; Urry, 2000). Urry (2000) for example theorises automobility as constituting a civil society where people enter the public realm and dwell within their cars, effectively excluding ‘‘those without cars or without the ‘licence’ to drive such cars (Urry, 2000:193). He argues that as a result public spaces have been transformed into public roads where only those moving in cars, buses and trucks can be a part of the public, and other mobile hybrids such as pedestrians and cyclists are more or less excluded (Urry, 2000:193), becoming Cresswell’s ‘barely citizens’ (2013:94). Whilst Durkheim (1984) saw mobility as weakening political and spatial ties (liv cited in Isin and Wood, 1999:97), we would argue as Urry (2000) does that daily mobility can provide new forms of political and spatial association. The few other accounts exploring daily mobility and citizenship have tended to engage with the official governance of mobility (see for example Freudendal-Pedersen, 2009; Kitchin, 2007; Merriman, 2006; Packer, 2008) at a variety of scales. Other work has looked at specific facets of citizenship such as Cass et al. (2005) edited collection on social exclusion, mobility and access, or work on ethical aspects of mobility in relation to exclusion, control and identity (Bergman and Sager, 2008; Pinder, 2005). Yet in such accounts mobility persists as something produced by broader forces, rather than acting upon and producing relations. Likewise we remain in the early stages of exploring how the bounding of legitimate citizenship through the ways in which people move, intersects with other powerful delineations of social difference and competence, such as gender, ethnicity, age, sexuality and disability (Cresswell, 2010; Green et al., 2012; Steinbach et al., 2011). Perhaps more surprisingly given the prevalence of Science and Technology Studies (STS) in much geographical scholarship, little has been written regarding inter-linkages between citizenship and the regulation of hybridised mobile bodies and materialities (C.f Cresswell, 1996, 1999, 2010; Imrie, 2000; Matless, 1998). As a result there are a set of under-explored questions and debates which we set out below and to which this collection seeks to make a contribution. 1.3. Mobility, identity and practice A central question posited by Marshall (1950) that still haunts us today is whether citizenship (with its claim of universal rights) masks various forms of inequality? Certainly debates around citizenship have often revolved around the tensions and differences between the theoretically universal benefits of citizenship and what we might call ‘actually existing citizenship’ as practiced. A key goal of this collection is to situate the production of citizenship and identity within practical relations with the world – in doing (Bourdieu, 1990:52). The significance of mobility here we argue, is that it has become one of the key practiced ‘acts’ through which the individual becomes related to both other actors and broader institutions such as the state. Whilst citizenship is evidently enacted through the transformation of movement (the bare fact of displacement) to mobility (movement imbued with meaning) (Cresswell, 2006a,b), the emphasis has been on discourse and symbolism as the key way in which this transformation has occurred.
In this section we want to highlight the importance of mobile practice to citizenship as a constantly ‘becoming’ accomplishment. It is evident that modern mobilities both contribute to particular social identities and modes of citizenship (e.g. the cosmopolitan citizen) and constitute cultural identities in their own right (e.g. the cyclist or driver). Within such conceptualisations identities are constantly becoming, multiple, overlapping and fragmented through a relational process: ‘‘any identity depends upon its difference from, its negation of, some other term, even as the identity of the latter term depends upon its difference from, its negation of, the former. Identity is thus formed not against difference but in relation to difference’’ (Isin and Wood, 1999:16). The process of identity formation allows for the formation of groups which may or may not lead to claims for political entitlements. Thus identity should be thought of as the basis for recognition demanded by groups excluded from the scope of formal citizenship: ‘‘as group markers, the difference between citizenship and identity is that, while the former carries legal weight, the latter carries social and cultural weight’’ (Isin and Wood, 1999:20). As a result we can theorise the formal validation and recognition of differential group identities as crucial to any attempts to participate in the public sphere (Hopkins and Blackwood, 2011:215). However, as Isin clarifies, to be a citizen means more than being an insider – it is fundamentally about mastering particular modes and forms of conduct deemed appropriate to attaining insider status (Isin, 2009:372). ‘‘For subjects and abjects becoming a citizen means either adopting modes and forms of being an insider (assimilation, integration, incorporation) or challenging these modes and forms and thereby transforming them (identification, differentiation, recognition)’’ (Isin, 2009:372). Isin suggests a focus on ‘acts of citizenship’ – ‘those deeds by which actors constitute themselves (and others) as subjects of rights’ (371). Citizenship as an accomplishment is therefore fundamentally about practice. One of the key advantages of viewing citizenship through the lens of practice is that it de-centres individuals and what they say, and re-orients analysis toward a more diffuse understanding of practice and doing as carriers and producers of identity (Staehili, 2010:399). In other words, citizenship as acts implies that we think about it in terms of shared embodied practices which disrupt already existing norms and practices. As Bourdieu’s (1977) concept of habitus suggests, power is reproduced because we perceive and act in accordance with embodied orientations and understandings of the world. Painter and Philo (1995:114) show how the definition of a ‘true’ citizen depends upon whether one carries the correct baggage of history, ethnicity, culture and religion, further cut across by age, gender etc. Accordingly citizenship can be theorised as conferred (or not) in particular bodily orientations and practices. It is evident for example that how people are oriented to their environment in terms of sound, vision, touch, and being visible, position them as being more or less ‘engaged’ – or familiar – with others whilst on the move (Auge, 1995; Imrie, 2000; Sennett, 1977, 1994) and thus more or less accepted. This punctuates the contested choreography through which moving bodies themselves are deployed in particular ways to stake a claim to space in relation to differently mobile others, for example, by demonstrating the attunements and articulations of a ‘responsible’ citizen (Brown, 2012). Some forms of movement are stigmatized, such as cycling (Aldred, in press-a), yet may also be used to challenge dominant norms of conduct and citizenship. These often constitute what Painter and Philo (1995:117) term the ‘spatial tactics of ‘non-citizens’ because they are used by those deemed to be ‘outside’ to engender a feeling of being inside. Many mobile practices and the identities associated with them are contested in relation to different modes of citizenship. For example, notions of ecological citizenship – normativities of how citizens ought to conduct their lives so as to reduce their
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environmental impact (Wolf et al., 2009) – come into conflict with Western societal norms regarding driving and flying as appropriate modes of travel. At the same time, modes constructed as more sustainable such as walking and cycling are often positioned as unbecoming of the citizen, for example because particular groups position them as lacking ‘status’, or because of their seeming inability to fit into a legal framework which proscribes ordered forms of ‘vehicular’ conduct as appropriate on the roads. Particularly with regard to the latter it is evident that legal frameworks governing mobility are based on normative notions of how particular bodies should act and what roads (or paths, streets and public spaces) are for. One result is a reduction of many possibilities to just a few desired and accepted movements (c.f. Cresswell, 2006b) ultimately positioning many ‘other’ styles of movement as constitutive of the ‘barely citizen’. Certainly we must also ask the question that in ‘choosing’ to move around in a certain way, to what extent are individuals consciously choosing or simply inheriting a set of practices that may against their wishes produce them as less than citizen? Whilst all the papers in this collection deal with mobile practice, this is a question explored most evidently by Gaete Reyes. Through a case study of women wheelchair users, Gaete-Reyes demonstrates how the provision of infrastructure and technologies that privilege movement between workplaces and homes at specific times produce the ‘productive body’, as that of the citizen. By contrast, those who by virtue of moving differently are less able to negotiate this environment are disadvantaged and constructed as ‘barely citizen’. In particular Gaete-Reyes demonstrates the importance of particular mobility scripts – the often poor design and maintenance of mobile and fixed technologies that frames the practice of wheelchair use – in constituting particular mobile practices. In doing so she demonstrates that practices are largely scripted rather than freely chosen. Congruently, the lack of substantive citizenship ‘enjoyed’ by this group must be seen as unjust because of the very real absence of choice in how they are able to be mobile. 1.4. Hybrid citizens Many forms of mobile practice are marked by hybridity – the notion of in-betweenness. For us hybridity has two key meanings: the first (which we discuss in the following Section 1.5) relates to Isin and Wood’s (1999) use of the term to describe those physical spaces along political borders that have experienced substantial economic, social or cultural change producing them as hybrid ‘borderlands’ (Isin and Wood, 1999:18). The second use of the term (which we discuss here) relates more to the bodily level where mobile subjects are increasingly prostheticised; that is, subjectivities are performed as co-constitutions of bodies entangled with myriad technologies relating to, for example, clothing, communications, entertainment, and movement (Ingold, 2000; Latour, 2008). As Bourdieu (1990) has noted, objects and technologies are integral to understanding bodily practice. Certainly in modern societies, it is rare on a day-to-day level for the human body to remain unprostheticised by various technologies. Game (2001) elaborates upon this, pointing out that through a process of ‘entraining’, ‘‘. . .the human body is not simply human. Through interconnectedness, through our participation in the life of the world, humans are always forever mixed. . .’’ (1). The human organism modifies itself with technologies that produce, temporarily, a new organism; a hybrid object/subject. As a result – and as Latour amongst others has been at pains to point out – objects must be seen as crucial to the ways in which subjects effect agency as an accomplishment: ‘‘Students of technology are never faced with people on the one hand and things on the
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other, they are faced with programs of action, sections of which are endowed to parts of humans, while other sections are entrusted to parts of nonhumans’’ (Latour, 2008:174). The same can be said of citizenship as an accomplishment where artefacts and technologies must be conceptualised as ‘moral actors’; delegated tasks where humans fail to or cannot act, and shaping the ways in which mobile subjects interact with and perceive each other. A number of accounts have pointed to the importance of materiality in framing appropriate mobile conduct (Barratt, 2011; Kitchin, 2007; Merriman, 2006; Michaels, 2000) and ideas around nationality and citizenship (Billig, 1995). However, the ways in which these framings are negotiated and transformed through everyday use has been less travelled (though see Lorimer and Lund, 2003) and accounts featuring mobility have tended to focus on the car driver as a technologised subject with less attention paid to other forms of hybrid (Dant, 2004) or indeed the ways in which objects contribute to the constitution of particular citizen-subjects. In accounts of citizenship, objects have been largely taken for granted in terms of the ‘moral’ work (Latour, 2008) they do in making up the subject as more or less citizen. Through a focus on the stuff of mobility attention is shifted from the fixed categories and already defined actors through which we have come to understand citizenship to the hybridised actors and acts that constitute them. ‘‘Rather than asking ‘who is the citizen?’ the question becomes ‘what makes the citizen?’’’ (Isin, 2009:383). What we begin to explore in this section are the ways – the representations, materialities, technologies and forms of discipline – that different groups use to construct and challenge identities around modes of comportment as they vie to become citizens of one sort or another. Accordingly, a number of papers in this collection examine how the valorization (or otherwise) of mobile practice is intimately tied to hybridity and the materialities of movement all of which speak (to some degree) to the uneven constitution of citizenship. Jungnickel’s paper in this collection focuses on a period in the late Nineteenth Century to show how everyday bicycle riding and cycle wear afforded a new and contested way into the public sphere for women. Jungnickel argues that up until this time, the everyday lives of middle and upper class women were largely shaped by the bearing and/or caring of children and located within the boundaries of the home. Women’s domestic responsibilities coupled with the pathologising of their reproductive health and restrictive contemporary fashion colluded to normalise a female gendered citizen who was largely immobile. On the whole, middle and upper class women did not move much, and when they did they were chaperoned and under surveillance. Onlookers, no longer able to categorise women on bicycles in terms of normative gendered roles subjected them to startling public demonstrations of vitriol in the form of verbal and sometimes physical assault. By concentrating on where and how women moved, what they fought to wear in public places whilst cycling, and reactions to them, Jungnickel demonstrates in contrast to theorisations of the citizen as mobile subject, that what little claim to citizenship a woman had in the late Nineteenth Century was through being ‘immobile’ in the home doing the stuff women were supposed to do. Once they were mobile they were less than citizen, and the clothes they wore and how they moved were both produced by and productive of that mobility. Coming back to the present, Spinney, Kullman and Golbuff use a focus on the increasing tensions between HGVs and cyclists in London to simultaneously highlight the moral work of safety technologies and moralisation of mobile subjects. Drawing upon the work of Latour the paper focuses around the capacity of the hybrid HGV-driver to commit an immoral act – that of causing harm to another, in this case cyclists. Latour and others have argued that non-human actors – artefacts and technologies such as the seatbelt
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– are regularly delegated tasks which are moral in nature in order to stop such immoral acts being committed. Through a study of the implementation of HGV safety technologies (mirrors, cameras and sensors), and media reaction to HGV-cyclist encounters, Spinney, Kullman and Golbuff demonstrate how such technologies take on moral action. However they also demonstrate the ways in which materialities as moral actors are still ‘missing’ in popular discourse around incidents, a situation which ultimately serves to further channel the weight of moral action onto human actors, notably leading to constructions of the HGV driver as less than citizen. Indeed Spinney, Kullman and Golbuff argue that what these safety technologies actually do is absolve the HGV part of the hybrid of blame through the illusion of providing the driver with complete vision. In the language of STS these retro-fitted technologies redistribute moral action across the HGV-driver-sensor hybrid, in this case toward the human actors. 1.5. Crossing scales and borders Desforges et al. (2005) have argued that the state sets the terms of the debate around the scales at which citizenship is practiced (Desforges et al., 2005:440), or at least at the scales where it recognises it is practiced. Isin and Wood (1999) have argued that the increasingly trans-national production of group identities suggests that identifications with national norms are becoming looser, displaced and overridden due to a strengthening of cultural ties ‘above and below’ the level of the nation state (1999:91). Accordingly, Rose (1996a,b) and Dean (1999) have both argued that the hollowing out of the state has been paralleled by a re-scaling downwards of the levels at which citizenship is performed – for example at the level of the community and the active citizen. Yuval-Davis (2003) and Painter (2002) have both proposed multi-layered citizenship as defined and articulated by engagement with different scales of political authority and different social identities. Congruently both Sassen (2009) and Cresswell (2013) have argued that the spaces of global cities in particular are where new forms of citizenship and new classes and groups are emerging due to specific flows and concentrations of capital and labour under advanced capitalism. Hence a second meaning of hybridity in relation to place to produce ‘borderlands’ is particularly useful when considering questions of citizenship. Citizenship is thus performed as multi-scalar; acted out and expressed through different responsibilities so that for example global citizenship is acted out at home (Desforges et al., 2005:441). For example both McDowell (2005) and Blunt (2007) have shown how particular policies have served to restrict the movements of women, highlighting the close ties with domestic economies and global inequalities (686). The relationship between what constitutes ‘proper’ mobile conduct and how this is articulated in everyday practice is thus far from straight forward. What is interesting here are the tensions which may arise between different scales of citizenship. Urry uses the terms cosmopolitan and mobility citizenship to understand how we develop orientations to other citizens, societies and cultures (Urry, 2000:167). Whilst most scholars have used the terms to explore linkages across national boundaries, there is scope to appropriate the terms to explore how such border crossings shape norms and practices of everyday mobility. Indeed this links to Urry’s use of the term mobility citizenship which relates to ‘‘the rights and responsibilities of visitors to other places and other cultures’’ (Urry, 2000:167). As Urry goes on to say, contra to more static notions of citizenship, these are ‘citizenships of flow’ concerned with the mobilities of travellers, goods and services, and the rights and duties that they should enjoy (Urry, 2000:167). These citizenships of flow challenge national civil, political and social rights and responsibilities (ibid). Accordingly there is also
the possibility that the reconfiguration of citizenship norms in particular cosmopolitan areas may lead to increasing differences in relation to other regions (Jelin, 2000:52). A focus on ecological citizenship provides an example of such border crossings. As Dobson (2003) has stated, the last 30–40 years have brought increasing awareness of a number of environmental problems with corollary responses and groups which can perhaps be theorised under the umbrella of an ecological citizenship. Ecological citizenship refers not only to particular political and legal rights but to particular practices through which humans act as political and moral agents. Moreover, ecological citizenship is often intertwined with notions of cosmopolitan citizenship as new norms and practices which support and produce the ecological citizen may be imported from outside, creating tensions and transforming existing national (and other) norms regarding appropriate moral and political conduct. Brown for example has demonstrated how walkers more than mountain bikers are marked as ecological citizens. This differs markedly to the ways in which urban cyclists are often portrayed as ecological citizens because of the differences attributed to these different forms of ‘play’. However, the idea of environmental ‘global’ citizenship is increasingly linked to very local practices (Green et al., 2012), many of which are linked to forms of mobility such as cycling or taking the train, and relative immobility such as not flying. Thus the ways in which broader notions of what should constitute citizenship and localised practices of mobility continually transform each other is of special importance to understanding citizenship as a process of negotiation. In thinking through mobility in this way, it also becomes entangled with cross-border flows of alternative conceptions of citizenship, group identities and practiced norms which rub up against those dominantly held within a given nation, society or community. For example we may see particular groups (such as cyclists) drawing upon conceptions of ecological citizenship and mobility from Scandinavian nations to support their claims to equal rights to the road. Equally we may encounter diasporic and indigenous groups drawing upon aspirational, class-based or religious notions of appropriate comportment (relating for example to driving or clothing) which challenge mobile practices associated with ecological citizenship. A key challenge then is how to reconcile these different performances of citizenship without creating new modes of oppression and inequality. As Harvey (1996) has pointed out, in the name of the environment all sorts of restrictions are placed on the rights of others whilst those deemed to have the knowledge to address the problems are conferred with new rights (e.g. when natural resources held in common property are transferred to private individuals or companies to solve an alleged ‘tragedy of the commons’). As a result the status of mobile subjects as more or less citizen is constantly in flux in relation to broader cross-border conceptualisations of citizenship. Contributing to these debates through a case study focusing on outdoor citizenship in Norway, the paper by Flemsæter, Setten and Brown discusses struggles between differently mobile subjects with a particular focus on how state agencies attempt to make space for social inclusion in the construction of outdoor citizenship. Using the legally enshrined concept of friluftsliv – often mobilised as the ‘tradition’ of outdoor life – the authors demonstrate how the public rights of access folded into the corresponding law (Friluftsloven) have tended to privilege particular practices of movement in and through the landscape. Yet such ideals of mobile citizenship are becoming unsettled by current trends towards diversifying subjectivities claiming outdoor citizen entitlements, imbued as they are by a range of commercial, technological, health and participation imperatives. They focus on a variety of tensions
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between mobile practices (such as those associated with skiing, dog walking, mountain biking, hiking and snowmobiling, or with experienced and new participants) to demonstrate how these are transformed into configurations of moral – and thus legal – citizenship. Particular attention is given to the informal (as well as formal) discursive practices of state officials charged with managing and regulating outdoor recreation, what it tells us about how they interface with this reworking of the moral landscape, and how they perceive and constitute the struggle over which mobile practices count. This work illustrates how government agents grapple to reconcile established ideals of mobile citizenship in the outdoors with newer state priorities concerning who should move, how, where and when. Moreover, it flags how this might matter for regulating outdoor access when civil servants broker this reconfiguration of the legitmate outdoor citizen – how it is stretched, troubled and resisted – in their more-than-legal capacity. Ultimately Flemsæter, Setten and Brown demonstrate how movement as practiced creates relations with normative place and landscape meanings that serve to imbue movement with meaning. In so doing they highlight how substantive citizenship is produced through assessments of whether mobile practices are ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ in relation to specific spaces or landscapes. Taken together, the papers in this collection address the need to take seriously how movement and embodied practice – entwined with particular materialities and across multiple scales – enable or constrain citizen subjectivities and associated entitlements, undermining and confirming existing social identities and corresponding inequalities. Together, the papers articulate an attentiveness towards ‘‘how citizenship becomes inscribed in the intersections between political and social-cultural ‘spaces’’’ (Painter and Philo, 1995:109). They respond to the desire to understand citizenship as it unfolds on the ground, shaped by embodied experiences of mobility alongside policy paradigms (Isin, 2009), and as practiced in relation to legal codifications of citizen mobility (Mitchell, 2003; Blomley, 2010; Prytherch, 2012). In doing so they respond to a call by Desforges et al. (2005) to explore the complex ways in which citizenship is constructed, contested and articulated through mobility, building from the traditional geographical vocabulary of space and place to incorporate relations, flows, hybridity and mobility. We highlight not only the spatially uneven relationship between civil society and the state but also the ways in which mobile practices, bodies and spaces are configured together with the fluid and contested boundaries of citizenship, and in ways that relate to multiple formal and informal collectivities. References Adey, P., 2010. Mobility. Routledge, Oxford. Aldred, R., 2010. On the outside? constructing cycling citizenship. Social Cultural Geogr., 35–52 Aldred, R., 2012. Incompetent, or too competent? negotiating everyday cycling identities in a motor dominated society. Mobilities (in press). Amin, A., 2004. Regions unbound: towards a new politics of place. Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geogr. 86 (1), 33–44. Auge, M., 1995. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Verso, London. Barnett, C., Low, M. (Eds.), 2004. Spaces of Democracy: Geographical Perspectives on Citizenship, Participation and Representation. Sage, London. Barratt, P., 2011. Vertical worlds: technology, hybridity and the climbing body. Social Cultural Geogr. 12 (4), 397–412. Bauder, H., 2014. Domicile citizenship, human mobility and territoriality. Progr. Human Geogr. 38 (1), 91–106. Bell, D., 1995. Pleasure and danger: the paradoxical spaces of sexual citizenship. Political Geogr. 14 (2), 139–153. Bergman, S., Sager, T., 2008. The Ethics of Mobilities. Ashgate, Aldershot. Billig, M., 1995. Banal Nationalism. Sage, London. Blomley, N.K., 2004. Unsettling the City: Urban Land and the Politics of Property. Routledge, London. Blomley, N., 2010. The right to pass freely: circulation, begging, and the bounded self. Social Legal Stud. 19 (3), 331–350.
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