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Uncertainty is central to the governance of citizenship, but in ways that erase, even deny, this uncertainty. Uncertain citizenship investigates this uncertainty from the unique vantage point of ‘citizenisation’ – twenty-first-century integration and naturalisation measures that make and unmake citizens and migrants, while indefinitely holding many applicants for citizenship in what Anne-Marie Fortier calls the waiting room of citizenship. Fortier’s distinctive theory of citizenisation foregrounds how the full achievement of citizenship is a promise that is always deferred. This means that if migrants and citizens are continuously citizenised, so too are they migratised. Citizenisation and migratisation are intimately linked within the structures of racial governmentality that enables the citizenship of racially minoritised citizens to be questioned and that casts them as perpetual migrants.
Drawing on multi-sited fieldwork with migrants applying for citizenship or settlement and with intermediaries of the state tasked with implementing citizenisation measures and policies, Fortier brings life to the waiting room of citizenship, giving rich empirical backing to her original theoretical claims. Scrutinising life in the waiting room enables Fortier to analyse how citizenship takes place, takes time and takes hold in ways that conform, exceed and confound frames of reference laid out in both citizenisation policies and taken-for-granted understandings of ‘the citizen’, ‘the migrant’, and their relationships to citizenship. Uncertain citizenship’s nuanced account of the social and institutional function of citizenisation and migratisation offers its readers a grasp of the array of racial inequalities that citizenisation produces and reproduces, while providing theoretical and empirical tools to address these inequalities.
's world is more than normalising migration as no longer an exception (Papadopoulos, Stephenson and Tsianos 2008 ; Nail 2015 ; Hui 2016 ). It is to normalise migration as part and parcel of people's lives and imaginaries (Fortier 2012 ), regardless of their migration status. This requires investigations into how, regardless of status, substance or location, subjects constitute themselves, or are constituted, as migrants. What emerges from this study is that citizenisation and migratisation work together in ways that converge and diverge. The aims of
citizenships – symbolically if not legally – by making them irrelevant and in some instances undesirable to ‘naturalised’ citizenship. Consequently, migrants entering the process of citizenisation are cast as ‘irregular citizens’, in Peter Nyers's phrase, insofar as their rights, duties and obligations are undercut and their other citizenship ‘is unmade by being made unworkable’ (Nyers 2013 : 38). Moreover, the citizen–noncitizen/migrant opposition is intertwined with another distinction: the migratisation–demigratisation of those who become
normalisation of (white) English monolingualism and on the ‘migratisation’ or ‘racialisation’ of those who speak otherwise. Provincialising English and languaging practices are inextricably linked to linguistic imperialism, past and present: other languages (and other Englishes) are spoken here because English was there . The conclusion returns to the waiting room of citizenship and unpacks how provincialising English and languaging take time , take place and take hold on aspiring citizens. Jus linguarum in Britain
naturalised in citizenisation? The chapter then presents a conjunctural analysis of converging trends of neoliberal governance that retool citizenship through its skillification, securitisation and renewed domestication. I argue that citizenisation – and by extension migratisation – is a ‘social intervention’ that reaches far beyond those that it targets – migrants – and reaches into the fabric of society as a whole. Finally, Chapter 1 introduces ‘the waiting room’ as a useful heuristic device that foregrounds three axes of citizenisation: temporality
Bordering intimacy is a study of how borders and dominant forms of intimacy, such as family, are central to the governance of postcolonial states such as Britain. The book explores the connected history between contemporary border regimes and the policing of family with the role of borders under European and British empires. Building upon postcolonial, decolonial and black feminist theory, the investigation centres on how colonial bordering is remade in contemporary Britain through appeals to protect, sustain and make family life. Not only was family central to the making of colonial racism but claims to family continue to remake, shore up but also hide the organisation of racialised violence in liberal states. Drawing on historical investigations, the book investigates the continuity of colonial rule in numerous areas of contemporary government – family visa regimes, the policing of sham marriages, counterterror strategies, deprivation of citizenship, policing tactics, integration policy. In doing this, the book re-theorises how we think of the connection between liberal government, race, family, borders and empire. In using Britain as a case, this opens up further insights into the international/global circulations of liberal empire and its relationship to violence.
authenticity of naturalized identities to be questioned’, but which in turn ‘enable migrant groups to use ethnicity and nationality as a basis for political organizing’. In the UK what also ties into the remainders of difference are their racialised and imperial logics that endure – while imperial histories are forgotten (Williams 2020 ) – not in the form of replicas, but in the form of the logics and techniques of racism that (re)naturalise inequalities in seemingly raceless policies – for example through the migratisation of white-bodied Europeans who are racialised as
racial difference as something that ‘arrived’ in the Nordic countries with immigration from ‘non-Western countries’ ( Keskinen et al., 2009 ). This ‘migratisation’ of racial inequality ( Tudor, 2017: 1057 ) externalises problems of racism, and sustains the notion that immigration (rather than the differential treatment of people positioned as migrants) destabilises the egalitarianism of the welfare state