Standing at the intersection of immigration and welfare reform, immigrant Latin American women are the target of special scrutiny in the United States. Both the state and the media often present them as scheming "welfare queens" or long-suffering, silent victims of globalization and machismo. This book argues for a reformulation of our definitions of citizenship and politics, one inspired by women who are usually perceived as excluded from both. Weaving the stories of Mexican and Central American women with history and analysis of the anti-immigrant upsurge in 1990s California, this compelling book examines the impact of reform legislation on individual women's lives and their engagement in grassroots political organizing. Their accounts of personal and political transformation offer a new vision of politics rooted in concerns as disparate as domestic violence, childrearing, women's self-esteem, and immigrant and workers' rights.

Politics for the Love of Fandom examines what Ashley Hinck calls “fan-based citizenship”: civic action that blends with and arises from participation in fandom and commitment to a fan-object. Examining cases like Harry Potter fans fighting for fair trade, YouTube fans donating money to charity, and football fans volunteering to mentor local youth, Hinck argues that fan-based citizenship has created new civic practices wherein popular culture may play as large a role in generating social action as traditional political institutions such as the Democratic Party or the Catholic Church. In an increasingly digital world, individuals can easily move among many institutions and groups. They can choose from more people and organizations than ever to inspire their civic actions—even the fandom for children's book series Harry Potter can become a foundation for involvement in political life and social activism. Hinck explores this new kind of engagement and its implications for politics and citizenships, through case studies that encompass fandoms for sports, YouTube channels, movies, and even toys. She considers the ways in which fan-based social engagement arises organically, from fan communities seeking to change their world as a group, as well as the methods creators use to leverage their fans to take social action. The modern shift to networked, fluid communities, Hinck argues, opens up opportunities for public participation that occurs outside of political parties, houses of worship, and organizations for social action. Fan-based citizenship performances help us understand the future possibilities of public engagement, as fans and creators alike tie the ethical frameworks of fan-objects to desired social goal, such as volunteering for political candidates, mentoring at-risk youth, and promoting environmentally friendly policy. Politics for the Love of Fandom examines the communication at the center of these civic actions, exploring how fans, nonprofits, and media companies manage to connect internet-based fandom with public issues.

Interest in citizenship has never been higher. But what does it mean to be a citizen in a modern, complex community? Richard Bellamy approaches the subject of citizenship from a political perspective and, in clear and accessible language, addresses the complexities behind this highly topical issue.

This book explores the politics of race, censuses, and citizenship, drawing on the complex history of questions about race in the U.S. and Brazilian censuses. It reconstructs the history of racial categorization in American and Brazilian censuses from each country’s first census in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries up through the 2000 census. It sharply challenges certain presumptions that guide scholarly and popular studies, notably that census bureaus are (or are designed to be) innocent bystanders in the arena of politics, and that racial data are innocuous demographic data. Using previously overlooked historical sources, the book demonstrates that counting by race has always been a fundamentally political process, shaping in important ways the experiences and meanings of citizenship. This counting has also helped to create and to further ideas about race itself. The author argues that far from being mere producers of racial statistics, American and Brazilian censuses have been the ultimate insiders with respect to racial politics. For most of their histories, American and Brazilian censuses were tightly controlled by state officials, social scientists, and politicians. Over the past thirty years in the United States and the past twenty years in Brazil, however, certain groups within civil society have organized and lobbied to alter the methods of racial categorization. This book analyzes both the attempt of America’s multiracial movement to have a multiracial category added to the U.S. census and the attempt by Brazil’s black movement to include racial terminology in census forms. Because of these efforts, census bureau officials in the United States and Brazil today work within political and institutional constraints unknown to their predecessors. Categorization has become as much a "bottom-up” process as a "top-down” one.

Most Americans believe that the ratification of the Constitution in 1788 marked the settlement of post-Revolutionary disputes over the meanings of rights, democracy, and sovereignty in the new nation. In The Citizenship Revolution, Douglas Bradburn undercuts this view by showing that the Union, not the Nation, was the most important product of independence. In 1774, everyone in British North America was a subject of King George and Parliament. In 1776 a number of newly independent "states," composed of "American citizens" began cobbling together a Union to fight their former fellow countrymen. But who was an American? What did it mean to be a "citizen" and not a "subject"? And why did it matter? Bradburn’s stunning reinterpretation requires us to rethink the traditional chronologies and stories of the American Revolutionary experience. He places battles over the meaning of "citizenship" in law and in politics at the center of the narrative. He shows that the new political community ultimately discovered that it was not really a "Nation," but a "Union of States"—and that it was the states that set the boundaries of belonging and the very character of rights, for citizens and everyone else. To those inclined to believe that the ratification of the Constitution assured the importance of national authority and law in the lives of American people, the emphasis on the significance and power of the states as the arbiter of American rights and the character of nationhood may seem strange. But, as Bradburn argues, state control of the ultimate meaning of American citizenship represented the first stable outcome of the crisis of authority, allegiance, and identity that had exploded in the American Revolution—a political settlement delicately reached in the first years of the nineteenth century. So ended the first great phase of the American citizenship revolution: a continuing struggle to reconcile the promise of revolutionary equality with the pressing and sometimes competing demands of law, order, and the pursuit of happiness.

This book introduces the concept of semi-citizenship into debates about individuals who hold some but not all elements of full democratic citizenship. Cohen uses theoretical analysis, historical examples, and contemporary cases of semi-citizenship to illustrate how divergent normative and governmental doctrines of citizenship make semi-citizenship inevitable in democratic politics.

Citizenship is a core concept for the social sciences, and citizenship is also frequently interpreted, challenged and contested in different political arenas. Shaping Citizenship explores how the concept is debated and contested, defined and redefined, used and constructed by different agents, at different times, and with regard to both theory and practice. The book uses a reflexive and constructivist perspective on the concept of citizenship that draws on the theory and methodology of conceptual history. This approach enables a panorama of politically important readings on citizenship that provide an interdisciplinary perspective and help to transcend narrow and simplified views on citizenship. The three parts of the book focus respectively on theories, debates and practices of citizenship. In the chapters, constructions and struggles related to citizenship are approached by experts from different fields. Thematically the chapters focus on political representation, migration, internationalization, sub-and transnationalization as well as the Europeanisation of citizenship. An indispensable read to scholars and students, Shaping Citizenship presents new ways to study the conceptual changes, struggles and debates related to core dimensions of this ever-evolving concept.