Sub-project Bonn: Collective Articulation of Citizenship in Madrid
In 2014-2016 the sub-project Bonn investigates activations of citizenship and belonging in the context of migration in Madrid. Since the crisis of 2008, the social positionalities of migrants, migrant organisations and self-organised groups have come under additional stress, interfering with practices and ontologies of becoming (citizen) and articulations of claims. The social movement of the indignad@s of 2011 powerfully emplaced citizenship by rhizomatic ways of constructing and amplifying a networked social movement for ‘real democracy’. Some migrant organisations joined the movement, using this collective level to articulate politics of difference with respect to their citizenry, while they also focus on empowerment, assistance and social support.
In terms of the practically applied component of the second project phase, several workshops with migrant organisations and institutions of development cooperation are organised. Presentations by activists, practitioners and scientists shall enable a debate on the concepts.
In 2010-2014 the research focus has been on transnational migration regarding the concepts of ethnicity, citizenship and belonging. Belonging was assumed to be socially constructed and imagined so that it could be tied up to the idea of relational and multiple attachments of individual actors and underlying concepts of space, breaking a dichotomic understanding of inclusion and exclusion. Citizenship, understood as everyday practices, ontological ways of being and becoming as well as political claim-making, considers how acts of migrants, articulated from a position of difference and externality, come back into the minds of all residents and of societies’ representational systems. Thereby, the migrants’ “act” of crossing space redefines and animates it, translocalising perceptions of space and places as socio-material hybrids.