Ambiguous Citizenship in an Age of Global Migration

This is a sustained engagement with the increasingly complicated global, transnational and postmodern nature of citizenship. Many people see citizenship in a globalised world in terms of binaries: inclusion/exclusion, past/present, particularism/universalism. Aoileann Ni Mhurchu points out the limitations of these positions and argues that we need to be able to take into account the people who get caught between these traditional categories. Using critical resources found in poststructural, psychoanalytic and postcolonial thought, Ni Mhurchu thinks in new ways about citizenship, drawing on a range of thinkers including Kristeva, Bhabha and Foucault. Taking a distinctive theoretical approach, she shows how citizenship is being reconfigured beyond these categories. It provides a radical new framework for thinking about the limitations of current European citizenship scholarship. It links existing insights on intergenerational migration with new literature on citizenship through innovative empirical research. It develops a new way of thinking about the increasingly discontinuous and fragmented nature of citizenship. It contributes to the growing interdisciplinary field of critical citizenship studies, which is exploring new forms of citizenship in a globalised world.