Journal of Language and Politics - Volume 14, Issue 3, 2015

The main argument advanced in this article that frames this special issue is that citizenship is not just a highly polysemic word employed by the media and other political institutions; it is also a set of norms and (linguistic) behaviours that individuals are socialised into, as well as a series of practices that social actors perform through an array of semiotic means including multilingualism, multivoicedness, the body, and affect. In light of this, it is proposed that the linguistic/discursive study of citizenship should be expanded beyond a rather narrow emphasis on political proposals about language testing to include the diverse, more or less mundane, ways in which citizenship is enacted via an array of multivocal, material, and affective semiotic resources.

In this article we will show, with Flanders (Belgium) as a concrete case, how intertwined integration and citizenship discourses and policies have become in contemporary super-diverse societies. Flanders is a clear example of how integration is gradually being replaced by virtual or moral citizenship. The fact that (moral) citizenship has replaced integration, has as a consequence that the concept of citizenship has shifted, in a subtle way, from a dynamic and contextualized process, which shapes itself in daily practice through social networks, into ‘citizenship as achievement’. This is an achievement that is the sole responsibility of certain groups in society. It is also an impossible achievement, because some are exempt from it and others will always be perceived as not yet belonging to the category of ‘true citizens’.

Linked to global processes and the reconfigurations of ‘outer’ and ‘inner’ European Union (EU) borders are attempts at harmonizing migration policies across EU member-states as well as introducing an additional layer of EU citizenship to that of the state. At the same time, discourses on citizenship in many EU member-states continue to be informed by the ideal of nation-state congruence and the dogma of social and linguistic homogeneism. Combining research on regimes of language and acts of citizenship, this paper provides an analysis of discourses on language, integration and citizenship in Luxembourg. The analysis shows how disputes concerning the introduction of the formalized testing of Luxembourgish as part of the 2008 law on la nationalité luxembourgeoise ‘Luxembourgish nationality’ are intertwined with contestations over transformations of long-standing language regimes and with the issue of whether the authority of Luxembourgish is bound up with notions of anonymity or authenticity.

The British citizenship ceremony marks the legal endpoint of the naturalisation process. While the citizenship ceremony may be a celebration, it can also be a final examination. Using an ethnographically-informed case study, this article follows one candidate, ‘W’, through the naturalisation process in the UK. W is a migrant Yemeni at the end of the naturalisation process. Bakhtin’s notion of “ideological becoming” offers an analytic orientation into how competing discourses may operate. This article focuses on the role of what Bakhtin describes as “authoritative discourse” in the citizenship ceremony, in particular the Oath/Affirmation of Allegiance which citizenship candidates are required to recite. Success in the ceremony is dependent on how individuals negotiate authoritative discourse. This study follows W and highlights the complexities and negotiations of authoritative discourse in a citizenship ceremony.

A major challenge facing South Africa is that of reconstructing a meaningful and inclusive notion of citizenship in the aftermath of its apartheid past and in the face of narratives of divisiveness that reach back from this past and continue to reverberate in the present. Many of the problems confronting South African social transformation are similar to the rest of the postcolonial world that continues to wrestle with the inherited colonial divide between citizen and subject. In this article, we explore how engagement with diversity and marginalization is taking place across a range of non-institutional and informal political arenas. Here, we elaborate on an approach towards the linguistic practices of the political everyday in terms of a notion of linguistic citizenship and by way of conclusion argue that the contradictions and turmoils of contemporary South Africa require further serious deliberation around alternative notions of citizenship and their semiotics.

This article explores an incident that took place in the context of Joburg Pride 2012, where the activist group One in Nine Campaign attempted to temporarily stop the Pride parade through means of a die-in protest, resulting in resistance and violence on the part of the Pride participants. The article argues that Pride and the One in Nine protest are manifestations of two very different types of sexual cityzenship. Whilst Pride is an orderly claim to the urban environment that is founded on an alignment with state-sanctioned, rights-based discourses of gay and lesbian identity, the One in Nine protest is a spatial disruption that problematises the optimistic reliance on sexual identities as catalysts for political action. The article also seeks to offer a queer epistemology that questions the logocentric bias of research on discourse, space and citizenship by encompassing not only the visual but also and most importantly the corporeal.

This paper highlights the dynamic nature of the relationship between government and society, drawing on as a case study the changing relationship between the Singapore government and the citizenry. I discuss the conditions under which the People’s Action Party is under pressure to change its style of government,. Following on from this discussion, I make two key points. One, concepts such as habitus and act (Isin 2008) have been employed to elucidate the nature of citizenship. But they are also relevant to our understanding of government. Two, the distinction between act and habitus, at least as articulated by Isin (2008), confuses two ontologically distinct entitiies: a disposition to act, and the action itself. I suggest that this confusion arises in part from Isin’s failure to examine carefully the communicative modes of engagement between the government and the citizenry.