"Lived Citizenship, Uprising and Migration: Everyday Politics, Imaginaries and Contestation"

Two public keynote addresses were delivered by

MARCO GIUGNI (University of Geneva):
"Institutional and Non-Institutional Participation: Substitution or Complementarity?"

PETER NYERS (McMaster University)
"Decolonizing Lived Citizenship: Lessons from the Blockades"

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With the first wave of the Arab Uprisings, it became apparent that new frameworks were needed for understanding the diverse experiences, resources and aspirations of Arab publics. The unprecedented scale of collective action presented serious challenges to the status quo, and triggered major regional and global developments, including a new wave of migration across the Mediterranean that remains at the forefront of European politics. With still unfolding repercussions, 2019 witnessed a second wave of the Arab uprisings with major protests in five more countries in the region. This workshop explores new ways of thinking about the everyday experiences that shape political outcomes in the Arab region and its diasporas. While many scholars have examined the causes of the uprisings and the institutional arrangement and re-arrangements that followed, little research has been carried out on how the everyday realities, transformations and dislocation are lived by different categories of citizens.

Through the theme of lived citizenship, the workshop explores how citizens experience and shape the everyday realities of socio-economic, political and spatial governance and narratives of identity and legitimation in these critical times. The lens of lived citizenship serves as a tool for understanding how differentiated rights, obligations and forms of belonging are navigated and contested across categories of social difference. Lived citizenship points to citizenship as always gendered, classed, racialized, critically intersecting with intensities of privilege, violence and clientelism and producing differentiated political subjectivities and modes of appropriation, contestation, exit and flight. The workshop is particularly concerned with the intersections between lived and imagined citizenship and everyday forms of contestation, episodes of mass mobilization and experiences of migration. It explores how everyday realities, narratives and encounters in formal and informal institutions reflect different constellations of the relationship between state and citizen in the Arab region and its diasporas. More broadly, it seeks to encourage deeper engagement with the emerging global scholarship on citizenship, including its enacted, lived, affective and transnational dimensions.

For queries, please write to Dr. Hania Sobhy, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Department of Socio-Cultural Diversity at: Sobhy@mmg.mpg.de