Lynn A. Staeheli

The people's property?: power, politics, and the public

The Peoples Property?Power, Politics, and the Public Chapter 1: Permitting Protest in Washington, D.C. Chapter 2: Property, Law, and the Plaza of Santa Fe, New Mexico: Turning Social Relations into Space Chapter 3: Privately Public: Property Redevelopment, Public Space and Homelessness in San Diego Chapter 4: Publicly Private: Regulating Space and Creating Community in Syracuses Carousel Center Chapter 5: Publicizing Public Property? The Struggle for the Public in New Yorks Community Gardens Chapter 6: Placing the Public: Discourses of Publicity and Practices of Property Chapter 7: Power, Politics, and Regimes of Publicity: Conclusions Post Script: Interventions Methodological Appendix References Index

Dreaming the ordinary Daily life and the complex geographies of citizenship

This paper introduces the concept of ‘ordinary’ to analyze citizenship’s complexities. Ordinary is often taken to mean standard or routine, but it also invokes order and authority. Conceptualizing citizenship as ordinary trains our attention on the ways in which the spatiality of laws and social norms are entwined with daily life. The idea of ordinariness fuses legal structures, normative orders and the experiences of individuals, social groups and communities, making citizenship both a general category and a contingent resource for political life. We explore this argument using immigrants as an example, but the conceptualization of citizenship extends more broadly.

Political geography: Where’s citizenship?

Citizenship is a contested subject in political geography, as a quick review of the literature suggests considerable differences in the way it is conceptualized and its importance is understood. This report reviews debates on the salience of citizenship in the context of broad social, political, and economic changes. Rather than attempting to assign a relative importance to citizenship as status as compared to citizenship as membership, it focuses on the continual rearticulation of the relationships and sites through which citizenship is constructed.

The Complex Politics of Relevance in Geography

Abstract As a discipline, geographers have debated what it means to make research relevant. In this article, we argue that the issue of what makes research relevant cannot be separated from the questions of why research should be relevant, how research becomes relevant, the goals of research, and for whom it is intended to be relevant. In this sense, the determination of relevance is a social and political process. We make this point through an evaluation of various writings on relevance, editorials that have appeared in the Newsletter of the Association of American Geographers, and through interviews with researchers. We argue that relevance can be intended, but that commitment to relevant research requires a long-term view and an appreciation for the indirect pathways of relevance.

Citizenship, Community, and Struggles for Public Space

On April 16, 1993, a group of male students at the University of Colorado got into a fight with another group of males not associated with the university; this fight unleashed a broader debate over who should have access to the public spaces surrounding the university. We examine this debate in terms of its implications for citizenship, public space, and community. We discuss conflicts over public space and the role these conflicts have played in defining a citizenship that rejects notions of equal membership in a larger polity. This strategy is examined using newspaper accounts, interviews, and participant observation techniques to understand the conflict over access to “the Hill” in Boulder, Colorado. Central to these conflicts is the issue of how “the public” is constituted. As we detail the actions of agents involved in the Hill, it will become clear that this fight is about competing definitions of who belongs to the public, who is a citizen, and what should be the criteria for membership in the publ...

Topographies of home and citizenship: Arab-American activists in the United States

Home and citizenship carry contradictory and ambiguous meanings for immigrants as they negotiate lives ‘here’ and ‘there’. We use the concept of topography to analyze the ways in which activists in the Arab-American community draw connections between homes in the United States and in the Middle East. In intensive interviews, we ask activists about how their understanding of home influences their activism and positioning as citizens within the United States. Activists often bring to their work conceptualizations of home and citizenship that are open, and that connect home to broader forces operating at various scales and in more than one place. Rather than pursuing a deterritorialized, transnational citizenship, our respondents forged a politics of home and citizenship whose topography transcended localities and nations, even as they were often rooted in the spaces of both.

Integration and the negotiation of ‘here’ and ‘there’: the case of British Arab activists

Immigrant-receiving societies are increasingly emphasizing the need for immigrants to integrate into mainstream life. In Britain, this trend has manifested itself in ‘social cohesion’ discourses and policies. Discussions about social cohesion have often focused on the residential patterns of immigrant and minority groups in British cities, with the assumption that residential patterns are an indication of social integration. Integration, however, is also a socio-political process by which dominant and subordinate groups negotiate the terms of social membership. We explore the ways in which British Arab activists conceptualize their membership in and responsibilities to their places of settlement; we also consider how they reconcile notions of integration with their connections to their places of origin. Our study participants speak of the need for immigrants to participate actively in their society of settlement, but they reject the idea that integration requires cultural conformity or exclusive loyalty to Britain. Their definition of integration as a dialogue between distinctive but equal groups sharing a given place provides a normative alternative to social cohesion discourses.

Empowering women's citizenship

Abstract This paper addresses the question of whether citizenship is used as a basis for social change, and if so, how. We first examine the meanings of citizenship as a qualification that encompasses more than just political rights, and as a formally granted status that is mediated by informal structures. We then build the concept of an ‘empowering citizenship’. Specifically, we demonstrate that women themselves often turn the situation around and use their de jure status as citizens (through employment and political activism) to challenge the de facto barriers to full social inclusion that they encounter, such as gendered divisions of labor and discrimination in education and employment. Interviews of women in Pueblo, Colorado are used to solidify the proposed links between womens political and economic standing and the negotiation of citizenship.

Political geography: democracy and the disorderly public

This progress report reviews recent research on the role that disorder plays in fostering democracy. Disorder can be a powerful tool in fostering democracy because it highlights the conflicts, the agonism, that are inherent in democratic politics. More than a form of government or a set of outcomes, democracy can be conceptualized as a process through which agonism is expressed and action is taken. Yet agonism disrupts what seem to be settled relationships and practices, as new people, voices, and ideas enter the public sphere. Research in political geography has examined material and virtual spaces for public address in which groups struggle to expand, and in some cases reorder, democratic publics.

Educating the new national citizen: education, political subjectivity and divided societies

This paper explores the ways in which citizenship education is used in an effort to create particular kinds of citizens as part of a larger effort at nation- and polity-building. This paper addresses the purpose of citizenship education and its role in creating political subjectivities for citizens. We argue that policies and programmes often attempt to heal social divisions by fostering a common linkage between citizens and nation, but in ways that may be ineffective, and in some cases, deeply problematic. This argument is developed through a consideration of the ways in which different agents involved in citizenship education use their own experiences to develop and interpret citizenship education programmes. Through this, both the meaning and the teaching of citizenship may be reworked. This conceptual argument is supplemented through a consideration of citizenship education programmes in South Africa.