Enacting European Citizenship (IV): Methods

We have mentioned that our focus is ‘enacting citizenship’. The main object of analysis in this research is ‘acts’ within the context of statuses and habitus as modes of enactment and subjects, scales and sites as media of enactment. We develop a catalogue of acts through which subjects in various sites enact themselves as European citizens. We also investigate how European states attempt to inhibit their citizens to act as European citizens. The binding thread of our investigation is enacting citizenship that enables us to develop a renewed focus on all three modes of citizenship (status, habitus and acts) as well as its media of enactment (subjects, sites and scales). By focusing on acts as cases we will undertake empirical studies and develop a catalogue of acts that illustrate various conditions under which actors are enabled to or inhibited from enacting themselves as European citizens. Each enactment of citizenship will be investigated and catalogued with its modes (status, habitus, acts) and media (subjects, scales, sites). By cataloguing we mean to indicate that we will gather, interpret and understand how European citizenship is enacted by specific subjects, scales and sites mobilising specific statuses, habituses and acts. There is a symbiotic relationship between our conceptual approach and the empirical research. While we start with a robust conceptual approach that takes into account of the developments in the field of citizenship studies in the last decade, our empirical findings will help us refine our approach and present a catalogue of acts of citizenship that reassess European citizenship. Methodologically, we consider that creative citizenship emerges through contestation. These forms of contestation are already enacted and we draw attention to them. Thus, we emphasize that there is a methodological difference between top-down analysis of practices and governance and bottom-up emphasis on enactment. Thus we do not analyse the perceptions, opinions or attitudes of subjects, but their ‘acts’ that create sites and scales of contestation and struggle.

To achieve these aims each work package broadly adheres to the conceptual approach we have identified but uses specific methods and techniques appropriate to the acts that it investigates. WP3, for example, will examine acts of Roma and sex workers in articulating claims to European citizenship through their mobility. Consider the following act. In October 2005, sex workers organised a European Conference on Sex Work, Human Rights, Labour and Migration with the purpose of putting sex workers’ right back on the European Agenda. Rather than mobilising in terms of their national citizenship, sex workers enacted an idea of being European as the space in which labour rights can be claimed and mobility rights legalised. Thus, the Manifesto and Declaration of the Rights of Sex Workers in Europe were presented before the European Parliament. Through contesting labour and mobility rights, sex workers also enacted European citizenship by having recourse to European institutions. In cataloguing such acts, the project will have a twofold methodological approach: on the one hand, it will analyse the reformulations of citizenship through acts of contestation and mobilisation; on the other, it will explore the effects of these acts for subjects, scales and sites. While acts are sometimes intended for certain effects, they can also produce others. WP6 and WP8 will examine actual court cases through which women or youth have made claims to citizenship. WP3 and WP5 draw from similar conceptual resources but focus on different empirical cases. WP6 and WP8 focus on subjects and sites that are at the limits of European citizenship. WP4 and WP7 focus on deprivation of European citizenship, the former investigates state practices and the latter non-citizens. Thus each work package interacts not only with the overall conceptual approach but also with the methods and findings of other work packages. It is in this sense that the consortium is a collaborative research group rather than a discretely conceived separate research projects. It is tightly integrated and organized around an objective—enacting of European citizenship—that is simultaneously conceptual and empirical, normative and practical. The work plan in Figure 4 demonstrates the integration of work packages, their deliverables and milestones. There are both temporal and conceptual dependencies in the work plan and their smooth delivery and implementation are the key tasks of WP1 and WP2 over three years (2008-2010). Work packages sharing closer conceptual and empirical affinities with each other are shaded with same colours to indicate levels of integration.