Assembling Fragmented Citizenship: Bulgarian Muslim Migrants at the Margins of Two States - PhD defense of Neda Deneva

PhD defense of Neda Deneva

Dissertation Examination Committee:

Chair: Violetta Zentai, Director and Research Fellow at the Center for Policy Studies, CEU

Supervisor: Ayse Caglar, Visiting Professor at the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, CEU

Internal examiner: Daniel Monterescu, Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, CEU

External examiner: Umut Erel, Lecturer in Sociology at the Faculty of Social Sciences, The Open University

Abstract:

This dissertation addresses everyday citizenship practices and imaginings of the state/s of Bulgarian Muslim migrants in Spain. By doing this it seeks to understand how migrants re-position themselves as citizens in the context of multiple citizenship and migration regimes between two states within the European Union. It examines the multiple ways of being, becoming, and conceiving oneself as a citizen by engaging with or circumventing the state in its different faces through simultaneous normative and institutional incorporation in more than one polity and social context. Drawing on a year-long ethnographic multi-sited research of a migrant community spreading between a village in Bulgaria and a small town in Spain, it aims at unpacking the everyday struggles and negotiations of individuals embedded as semi-insiders/semi-outsiders at the margins of two states. As part of a process of ‘citizenship disaggregation and re-articulation’ migrants claim rights and membership by positioning themselves simultaneously within these multiple institutional contexts, making up for what they lack in one site by seeking it elsewhere. By working on the vertical and the horizontal relations that citizenship entails in these two contexts the migrants described here manage to assemble the different elements of their fragmented citizenship.

However, I argue that the case of the Bulgarian Muslim migrants reveals not only the agentic process of assembling citizenship elements, but also the hidden inequalities contained in the concept of European citizenship in a pan-European space where free movement is linked to labour migration and demands participation in the accumulation of capital. In this context those who fall outside of the category of regular workers - workers who shift between statuses of regularity and irregularity, and women and ageing relatives, who are engaged in reproductive labour sustaining the migrant family - are trapped in precarious positions and lose citizenship rights both at home and in migration. Although the EU space allows an overall economic improvement of migrant families’ wellbeing, the empowering potential of the process of assembling citizenship fragments is only enacted by the limited group of male regular workers, while new insecurities and dependencies emerge for the rest of the migrants in a highly gendered and age-dependent way. This dissertation has sought to tease out this particular heterogeneity and unevenness of intra-EU migration by focusing on the micro-dynamics inherent in the processes of citizenship disaggregation.