The notion of citizenship has gradually evolved from being simply a legal status or practice to a deep sentiment. Belonging, or feeling at home, has become a requirement. This groundbreaking book analyzes how 'feeling rules' are developed and applied to migrants, who are increasingly expected to express feelings of attachment, belonging, connectedness and loyalty to their new country. More than this, however, it demonstrates how this culturalization of citizenship is a global trend with local variations, which develop in relation to each other. The authors pay particular attention to the intersection between sexuality, race and ethnicity, spurred on by their awareness of the dialectical construction of homosexuality, held up as representative of liberal Western values by both those in the West and by African leaders, who use such claims as proof that homosexuality is un-African.

`Culture' and `citizenship' are two of the most hotly contested concepts in the social sciences. What are the relationships between them? This book explores the issues of inclusion and exclusion, the market and policy, rights and responsibilities, and the definitions of citizens and non-citizens. Substantive topics investigated in the various chapters include: cultural democracy; intersubjectivity and the unconscious; globalization and the nation state; European citizenship; and the discourses on cultural policy.

Fifty years of large-scale immigration has brought significant ethnic, racial, and religious diversity to North America and Western Europe, but has also prompted hostile backlashes. In Fear, Anxiety, and National Identity, a distinguished multidisciplinary group of scholars examine whether and how immigrants and their offspring have been included in the prevailing national identity in the societies where they now live and to what extent they remain perpetual foreigners in the eyes of the long-established native-born. What specific social forces in each country account for the barriers immigrants and their children face, and how do anxieties about immigrant integration and national identity differ on the two sides of the Atlantic? Western European countries such as Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom have witnessed a significant increase in Muslim immigrants, which has given rise to nativist groups that question their belonging. Contributors Thomas Faist and Christian Ulbricht discuss how German politicians have implicitly compared the purported “backward” values of Muslim immigrants with the German idea of Leitkultur, or a society that values civil liberties and human rights, reinforcing the symbolic exclusion of Muslim immigrants. Similarly, Marieke Slootman and Jan Willem Duyvendak find that in the Netherlands, the conception of citizenship has shifted to focus less on political rights and duties and more on cultural norms and values. In this context, Turkish and Moroccan Muslim immigrants face increasing pressure to adopt “Dutch” culture, yet are simultaneously portrayed as having regressive views on gender and sexuality that make them unable to assimilate. Religion is less of a barrier to immigrants’ inclusion in the United States, where instead undocumented status drives much of the political and social marginalization of immigrants. As Mary C. Waters and Philip Kasinitz note, undocumented immigrants in the United States. are ineligible for the services and freedoms that citizens take for granted and often live in fear of detention and deportation. Yet, as Irene Bloemraad points out, Americans’ conception of national identity expanded to be more inclusive of immigrants and their children with political mobilization and changes in law, institutions, and culture in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement. Canadians’ views also dramatically expanded in recent decades, with multiculturalism now an important part of their national identity, in contrast to Europeans’ fear that diversity undermines national solidarity. With immigration to North America and Western Europe a continuing reality, each region will have to confront anti-immigrant sentiments that create barriers for and threaten the inclusion of newcomers. Fear, Anxiety, and National Identity investigates the multifaceted connections among immigration, belonging, and citizenship, and provides new ways of thinking about national identity.

According to politics and the media, immigration and individualization drive citizens apart but in neighbourhoods social life is often thriving, depending on the talents of particular citizens or of local institutions. This book examines new forms of active citizenship and the actual conditions that hinder social cohesion.

Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. Citizenship is always in dispute – in practice as well as in theory – but conventional perspectives do not address why the concept of citizenship is so contentious. This unique book presents a new perspective on citizenship by treating it as a continuing focus of dispute.The authors dispute the way citizenship is normally conceived and analysed within the social sciences, developing a view of citizenship as always emerging from struggle. This view is advanced through an exploration of the entanglements of politics, culture and power that are both embodied and contested in forms and practices of citizenship. This compelling view of citizenship emerges from the international and interdisciplinary collaboration of the four authors, drawing on the diverse disputes over citizenship in their countries of origin (Brazil, France, the UK and the US). The book is essential reading for anyone interested in the field of citizenship, no matter what their geographical, political or academic location.

We live in a time of great uncertainty about the future. Those heady days of the late twentieth century, when the end of the Cold War seemed to be ushering in a new and more optimistic age, now seem like a distant memory. During the last couple of decades, we’ve been battered by one crisis after another and the idea that humanity is on a progressive path to a better future seems like an illusion. It is only now that we can see clearly the real scope and structure of the profound shifts that Western societies have undergone over the last 30 years. Classical industrial society has been transformed into a late-modern society that is molded by polarization and paradoxes. The pervasive singularization of the social, the orientation toward the unique and exceptional, generates systematic asymmetries and disparities, and hence progress and unease go hand in hand. Reckwitz examines this dual structure of singularization and polarization as it plays itself out in the different sectors of our societies and, in so doing, he outlines the central structural features of the present: the new class society, the characteristics of a postindustrial economy, the conflict about culture and identity, the exhaustion of the self resulting from the imperative to seek authentic fulfillment, and the political crisis of liberalism. Building on his path-breaking work The Society of Singularities, this new book will be of great interest to students and scholars in sociology, politics, and the social sciences generally, and to anyone concerned with the great social and political issues of our time.