Social psychology and citizenship: A critical perspective

Abstract

The paper advances a critical social psychological approach to the study of citizenship. It builds upon recent social psychological work on the subject, particularly in discursive and rhetorical psychology but also other critical approaches such as social representations theory. The paper also borrows insights from the interdisciplinary field of citizenship studies in order to conceptualise citizenship in both its conventional (enacting well‐established scripts of political action) and its transformative aspects (making rights claims that are disruptive of established scripts). The paper is divided in five sections. The first section considers the relationship between social psychology and citizenship; the second section offers a conceptualisation of citizenship that takes under consideration citizens' practices from the ground up and constraints posed by existing norms and laws; the third section considers the value of adding citizenship into the social psychological conceptual toolkit. The fourth more substantive section advances a critical social psychological approach to citizenship which focuses on the study of the different ways that “ordinary” political actors engage with political matters in the mundane practices of everyday life. The last section concludes the paper and makes some suggestions for future directions, such as the study of emerging forms of citizenship through a more nuanced examination of intersecting political affiliations.

Is the press presenting (neoliberal) foreign residency laws in a depoliticised way? The case of investment visas and the reconfiguring of citizenship

“…Citizenship is often defined as "a status of a legal and political membership of a state" (Verkuyten, 2018, p. 226) and is usually equated to nationality. The notion of citizenship is, however, far more complex and extensive than a simple equation with nationality (Andreouli, 2019;Bosniak, 2006;Castro & Santos, 2020;Gibson, 2011;Langhout & Fernández, 2018;Stevenson et al, 2015). Citizenship regimes are laws and legal frameworks that regulate several dimensions of people's relation with a nation, with some determining the conditions for foreigners/migrants' entrance, residency in and exit from a country (Vink, 2017).…”

“…However, few social psychological studies have explored how this is done. In particular, few studies on the social psychology of citizenship (Andreouli, 2019;Condor, 2011;Stevenson, Hopkins, Luyt, & Dixon, 2015;Xenitidou & Sapountzis, 2018) have simultaneously attended to the social psychology of mediated communication about citizenship-relevant laws: for instance, by focusing on how new (neoliberal) laws for migration and residency are presented to a polity by the press, namely examining whether this presentation is depoliticised, or whether and how it makes visible sub-groups of a foreign community and constructs their representations.…”

Rehearsing post-Covid-19 citizenship: Social representations of UK Covid-19 mutual aid

“…A common criticism (Gray & Griffin, 2014;Stevenson et al, 2015) is that there is still a notable absence of research on citizenship within the discipline, with the need to research everyday understandings and practices of citizenship in particular being highlighted (Condor & Gibson, 2007;Stevenson et al, 2015). Andreouli (2019) further notes that social psychology's engagement with the concept of citizenship is particularly vital in contexts of political upheaval and transition, during which different understandings of citizenship are being developed and enacted. We viewed the Covid-19 pandemic as one such 'emergent form' (Andreouli et al, 2019), during which new understandings and practices linked to citizenship would likely be under (re)construction.…”

Social citizenship and social psychology

“…The small but growing engagement with citizenship in social psychology (for overviews, see Andreouli, ; Condor, ; Stevenson, Dixon, Hopkins, & Luyt, ; Xenitidou & Sapountzis, ), has, to date, paid relatively little attention to social citizenship. This is an interesting gap in the literature and one potential reason could be the academic division between sociology and psychology that arose in the early 20th century, which Stenner and Taylor () argue resulted in sociology focusing on the social project of welfare and psychology on individual “well‐being.” They call instead for a “psychosocial” approach to welfare that merges the two, as the welfare state plays a fundamental role in constructing human subjectivity, and well‐being cannot be fully considered outside the context of welfare.…”

“…However, despite the growing body of work on governmentality and the small amount of social psychological work on social citizenship, there has been no explicit link made between the two that investigates how our understandings of social citizenship rights and responsibilities are shaped by current ideas about self and society. As Andreouli () argues, analyses of citizenship often lack such a focus on everyday perspectives and practices of citizenship.…”