Doctoral Dissertation Research: Citizenship, Identity, and Rural-Urban Migration

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SES-1434668Nitsan ChorevOi Ying I PangBrown UniversityThis dissertation project examines what happens to citizenship regimes when a country undergoes transformation, triggered by capitalist market reforms. The study contributes to the limited literature on citizenship regimes which diverge from the model of citizenship in Western Europe. This project asks two closely-related questions. Firstly, how is citizenship in countries undergoing capitalist reforms described and instituted in the law, but also experienced and practiced, especially by disadvantaged populations. Secondly, by comparing and contrasting the trajectories of citizenship development, this project aims to clarify and contribute to the theoretical understanding of the relationship between capitalist development and citizenship development outside of Western Europe. Over the past three decades, capitalist market reforms in China and India have substantially altered socio-political landscapes, triggering the transformation of the citizenship regime in each country. Yet the citizenship development of China and India is difficult to explain with existing literature on citizenship, which is still largely derived from the experiences of Western Europe. Informed by an understanding of citizenship not as a status or as a predetermined set of rights to be conferred on the population, but rather as relations that arise out of everyday practices and interactions between different societal actors, this project will study how citizenship is understood, interpreted, practiced, and contested by citizens in China and India. . In particular, this project will focus on the experience of low-income internal migrants. As newcomers to the city, many internal migrant workers are faced with the paradoxical existence of being a stranger at home, as they are treated as "virtual foreigners within the cities of their own country". The entry of internal migrant workers into cities therefore serves as a research site where migrants' struggles to establish themselves as rightful members of the city bring into relief the active and observable practices and contestations of citizenship. More specifically, this ethnographic study will study construction workers in Beijing and Delhi, who are mostly low-income migrant workers from neighboring provinces. Broader ImpactThe imperative for the study of citizenship is simultaneously empirical and normative. The implications of citizenship in most contexts are significant in that citizenship status impacts and defines the daily lives of people. By examining the livelihoods of low-income construction workers, this project has the potential to contribute to a better understanding and clarity of the needs and struggles of a vast, underprivileged population. The findings from this project will be relevant for policy makers as in that they will generate a greater awareness of the situation of exploited workers among the general public.