Citizenship in Dispute: Austerity, authoritarianism and the remaking of the social, public lecture by John Clarke (Visiting Professor, Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, CEU)

Citizenship in Dispute: Austerity, authoritarianism and the remaking of the social.

a public lecture by  

John Clarke (Visiting Professor, Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, CEU) 

In this seminar, I will draw on a recent international collaboration on questions of citizenship to examine some of the ways in which formations of citizenship are currently being disputed and remade. I will treat citizenship as an ‘object of desire’ that is claimed –and contested – by diverse political projects. Through such disputes, the meanings, relationships and practices of citizenship are recurrently remade.

I will explore this analytic framing through examples (mainly) drawn from the contemporary United Kingdom (including those that reflect an increasingly dis-United Kingdom). I will consider how Austerity has been a project for the reconstruction of citizenship (as the site of new responsibilities); how austerity and authoritarianism have been combined (in the identification and control of the irresponsible); and how both have been involved in an attempt to remake citizenship as part of an imagined moral economy of ‘fairness’. Not for the first time in British politics, this project reinvents the social as a field of communities that can replace the state (the Conservative fantasy of the ‘Big Society’).

John Clarke, Kathleen Coll, Evelina Dagnino and Catherine Neveu: Disputing Citizenship. Bristol: The Policy Press, 2014.