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Call for Publications Theme: The Theory and Practice of Second-Class Citizenship Publication: Politics, Groups and Identities Date: Special Issue Deadline: 1.2.2016 __________________________________________________ We are soliciting contributions to a special issue of Politics, Groups and Identities, titled “The theory and politics of second-class citizenship.” Contributions should evaluate the political theoretic questions that arise from governments’ recent attempts to legislate the creation of second class citizenship. The issue’s goal is to evaluate changes in the last 25 years to the approach taken by western states to citizenship that have led to new forms of second class citizenship. In 1989, Iris Marion Young argued for a group-differentiated approach to citizenship in response to what she perceived as the corrosion of the ideal of universal citizenship in the postwar period. According to Young, differences in class and cultural identity could be predicted to intersect with public policies with the effect of denying access for some people to certain key benefits of citizenships and thereby creating a de facto class of second-class citizens. Her goal was to expose these exclusions as a direct result of the pursuit of universal citizenship, and to propose group-differentiated citizenship as a response. In contrast, today, second-class citizenship is explicitly written into the legislation of many western states. For instance, in Canada and Britain, legislation now allows the state to strip citizenship from those who are convicted of, or in some cases suspected of, engaging in counter-state activities; many European states are considering doing the same. In France, court decisions have denied citizenship applications to those who appear to fail to conform to French republican ideals. Temporary foreign worker programs across North America and Europe are being revamped (in Europe) and increasingly treated as a means by which states access an army of workers while denying them a clear pathway citizenship (in North America); in some cases, access to citizenship is dangled as a possible prize, but only on condition of good behavior by these workers. The rewriting of citizenship tests across European states to emphasize shared norms and values; the refusal to consider abandoning the widespread practice of disenfranchising felons in the United States (who remain predominantly African American); the attempts to ban traditional forms of Muslim dress from the public sphere – these are all examples of conditioning citizenship on certain behaviors and norms. Whereas when Young was writing, political actors still treated citizenship as a status that ought to be thought of as universal – i.e., applied to all citizens equally – and were thus in the business of refusing to admit that some citizens were treated less than equally because of racial, gender, cultural, and ethnic differences, now political actors (and the publics that support them) are explicitly treating citizenship as conditional, on good behavior, on shared values and so on, and appear more comfortable with the ways these conditionality intersects with, and excludes, difference. Contributions to this special issue of PGI will consider and evaluate the theory and politics of these turns towards conditionality of citizenship. Please send expressions of interest by February 1, 2016 and final papers, of between 7000-9000 words, by May 1, 2016, to Avigail Eisenberg (aviga...@uvic.ca) and Patti Tamara Lenard (patti.len...@uottawa.ca). __________________________________________________ InterPhil List Administration: http://interphil.polylog.org Intercultural Philosophy Calendar: http://cal.polylog.org __________________________________________________
