Doctoral Dissertation Research: Exclusion and the Social Construction of Citizenship

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Research has shown that what it means to be a responsible, law-abiding, and fully engaged citizen is more than legal status alone. People also have to feel that they are accepted as belonging. Religious and other minority populations may be economically successful and yet find themselves excluded from full social participation. Furthermore, as the world becomes more interconnected, external pressure groups can affect the effective citizenship status accorded minorities or, alternatively, minorities may have external ties as important to them as their internal ones. Such developments challenge the very ideas of nation and citizen, both for social theoreticians who study them and for governments that serve them. In this research project, Northwestern University doctoral student Sadaf Hasnain, with the guidance of Dr. Robert Launay, will investigate this phenomenon through the lens of youth socialization. How do young people understand their belonging to a nation-state when they face ambiguous citizenship status? The research will be conducted in Pakistan and will focus on the citizenship of young adherents of the Ahmadiyya faith, a 19th. century off-shoot of Islam. The economically successful Ahmadi regard themselves as Muslims but are not so regarded in Pakistani law. Their ambiguous status makes them ideal for this research. The investigator will carry out participant observation, group and individual interviews, content analysis of relevant news media, and archival research. These data will be used to assess the relationship between Ahmadi youth's sense of citizenship and belonging, the opposition to their religious identity and practice, and their social class and transnational religious ties. Findings from this research will provide insight into the relationship between legislation, exclusion, socio-economic status, and transnational links on the one hand and the construction of nation and citizenship on the other. This research will contribute to the NSF Cultural Anthropology Program's research focus on socio-cultural drivers and consequences of critical anthropogenic processes, including those that produce and transform socioeconomic differentiation.