Theorising the constitution of subjects and the state through governmental citizenship : immigration regulation and the 2004 Irish citizenship referendum
Year: 2011
Type: dissertation
Abstract: This is an empirical investigation of the processes whereby the boundaries and meaning\nof citizenship are re-constituted through state-driven practices of regulating migrants and migrants’ responses to such practices. The focal point of this study is an instance of constitutional and legislative citizenship reform which occurred in the Republic of Ireland in 2004, resulting in the alteration of jus soli citizenship. This thesis explicates the\nforms of power-knowledge, the discursive and enumerative practices, through which\nmigrant mothers were constituted as risky, irresponsible subjects.\nThe politics of the referendum produced judicial decisions, deportations,\nlegislative change, and the suspension and re-establishment of an administrative\nresidency programme pertaining to immigrant parents. I conceptualise this series of\nlegislative and administrative developments in terms of ‘technologies of citizenship’ and\n‘anti-citizenship technologies’ which have cumulatively expanded the capacity of the\nState to biopolitically and ethopolitically regulate the non-EEA resident immigrant\npopulation. I argue that the technical and programmatic aspects of immigration\ngovernance through which migrants are channelled into various governmental categories, are constitutive of subject-positions and structuring of immigrants’ agency. Practices such as detention and deportation, direct provision and expedited asylum determination procedures operate as anti-citizenship technologies intended to discipline and deter immigrants. Conditional and temporary residency statuses act as technologies of citizenship, provisionally including immigrants on the basis that they adhere to prescribed criteria. I investigate the subject-effects these technologies on migrant mothers through the prism of eighteen participants’ experiential narratives. The analysis examines how\ncitizenship/immigration technologies act upon migrants’ bodies and mobilities,\npresuppose particular raced and gendered forms of subjectivity, and endeavour to\ncultivate forms of subjectivity compatible with the needs of neoliberal governance.\nHowever, participants’ narrations of their negotiations of governmental processes and\nprocedures reveal their capacity for political agency, albeit constrained. Moreover, in narrating their local, everyday practices of forming families, participating in communities, engaging in education and employment, the migrant mothers who\nparticipated in this study expound alternative articulations of legitimacy and belonging.\nThis thesis theorises the constitutive relationship between the state and migrant\nsubjects in re-shaping the boundaries and meaning of citizenship in the context of\ntransnational migration.
Author: Siobhán Ní Chatháin
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2238019113