A material politics of citizenship: the potential of circulating materials from UK Immigration Removal Centres

Abstract

This paper introduces a materialist approach to Isin's concept of 'acts of citizenship' to call for an attention to the lively and agential materials that mediate citizenship claims. It describes two ways in which materialism helps progress conceptualisations of citizenship. Firstly, it demonstrates the ways in which a materialist viewpoint forces a reconsideration of 'acts of citizenship' as undertaken by heterogeneous collectives, rather than them being the sole responsibility of human actors. Secondly, it suggests that, because acts of citizenship arise out of socio-material entanglements, they may exceed the apparent intentions of human subjects. This paper argues that materials are more than bystanders in claims to citizenship; they actively mediate and facilitate encounters through which political claims are made. This argument is developed through a detailed empirical study of the materials permitted to circulate from Immigration Removal Centres during a community exchange project organised by the charity Music in Detention.

Technologies, infrastructures and migrations: material citizenship politics

“…'those deeds by which actors constitute themselves (and others) as subjects of rights' (Isin 2009, 371) in the context of migration technologies and infrastructures, invites us to take a closer look at their consequences for migrants' subject positions in the first place. Thus, we explore the ways in which migrants' sociocultural practices and spaces of action can be constrained and enabled to become acts of citizenship deriving from sociotechnical and epistemic conditions, and how such conditions contribute to individuals and groups gaining recognizable positions (Hughes and Forman 2017). With this, we seek to contribute also to the ongoing project of rethinking 'citizenship after Orientalism', which implies undoing, deorientalizing and decolonizing citizenship, as well as uncovering and reinventing it in light of the construction of political subjectivities and their rights (Isin 2012).…”

“…When engaging with migration discourses, citizenship studies have also looked into the role of technology and materiality (Netz et al 2019;Maestri and Hughes 2017;Hughes and Forman 2017). Netz et al (2019) explored how technologies that identify migrant bodies end up shaping relational citizenship claims.…”

“…Netz et al (2019) explored how technologies that identify migrant bodies end up shaping relational citizenship claims. Hughes and Forman (2017) have proposed that sociomaterial entanglements may exceed the apparent intentions of human subjects and may actively mediate and facilitate encounters through which political claims are made. The perspective of a material construction of citizenship touches also upon the materiality of place, such as camps and detention centers (Esposito et al 2019;Rygiel 2011).…”

Securing materials at international borders: exploring the biosecurity practices of Nepalese migrants to Australia

“…Materials that enable or hinder migration have been more recently discussed in relation to precarious migration. For instance, Hughes and Forman (2017) explore how the materials that are permitted to be used in musical classes in UK detention centres are enrolled into performances of migration, citizenship, and governance. Similarly, Darling (2014) advocates the potency that materials, especially in the forms of government documents and letters, have in the context of migration.…”

Obfuscated democracy? Chelsea Manning and the politics of knowledge curation

“…However, to place paranoia in conversation with logic is not to argue that such logics are singular, or paradoxically irrational (if indeed, such a distinction can or should be made), instead it is to follow Hughes and Forman (2017) to recognise that the spectre of the "'worst-case-scenario' haunts the hypersensitive, reactionary responses of stakeholders" within this possible circulation: paranoia therefore is not used to refer to irrational fear, nor the (problematic and gendered) positioning of apparent paranoid-thought as madness. Instead when we deploy the term, it is for the purpose of exploring how particular, unwanted, anticipatory futures become a fixated source of outcome, one which seemingly works to govern the emergent actions of particular individuals or aspects of an organisation (Hughes and Forman, 2017;Anderson 2010). Indeed, Sedgwick (2003) notes that paranoid thinking has become normative throughout contemporary politics, arguing that such paranoia is anticipatory, refuting other possibilities other than the worst-case scenarios: paranoid reading is therefore tied into an idea of the inevitable.…”