Social Citizenship on the Move

Annual Spring Conference of the Section “Migration and Ethnic Minorities”
of the German Sociological Association (DGS). Cologne, May 21st- 22nd, 2026

Social Citizenship on the Move

Arenas, Actors and Practices of Social Rights within and beyond the State

Conference organizers:

Prof. Dr. Matthias Otten (Technische Hochschule Köln), Dr. Catharina Peeck-Ho (Leibniz University Hannover), Dr. Oleksandra Tarkhanova (University of St. Gallen)

Migration and mobility have long been central themes in citizenship research. People on the move are often regarded as either an asset to increasingly diverse societies (Bukow, 2014) or as challenges to state governance. In public discourse, they are often portrayed as threats to security, social cohesion, or state welfare, which legitimizes new practices of exclusion (Wemyss, Yuval-Davis, & Cassidy, 2019). Depending on the context, these dynamics involve both migrants and internally displaced people.

Although all people are ultimately subject to the biopolitics of the state over ‘its’ citizens, the opportunities to experience and assert oneself as a free subject in the face of this control are very unevenly distributed (Agamben, 1998; Lemke, 2010; Wiertz, 2020). Against the backdrop of the ongoing wars and mass displacements, current attacks on the welfare state, and the discursive framing of migration as a problem for societies, the planned conference will focus on the future of social citizenship for people on the move.

This involves two different perspectives. While the state perspective and actions to regulate access to citizenship for different people remain an important research focus in ever-changing governance regimes, the conference also welcomes contributions exploring citizenship as a lived experience through practices and acts associated with the acquisition of rights and the development of political subjectivity. Social groups with limited legal status are in focus, including illegalized migrants, stateless persons, precarious labour migrants, and internally displaced persons. In addition to the dismantling of the welfare state, the spread of political and militarized conflicts, and restrictive migration regimes, the shifting power relations between and within the so-called Global North and South, as well as the nexus of climate change and migration, present themselves as important conditions for a discussion of social citizenship. Since citizenship is a ‘traveling’ key principle for fostering solidarity in modern societies (e.g. Harris et al., 2015), it is important to focus on spaces and encounters where exclusion and marginalization takes place as well as resistance and renegotiation of power relations, namely on the margins, at the borders, and in spaces of state-citizen encounters (Brandzel, 2022; Shachar, 2009). The conference seeks to bring together current empirical findings and new theoretical perspectives on the future of social citizenship.

References

• Agamben, G. (1998). Homo sacer: Sovereign power and bare life. Stanford University Press.
• Bukow, W.-D. (2014): Mobilität und Diversität als Herausforderungen für eine inclusive city. In: Yildiz, E. & M. Hill (eds): Nach der Migration. Postmigrantische Perspektiven jenseits der Parallelgesellschaft. (pp. 105-124): Transcript
• Brandzel, A. (2016): Against Citizenship: The Violence of the Normative. University of Illinois Press
• Harris, J., Borodkina, O., Brodtkorb, E., Evans, T., Kessl, F., Schnurr, S., & Slettebø, T. (2015). International travelling knowledge in social work: An analytical framework. European Journal of Social Work, 18(4), 481–494. https://doi.org/10.1080/13691457.2014.949633
• Lemke, T. (2010). From state biology to the government of life: Historical dimensions and contemporary perspectives of ‘biopolitics.’ Journal of Classical Sociology, 10(4), 421–438. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468795X10385183
• Shachar, A. 2009: The Birthright Lottery. Citizenship and Global Inequality. Harvard University Press
• Wemyss, G., Yuval-Davis N., & Cassidy K. (2019). Bordering. Polity Press
• Wiertz, T. (2021). Biopolitics of migration: An assemblage approach. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 39(7), 1375–1388. https://doi.org/10.1177/2399654420941854