1 Introduction
Today’s citizenship regimes are highly racialised and gendered. When we look at the ways inequalities are enforced in everyday acts and institutions, it becomes clear that they are ingrained in social structures in many ways. This may be partly due to the strong link that connects constructions of race and gender to the nation, which, even if it is questioned, is still the most potent and relevant anchor point for citizenship and imagined communities of solidarity. Although gender inequalities seem to have been diminishing and transformed in western societies, many improvements remain accessible only to an elite or only in paradoxical ways. An extremely gendered and racialised social division of work is still the reality for the vast majority of people. Its foremost expression lies in the division, as well as the recognition and valorisation, of care work. Care work has been described by Helma Lutz as the ‘backstage’ of globalisation (2018), a place where racialised persons, mostly women, take care of all the least valorised but most necessary work of cleaning and catering for those who are very young, very old or otherwise in need. A huge gap with regard to citizenship prevails between these carers and those whom they take care of. Similar processes can be observed when we focus on fields like racialisation processes inside state institutions and the role played by language, cultural representation and the digital code—machine language—as more than merely the symbolic ‘infrastructure’ for citizenship or the implementation of digital technologies. Looking at the ways activists and social movements address these developments, we can say that, in all these fields, people do resist and challenge these inequalities and subvert them in different ways. This, roughly speaking, is the field in which we intervene with our concept of inclusive citizenship.
In this volume, we argue that citizenship is a “momentum concept” (Hoffman 2004) which encompasses the potential to build up spaces for equality and inclusion. Simply understood as a status (a ‘passport’ held), citizenship grants rights to citizens and denies them to non-citizens. However, if one takes a closer look at the associated practices and discourses, the situation becomes less clear. When Thomas H. Marshall made his famous distinction between social, political and civil citizenship (Marshall 1950), he pointed to the complexity caused by different forms of rights and obligations. More recently, authors (Yuval-Davis et al. 2006; Yuval-Davis 2011) have connected citizenship with different notions of belonging—an aspect that becomes even more relevant in times of global migration and increasingly pluralist and diverse societies. All these developments show how practices and discourses around citizenship cannot be reduced to questions of status. More importantly, an understanding is needed that allows the analysis of the complex dynamics of inclusion and exclusion arising within practices and regimes of citizenship—a project that has been undertaken in the field of citizenship studies (Turner 1997; Isin and Turner 2002).
Starting from this field, the book aims to further develop the concept of inclusive citizenship, which is a common working base for us at the Center for Inclusive Citizenship (CINC) at Leibniz University, Hannover. Our understanding of inclusive citizenship has been the result of intense discussion between several disciplines. The CINC was founded in 2017. Since then, researchers from the disciplines of sociology, history, political science, civic education, special education, the didactics of natural science, medicine, the German language and educational science have been collaborating in the framework of the theoretical approach labelled as inclusive citizenship. The CINC’s discussion on inclusive citizenship and, due to the educational disciplines involved, inclusive citizenship education (Kleinschmidt and Lange 2020; Kleinschmidt et al. 2019; Kleinschmidt 2017, 2018, 2021, p. 53 ff.; see Richard Heise and Steve Kenner in this volume) is work in progress, and this volume aims to contribute to the progressive theorisation of the concept. In the field of civic education, the inclusive citizenship approach is based on the idea that education should not be understood as transmitting knowledge or skills from the academic sphere to the learners’ minds. The profound and emphatic German idea of Bildung, instead of education (Erziehung), should be taken into account here for a better understanding. Instead of the idea of transmitting ‘correct’ knowledge, the subjective meaning, the concept formation of the learners, developed to a large extent before, without or independently from institutionalised education settings, is placed at the core of citizenship education. Learners work with these subjective concepts in their everyday life, orientate themselves in society and organise their social relations. Thus, instead of being a top-down process of transmitting, education is seen as an appropriation and reflection of the world and the self by the learning subjects. Here, the question of citizenship as regime and act becomes pivotal to understanding these processes from the perspective of inclusive citizenship. Since this volume does not focus on educational issues, with some exceptions, i.e. the contribution of Heise and Kenner, we will not follow these traces now.
We focus on the dimensions of gender and race, and thus take up two pivotal dimensions of inequality which have received public attention in recent years, for example, within debates on racist police violence in the USA and Europe, and in the care crisis, not only during the COVID-19 pandemic. To what extent is citizenship a momentum concept directed towards gaining not only rights but equal rights, and towards combating patriarchy, sexism, hetero-normativity, gender binarism, colonialism and racism? Due to the topicality of these questions, it is our concern to consider them as not purely academic. We do not believe that there is a latent hierarchy between knowledge in academia and knowledge in social movements. We see a lot of important knowledge circulating among activists that is crucial when it comes to challenging current citizenship regimes and is necessary to widening or rethinking academic perspectives. Thus, this volume engages in a dialogue with activists as experts in the field. Of course, this approach requires a critical reflection of the power relations between academia and activism and the ways in which we contribute to them in the context of editing this volume. Even scholars who genuinely intend to act in solidarity with social movements can do more harm than good, for example, when they (unintentionally) reproduce racist, gendered or culturalist stereotypes in their work. Debates around research methodologies mirror this concern and deal with a range of contradictions resulting from power relations and ways of producing knowledge. For example, although knowledge is always situated and structured by power relations, this does not necessarily mean that scientific knowledge is fundamentally more valuable than that of social movements, or vice versa. In bringing different perspectives to this volume, we aim to take this into account. In contrast to more traditional methodologies, we further draw on methodological considerations from social movement research, especially the work of the anthropologists Alex Khasnabish and Max Haiven. These authors propose a strategy in which they understand research with social movements as an active attempt to create “spaces of encounter” to collectively analyse and imagine alternative knowledge (Khasnabish and Haiven 2012, p. 411; Sielert 2019; Peeck and Sielert 2019). We would like our volume, and the dialogue involved in the process of its making, to be understood as a “space of encounter” in this sense.
This volume promotes the conversation on citizenship, migration and belonging from an intersectional perspective, on the one hand (e.g. Yuval-Davis 1999; Werbner and Yuval-Davis 2005; Anthias 2012; Lutz and Amelina 2017), and from an “acts of citizenship” perspective (Isin and Nielsen 2008) on the other. Not all of our authors situate themselves inside the intersectionality debate, while some do this very strongly. Similarly, some of the authors are very much at home in the citizenship debate, while others have parted ways with it or don’t feel they belong there. As the editors, we therefore promote a constructive discussion among scholars and activists who draw on partly diverging, partly shared theoretical discourses and concepts like acts of citizenship (AoC) (Isin and Nielsen 2008; Isin 2009) or an understanding of citizenship as a regime (Jenson and Papillon 2000; Fourot et al. 2018) as well as on debates on intersectionality (e.g. Lutz et al. 2013). Taking up Engin Isin’s notion of AoC, we are interested, on the one hand, in acts which transform citizenship so that it becomes more inclusive. On the other hand, citizenship regimes are, in many ways, exclusive, as they establish a status quo and can stabilise unequal distributions of rights and duties. From an intersectionality perspective, as many of the contributions in this volume reflect, race and gender are genuinely intertwined with other categories, among them class, religion, disability or sexuality. By demarginalising and centering gender and race, intersectionality helps us to understand and elaborate the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion within debates on citizenship.
As stated above, we regard citizenship as a momentum concept according to John Hoffman: “They [the momentum concepts] ‘unfold’, so that we must continuously rework them in a way that realizes more and more of their egalitarian and anti-hierarchical potential” (Hoffman 2004, p. 138). As a momentum concept, to us, the notion of citizenship summons an imaginary of a commonly shared good inside space, one that is attractive to live in for all. Therefore, inclusive citizenship promotes the idea of opening up this space, whether from the inside or the outside. The idea contains a utopian moment that serves to rethink the infrastructure of these spaces as well as the questions of inequality and participation. Inclusive citizenship as a momentum concept thus encompasses a normative perspective of dynamics towards power equality. On this basis, we understand citizenship not in the narrow sense of membership of a (nation) state. Although membership plays a significant role, we are more interested in how people appropriate rights and struggle for participation (Isin and Nielsen 2008). Closely related to the question of who can make use of rights are questions of belonging and the politics of belonging. Belonging refers to emotional attachments to ‘home’ and the notion of feeling safe in this space. Thus, we must raise questions such as: How is a safe home gendered? Who do the police help to feel safe? Against the background of the mobilisation of these feelings for political projects—the politics of belonging (Yuval-Davis et al. 2006; Yuval-Davis 2011; the conversation in this volume)—the fundamentally political dimension of this category becomes evident. Questions of belonging and agency are negotiated and struggled for in local, regional, digital or transnational spaces as well as in the discursive space of language. In today’s highly racialised and gendered citizenship regimes, belonging remains contested. The idea of inclusive citizenship does not describe an already existing reality but a project, or rather a plurality of efforts and struggles, and provides future perspectives.
As academics who mainly conduct research and lecture at German universities, in many ways, we are discussing gender, race and inclusive citizenship from a privileged position. We already live in a mostly good, comfortable inside space that is attractive to many others who are excluded from it. As Alessandro Pratesi writes in his chapter, it is those who live on the margins who are enabled by an ‘edge effect’ to see this privilege most clearly, which those most centred can so easily take for granted and may even be oblivious to. Even if we, the editors, are obviously not all positioned identically (and some of us are nearer to the edge than others in some respects), our perspective as editors is structurally restricted. We have tried to reflect on this, and our conviction is that dialogue, debate and discussion are crucial to changing the game. The language of citizenship is permeated with antagonistic terms, with struggles for freedom, against oppression or for equality. It shows that the fields we are discussing are not about negotiations between equally empowered groups or individuals enjoying equal treatment. Framing citizenship as inclusive from this stance always needs to reflect the fact that this debate, in many ways, derives from the privileged side of the social divide, or rather that exclusive inside space. In Citizenship Beyond the State, Hoffman argues for a concept of “inclusive citizenship” (2004, p. 154) which is not absorbed in a state-centred understanding as full membership in a nation-state, but rather makes egalitarian and emancipatory processes describable. Similarly, Naila Kabeer frames ‘inclusive citizenship’ as an approach to “different mechanisms of exclusion which consign certain groups within a society to the status of lesser citizens or of non-citizens” and a way of describing “the struggles by such groups to redefine, extend and transform ‘given’ ideas about rights, duties and citizenship” (2005, p. 1). These two authors are thus part of a shift towards a nuanced and more multi-faceted understanding of citizenship.
Our own understanding of citizenship oscillates between membership status and AoC (Isin and Nielsen 2008; Isin 2009). Status is closely connected to rights and entitlements which are part of the citizenship regime (Bickerton 2018). As Hannah Arendt famously stated, “the right to have rights” (Arendt 1986, p. 295) is often formally restricted to citizens and human rights are not equally accessible to every human being (see also Turner 2006). AoC, on the other hand, involve the subversive potential to transform the rules of citizenship even for non-citizens. When activists claim rights, for example, in social movements, they can change the legal framework of citizenship. Isin (2009) thus attributes to these acts a subversive potential that can open up spaces of inclusion—a notion that we take up in our concept of inclusive citizenship.
For this bilingual volume, we should note that when transferring the anglophone concept and debate on citizenship into the German-speaking world some problems were encountered. The usual translation Staatsangehörigkeit (literally ‘state membership’) is not equivalent to what appears in the academic citizenship discourse, as it refers to the legal status of possessing a passport in the narrow sense. Bürgertum is very much associated with the bourgeoisie as a class antagonistic to the working class, and therefore transmits an elitist meaning, athough this may not be altogether inappropriate. Bürgerschaft, on the other hand, has been used by some authors (Lutz and Amelina 2017) to translate the term citizenship, with its associated meanings, to the German context. Others, partly from the CINC context, suggest that we need to differentiate between Bürgerschaft, Staatsangehörigkeit and Staatsbürgerschaft in order to be able to precisely grasp the associated notions (Bös and Schmid 2012). While Bürgerschaft is, in many ways, associated with practices of participation, Staatsbürgerschaft refers to the rights to which people have access. These are partly, but not entirely, connected to Staatsangehörigkeit, as some rights are held by non-citizens, too (e.g. some forms of social security rights which are bound to participation in the labour market). These accounts show that there is still certain potential to develop the concept further in a German-speaking context. As a consequence, the English term citizenship has mostly been retained in translations to take account of the variety of meanings associated with it.
On this basis, this volume sets out to discuss the project of inclusive citizenship along the two major social divisions of race and gender, with reference to the intersectionality debate. It aims to explore how to deal with social inequalities and strengthen perspectives of cooperation between academia and activism. The chapters started out as contributions by speakers invited to a conference programme at the CINC in Hannover, scheduled for September 2020, with speakers having confirmed their contributions; then, in early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic started, and flights, travel and conferences were cancelled. The conversations and dialogue in this volume echo our wish to preserve some of the communicative quality and intensity of a live conference and transmute it into writing. None of the scholars involved in the making of this volume regard themselves as impartial distant observers of intersectional processes of citizenship in the making. We engage in emancipatory projects ourselves, navigating between the idea that our academic work should make a contribution one day and a recognition that the divide between activism and research must not be underestimated. Examples of this double role can be found in many of the contributions, for example, in the conversation between Lisa Doppler and Catharina Peeck-Ho on their shared activist experience and research in Solidarity City contexts.
On a general level, an editing process can be regarded as an act of inclusive citizenship, as it can, to some extent, open up spaces for struggle, negotiation and debate which can subvert understandings of citizenship and belonging. This volume, following the rules of academic publishing, is nonetheless part of a largely privileged discursive space and is therefore relatively limited in terms of inclusion. From the perspective of inclusive citizenship, academic book editing is an activity carried out by an elitist circle trying to be included in a privileged discursive space—and, thus, being exclusive for so many others. Moreover, academic book editing processes go along with individualistic isolation, resulting in volumes as collections of separated monologues. Responding to both these problems, even if not solving them in this volume, we have attempted to find solutions to enable a dialogue. Every author contributing a chapter was also part of a written conversation or a group interview. There is a hierarchy between oral and written language that can be countered by carefully transcribing interviews and giving the spoken word equal weight.
We brought together activists, distinguished senior scholars and junior scholars to discuss a range of questions: What does inclusion in the context of societal pluralisation mean, and how is it related to citizenship? What is the role of discrimination, and how are different forms of discrimination interconnected? How do activists deal with inequalities, and what kind of strategies do they develop to fight for rights, especially when people do not formally have access to them?
In order to get closer to the answers to these questions, the volume contains, in addition to the kind of articles that are normal in a social science volume, a series of conversations and interviews that are intended to initiate and advance the dialogue on inclusive citizenship.
In the following sections of this introduction, we (2) elaborate on our understanding of acts of inclusive citizenship, linking debates on migration and racism in Germany with concepts from citizenship studies, and (3) explain the focus on gender and race that we chose for this collaborative publication project and embed it in the field of intersectionality research. We then present the fields in which we want to deepen our discussion of inclusive citizenship in this volume: the fields of (4) care, (5) institutional racism, (6) language and (7) the digital sphere.
2 What Do We Mean by Acts of Citizenship?
We imagine inclusive citizenship as a commonly shared inside space, which creates and allows belonging for all. This idea, as an imaginary, involves a normative perspective on the ways society deals and should deal with power and inequality. Inclusion has become an influential paradigm in debates about disability (Kleinschmidt 2017; see also Hazibar and Mecheril 2013). The 2006 UN Convention on Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which was the result of long struggles by disability movements, pushed states to strengthen their efforts for equal rights and especially, but not exclusively, in educational sciences, led to renewed thinking about inclusion as a way of restructuring society and its institutions anew, so that it could accommodate the needs of all persons and make differentiating categorisations between them obsolete (Kastl 2018, p. 666; Bittlingmayer and Sarai 2017, p. 684). This notion replaced the older concept of integration that imagined structures and institutions as unaffected and only ‘made a little space for persons with disabilities as well’.
Under the label of migration studies in Germany, a similar shift took place. Instead of treating migrants or the migrant others as the cause of a societal challenge or problem, the perspective was turned to problematising power relations and normalisation processes, and questioning the naturalised ideas of the nation and its mechanisms of belonging (Mecheril 2003). This shift of paradigm is what we want to take as a starting point: it is the mechanisms of exclusion, not the excluded, that are considered to be deficient. Although this shift of perspective is perhaps trivial, it breaks with hegemonic perspectives in several domains, particularly by assuming that neither the diversity nor the migration of people is the problem, but rather the nation state and European Union borders, and how society deals with those circumstances and structures accordingly. For example, in the debates about race and migration in Germany, our understanding of inclusion opposes the integration paradigm which—instead of being part of the solution—perpetuates the regime of racial and national difference and hierarchies. The dominant understanding of integration is the idea of adaptation, according to which the migrant other has to adapt culturally to the imagined homogenous national body—and prove their adaptation constantly. But from a critical perspective of migrant studies, the logic of the integration discourse is exactly the continuing production of the other, the current logic of racial othering in Germany. This integration discourse can be understood as a disciplinary instrument, continuously reproducing regimes of belonging and difference (Castro Varela 2013; also Ha 2007; Bojadžijev 2006). This shift of paradigms and perspectives is exactly what we draw on when using ‘inclusive’ or ‘inclusion’ as a label for our perspective. It turns out that the concept of inclusive citizenship can by no means be reduced to being ‘just’ normative. Inclusive citizenship is also an analytical perspective emanating from this shift and drawing on ideas from citizenship studies.
To introduce our multi-faceted perspective on and inheritances from citizenship studies, we draw a landscape of three different understandings of citizenship from which we inherit our notion of inclusive citizenship: (1) citizenship as healing of inequality in a community, (2) citizenship as a regime which produces exclusion, not-belonging and inequality, and (3) a performative understanding of citizenship putting into question these regimes through acts. Nira Yuval-Davis values Thomas H. Marshall’s (1950) understanding of citizenship “as a membership of the community rather than of the state” (Yuval-Davis 1997, p. 8) as breaking the liberal paradigm and opening the way to analytically encompass the multi-layered social relations in a society. Almost 50 years after Marshall’s book was published, Bryan Turner criticized Marshall’s framework for reducing the perspective on social division to class only (Turner 1997, p. 13). He aimed to extend the view of society and its divisions to other aspects like gender, ethnicity and age groups (ibid., p. 10) and, hence, to add to the understanding of citizenship as a legal status the “cultural identity of individuals and groups” (ibid., p. 8). As in Marshall’s general framework, in which citizenship provides the cure for capitalist inequality by propagating the welfare state, in Turner’s framework, citizenship is still seen as constructing social cohesion—to use a trendy word of current hegemonic discourse. “Citizenship provides a form of solidarity, if you like a kind of social glue that holds societies together which are divided by social class, by gender, by ethnicity and by age groups. The solidarity of the political community of modern societies is provided by citizenship which works as a form of civic religion” (ibid., p. 10).
Here, we have several objections to make. Yuval-Davis reminds us that “it is important not to view ‘the community’ as a given natural unit” (1997, p. 8). The framework used by Marshall and Turner does not address citizenship as a source of inequality because the community constructed by citizenship is not fundamentally questioned. “Collectivities and ‘communities’ are ideological and material constructions, whose boundaries, structures and norms are a result of constant processes of struggles and negotiations, or more general social developments” (ibid.). Rather than seeing citizenship as full membership of a community, it is possible to see it as multi-layered, oscillating between the force to exclude, divide and normalise, and the force of interrupting these inequalities and advancing equality.
“Therefore – and I apologize for the brutality of a formulation that is nonetheless all-too-relevant in reality because of past and present exclusions based on race, sex, deviance, pathologies, to mention only a few – the human being can be denied such access only by being reduced to subhumanity or defective humanity” (ibid, p. 276).
Balibar exposes the particularity of the propagated universalism. “[T]he particular characteristics of a narrow social group, such as being perceived as propertied, adult, male, rational, white, Christian, heterosexual, and able-bodied became the dominant universal characteristics in the modern state” (Isin 2017, p. 503). The flip side of this particular norm is then the exclusion of numerous groups: “These characteristics created various other social groups as subjects without rights: the poor, young, women, irrational, Black, non-Christian (Muslim, Indigenous, Jewish), ethnic minorities, queers (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning, intersex), and disabled people were deemed not capable of fulfilling the duties of citizenship and hence acting as citizens” (ibid.). But the tension of particularity and universalism remains vivid, since this is exactly the field of struggles about citizenship. The project of ‘truly’ universal human rights has been restricted so far by the lack of a global jurisdictive institution. To claim your rights as a human effectively, you need to be a national citizen.
“The rights (civil, political, social, sexual, ecological, cultural), sites (bodies, courts, streets, media, networks, borders), scales (urban, regional, national, transnational, international) and acts (voting, volunteering, blogging, protesting, resisting and organizing) through which subjects enact themselves (and others) as citizens need to be interpreted anew” (Isin 2009, p. 368).
This can be understood as a performative notion of citizenship. Following speech act theory (Austin), the concept of performativity was fundamentally developed further, not least by Judith Butler, who—especially in relation to sex and gender—worked out how reality and the subjects acting in it are created through (also linguistic) practices (Butler 1990). In particular, by incorporating the concept of iteration (Derrida), i.e. constant but never quite successful repetition, she succeeded in reflecting on domination and liberation while having no recourse either a metaphysical system or a sovereign subject (ibid.). Performativity unfolds a “force of rupture” (Butler 1997, p. 148) precisely when a claim is repeated that was not intended for the subject or context according to the script. “That break, that force of rupture, is the force of the performative, beyond all question of truth or meaning” (ibid.). Instead, the force of rupture derives “precisely from its decontextualization, from its break with a prior context and its capacity to assume new contexts” (ibid., p. 147). Rosa Parks did not have a right authorized by segregationist conventions to sit in the front of the bus; rather, the possibility of authorization arose as she laid claim to that right, it arose with the act of that “insurrectionary process of overthrowing those established codes of legitimacy” (ibid.).
“Acts of citizenship […] disrupt habitus, create new possibilities, claim rights and impose obligations in emotionally charged tones; pose their claims in enduring and create expressions; and, most of all, are the actual moments that shift established practices, status and order” (Isin and Nielsen 2008, p. 10).
The concept of acts does not necessarily imply denying the relevance of status. Rather, it is about the ways status becomes contested and subjectivities are (trans-)formed within processes of claiming rights (Isin 2008, p. 17). This shift in perspective leads to a focus on the contested field of “routines, rituals, customs, norms and habits of the everyday through which subjects become citizens” (ibid.). In this context, rupture is not understood as a systemic or total upheaval, but rather as a moment in which the future breaks through into the present, where possibilities of something different emerge (Isin and Ruppert 2015, p. 50).
“We can identify this influence as a continuing interplay or differential of insurrection and constitution, which constantly gives rise to the question of how the universal can be realized within the form (and limits) of a community that is organized by the state” (ibid.).
“It has shifted from a ‘constituted power’ (the right to rights is the result of belonging to an existing political community, particularly a nation-state) to a ‘constituent power’, the active ability to assert rights in a public space or, better yet, dialectically, the possibility of not being excluded from the right to fight for one’s right” (ibid., p. 66).
Thus, performative citizenship means not only to speak about rights claims, but speaking about rights, claims, subject, community and membership from a different perspective. Karen Zivi writes, “to approach rights and rights claiming from the perspective of performativity means, then, asking questions not simply about what a right is but also about what it is we do when we make rights claims” (2012, p. 18). Performing rights or performing AoC means to create a space and the subjects which are constituted by the tension in the concept of citizenship itself, driven by the potential force of equality between citizens, second-class citizens and non-citizens, or by—to use Balibar’s expression—equaliberty. With this performative concept of citizenship, we can analyse citizenship regimes and their inequalities and normalisation processes as always challenged. This concept shifts perspectives on agency and subjectivity and provides a tool to analyse citizenship in its multi-faceted, non-static and contradictory modes.
3 Why Focus on Gender and Race from an Intersectional Perspective?
The dimension of gender, understood broadly to cover aspects of identity, social recognition, sexuality, desire, the body and its enactment and performativity, attributions and imaginaries, remains entrenched in any social field relevant for inequality und social justice. Feminist perspectives, claims and research help to scrutinise and challenge power relations. Questions of gender and sexual identity have been motors of social change and claims to citizenship for a long time now, and the more gender and LGBTIQ* equality moves forward in many societies, the fiercer conservative antagonistic forces seem to become. Gender equality politics in Europe are increasingly being used as blueprints for race equality politics as well. At the same time, the relations between gender and LGBTIQ* issues, on the one hand, and race and migration issues, on the other, are interconnected in several and also problematic ways. The concept of post-liberal racism describes a current form of racism which uses “egalitarian ideologemes” (egalitäre Ideologeme, Pieper et al. 2011, p. 195) in equality policies as markers for racial distinction. Post-liberal racism constructs people as migrant, racial or cultural others by describing ‘them’ as culturally backward because supposedly ‘they’ deny gender and LGBTQI* equality (El-Tayeb 2013, p. 307). This dichotomous construction of the other at the same time makes it possible to produce a superior self. Since today, nobody, not even openly right-wing racists, wants to be called a racist (Lentin 2020), the new (and in its essence very old) form of racial superiority presents itself as more liberal and progressive than its racial counterpart.
Critical perspectives on race and racism are increasingly being put forward, named and spoken out loud in struggles over identity politics. This would not have been possible without relying on ideas like intersectionality and other concepts that developed in transnational Critical Race and Gender Studies, as well as in activist contexts. There is a certain urgency to address race and racism in depth, especially from a Germany-based or, more broadly speaking, continental European perspective. In German academia, work on racism, race, racialisation and institutional racism has for the most part been done under the label of ‘migration’ studies and research, a field that itself only really came into being in German social sciences in the 1990s and was boosted by the summer of migration of 2015. Although a great deal of excellent research on racism and related issues has been done in Germany and by German academics (Oguntoye et al. 1986; Kalpaka and Räthzel 1986; El-Tayeb 2001; Leiprecht 2001; Karakayalı and Tsianos 2002; Mecheril 2003; Steyerl and Gutiérrez-Rodríguez 2003; Eggers et al. 2005; Ha et al. 2007; Bojadžijev 2008), we can say that the theorems of critical race studies have been regarded, by the German social sciences at large, as an import from the US. Fatima El-Tayeb states that the systematic ignorance towards voices of German academics situated as people of colour is caused by the white dominance of academic spaces. These voices have been pushing anti-racist knowledge in Germany for a long time, but to gain acceptance as academic knowledge—and not just as ‘experiences’ of ‘victims’—it has had to be presented as ideas of white German authors (ibid., p. 41). As the editors of this volume and as a mixed but dominantly white-positioned team, we have to be aware of these tensions and pitfalls, since a huge part of our knowledge is based on and inherited from these preliminary works, mostly done by people of colour. As the title of this volume indicates, we mainly focus on the intersections between gender, racism and citizenship as they play a role in current debates on issues such as (forced) migration, institutional racism, digitalisation, care, and language policies. Within the last three decades intersectionality has become one of the most widely discussed analytical perspectives in feminist, critical race and cultural studies. Using the metaphor of the intersection to capture the interplay of social inequalities related to racism, sexism, nationalism, and capitalism, it aims to show how individuals and groups are discriminated against and privileged differently, simultaneously and sometimes in contradictory ways, in multiple dimensions within structures of power. In this regard intersectionality addresses difficult and sensitive issues of power, difference and epistemic struggles, problematic hegemonic appropriations and silences. The path the debate on intersectionality has taken, especially in continental Europe, itself mirrors power relations. The US feminist legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality in a paper published in 1989 (Crenshaw 1989; see also Collins and Bilge 2020). The concept was taken up in European contexts as well, and in Europe it encountered a rich and entangled ‘race class gender’ debate that had already been going strong for some time, as Nira Yuval-Davis and Helma Lutz tell us in their biographical conversation in this volume (similarly, for the USA, Collins and Bilge 2020). When the term intersectionality was adapted from Crenshaw’s work in continental Europe, women of colour and migrant women on the continent were in supposedly more marginalised positions inside the academy than they were in the UK and the USA (Bilge 2013, 2014; Lewis 2009; Tomlinson 2020). In continental Europe, a majority of white feminist academics enthusiastically took up a successful and helpful critical theoretical concept developed in another geographical context, a Black feminist one.
Questions of citizenship and belonging played a role at an early stage in European debates on intersectionality. In 1999, Nira Yuval-Davis and Pnina Werbner published their book Women, Citizenship and Difference (Yuval-Davis and Werbner 1999) and pointed to, among other things, the gendered dimensions of citizenship. Since then, a wide range of literature in the field of intersectionality has touched on the dimension of citizenship, for example, in the fields of sociology (Yuval-Davis 1999; Werbner and Yuval-Davis 2005; Lutz and Amelina 2017) and education (de Vries 2020). In addition to referring to gender as a dimension, this literature stresses the relevance of a perspective which is able to recognise the diversity of social positions and identity constructions. Studies have been published that focus on contexts of activism and participation (e.g. Rottmann and Ferree 2008; Erel and Acik 2019; Peeck-Ho 2020) and on people’s everyday experiences (e.g. Cherubini 2011).
If we frame struggles and activism for civil rights as fights for inclusive citizenship, there is no need to explain why we emphasise the dimensions of race and gender, though we do not focus exclusively on these dimensions. This has not always been the case in continental Europe. Race and racism as relevant everyday problems for all European societies were not only silenced in political discourse and the social sciences in general, but also to a considerable amount inside the European feminist debate on intersectionality. The discursive explosion around intersectionality, the concept that had been taken over from US American Critical Race Theory, was strong and broad, but the crucial and irreplaceable role that race plays as a core dimension, next to gender and class, was marginalised or even silenced altogether. This led to a large number of publications with intersectionality in the title, but where the term race did not appear in the text at all. Even research that was utterly silent on race and racism was labelled ‘intersectional’, and as a result silence and denial as familiar strategies to stabilise racist normalities were reproduced (see Weiss in this volume). While Black voices and voices of colour are still underrepresented in academic discourse, white gender scholars who did not want to miss the boat now found the ‘intersectional angle’ in any field of research.
The work of Myra Marx Ferree has been pivotal in understanding pathways of democratisation and the gradual inclusion of more social groups in the citizenry (Ferree 2008, 2011). When looking at historically successful strategies of feminism in a trans-Atlantic comparative perspective, Ferree observes in her analysis that, in the USA, feminists during the twentieth century oriented their strategies on the example of the African American civil rights movement. Therefore, gender worked like race in the USA, and was best framed in terms of identity politics. In Europe, especially in Germany where Ferree conducted her research, with no comparably strong or visible anti-racist movement around during most of the second half of the twentieth century, this was not a viable option, but the most prominent social emancipatory movement was the labour movement. Therefore, in Europe, gender best worked like class, and claims were put forward in terms of pay and the recognition of housework and child care as unpaid work (Ferree 2008). Today, by taking Ferree’s observations one step further, we claim that we can see a new adaptation of strategies in emancipatory politics: we see that race can work like gender in Europe (see also Supik 2014, p. 133). To be sure, race can work like gender in continental Europe, but it works in ways other than in the USA. The Düsseldorf feminist Mithu Sanyal, in a feuilleton essay (Sanyal 2021), related how, when she sat on an all-people-of-colour (POC) podium discussion in a German context, a US co-panellist complained about the absence of POCs from the podium. Persons socialised in the USA, Sanyal pondered, could not read how, in Europe, even southern Europeans are not (really) considered white (enough)—a position reflected in the “color-line” (W.E.B. DuBois 1903) in the USA at the beginning of the twentieth century, when Irish and Polish Catholics were excluded on racial grounds. Today, careful attention must be paid to the positioning of East Europeans as well. Being seen as positioned as white, as Black or of colour, happens along different lines all over the world. In Central or West European contexts, a Turkish-sounding name, the hijab, a Russian accent, a Romanian licence plate or black hair can all be markers for exclusion and discrimination.
We have identified four topics in particular that we believe are central to addressing citizenship from an intersectional perspective: care, institutional racism, language and digitalisation. In all of these areas, struggles for equality have impacted citizenship. The connection between citizenship and intersectionality therefore provides a basis for the further development and critical discussion of the notion of inclusive citizenship.
4 Care as an Act of Citizenship
As an act of citizenship and as social practice, caring, care work and the thinking and politics of care surely are the paradigmatic gendered practice. The field of care and social reproduction has been profoundly transformed in Europe and the USA since at least the 1980s. These changes are best described by key words such as economisation, commodification, privatisation, dissolution and precarisation in employment relationships, withdrawal of the welfare state, transnationalisation of care, and ideological struggles around the bourgeois nuclear family. The changes have been profoundly shaped by racist structures and the gender order, and are flanked by narratives about the crisis of social reproduction and a cost explosion in the health care sector (Fraser 2016; trouble everyday collective 2014; Winker 2013). The right to give and receive care and the rights of caregivers, specifically of migrant and illegalised domestic workers, are being renegotiated in this context (Casas-Cortés 2019). In their chapters, Maribel Casas-Cortés and Alessandro Pratesi develop the idea of care as a basis for (social) citizenship (Ungerson 1990; Knijn and Kremer 1997; Lutz 2011; Tronto 2013) and forms of intimate or affective citizenship.
The contributions in this volume by Casas-Cortés and Pratesi discuss processes such as when heterosexual norms are put to the test in everyday practices of gay parenthood (Pratesi), or when precarious migrant domestic workers join forces with feminist precarity activists in Spain for a care-strike and the demand to base citizenship not on the city (Spanish ciudadanía) but on the principle and practice of care (Spanish cuidadanía) (Casas-Cortés). Thereby, processes of gendered and racialised exclusion are made visible, as well as the role of invisible and unpaid care work as a basis for capitalism and as the condition of existence for the ‘liberal citizen’.
As the Covid-19 pandemic has shown, especially to those of us who usually have the privilege of carelessness, care work is still an undervalued, ill-recognised and underpaid form of work. At the same time, care work is existential, indispensable, and life-enabling; it is the heart of the social. The practice of caring for one another has also been an aspect of our collaborative work as editors of this volume. The lockdowns hit those of us with caring responsibilities for children and elderly people hard, and we tried to support each other as best we could while keeping this project rolling. In this sense, the context of production of this volume, in each of our households, was a constant thematic companion to our online meetings.
There is an ambivalence in the ways in which care is structured in societies and in care relations themselves, an ambivalence which has long been a contested site of diverse feminist debates (Hughes 2002; Plonz et al. 2011). On the one hand, as already debated in the domestic labour debates of the 1970s, the ways in which care is organised can be profoundly oppressive and alienating for all those providing care, due to a lack of recognition of this work as productive work (Molyneux 1979; Ungerson 1990; Haug 2011; Fraser 2016). Furthermore, the disability, children’s rights and Black feminist activist movements have also criticized the care relation as often deeply hierarchical and patronising from the perspective of those in need of care, thereby criticising any naive romanticisation of the caring relationship or essentialist tendencies (Duffy 2005; Graham 2007; Houston 1990; Hughes et al. 2005; Narayan 1995). People coming from this perspective are very sceptical of what some other activists and scholars see in the practice of care, and are increasingly paying attention to the subjective dimensions of the practice of caring and its politico-ethical and transformative potentialities (Engster 2007; Gottschlich et al. 2014; Robinson 2011; Tronto 2013). The former strand predominantly addresses care as work, thereby redefining the very concept of work itself and unravelling the consequences of welfare regimes in terms of inequality (Casas-Cortés and Lewicki and Supik in this volume).
Others analysing welfare regimes address care as a social right in a more affirmative manner, thereby criticising the close entanglement of care with ideas of dependence. Here, the fact that every human is dependent on others and a critique of the patriarchal idea of the autonomous subject together serve as a basis for rethinking citizenship rights. The right to be acknowledged as legitimate caregivers is another aspect of care that needs to be considered, as Pratesi—on gay parents—and Lewicki—on Muslim care workers in Christian welfare organisations—show in their contributions in this volume. A third strand of feminist research and activism addresses care as a practice based on specific ethical values. These scholars underline the public responsibility for this relation-oriented mode of practice; citizenship is a mode of action in this approach, rather than a legal construct (Brückner 2010).
Both individual contributions on care in this volume focus on those giving care and the transformative power of their caring practices and renegotiations as either intended or unintended AoC. Policing, another welfare-state practice designed to create security and protection, can be seen as the antipode of care. It is topical in the contributions of Thompson and Becker in the following sections on institutional racism and digital citizenship. Vanessa Thompson shows that transformative justice would involve more care to create security for all and fewer police, or, as the slogan goes, “invest in caring, not killing”, which resonates well with the slogan “disinvest from the police”.
5 Institutional Racism
The field of research on institutional racism has only recently begun to receive more attention in continental Europe in comparison to other parts of the world. For example, in the USA, institutional racism was addressed by W.E.B. DuBois at the beginning of the twentieth century, and from the 1960s on it was an issue in the US civil rights movement (Carmichael and Hamilton 1967). Black politics and liberation struggles, and the accompanying theoretical debates, have addressed the systemic nature of racism and white supremacy and the way it encompasses all social institutions, and so has lasted into the twenty-first century (Omi and Winant 1994; Feagin 2000).
In continental Europe, the dominating silence and state ignorance1 on race (Lentin 2014; Simon 2008) as a valid and productive category of analysis for European post-colonial and post-migrant societies prevailed well into the twenty-first century. In Germany, it was almost impossible to talk about racism in most academic and public circles. Only after 2000, did the influential study by Mechtild Gomolla and Frank-Olaf Radtke of institutional discrimination in the school system (Gomolla and Radtke 2009; and for an even earlier work on institutional racism, see Osterkamp 1996) pave the way for research to start inside institutions (Karakayalı et al. 2017; Kollaborative Forschungsgruppe Racial Profiling 2019; Karakayalı 2020). Today, we can observe anti-racist, BIBOC and migrantifa movements making some overdue course corrections within debates on belonging and intersectionality. Speaking about and against racism has become more self-evident. Still, there is a need to thematise racism, whiteness and Blackness, and to argue about race as a legal and social category and push for more diversity and anti-discrimination within the public sector.
Meanwhile, in Britain in the 1990s, the murder of Stephen Lawrence in April 1993 led to a parliamentary investigation followed by the Macpherson report (Macpherson 1999), which analysed the failure of the police to provide their service equally to every citizen and characterised this as institutional racism. State security institutions which fail to provide security for every citizen, or even become a deadly danger to citizens, are surely the clearest symptom of what systemic racism entails. The murder of Stephen Lawrence became the sad starting point for a new confrontation with this reality, which was (and still is) an everyday experience for racialised people.
What has gone wrong when a Black female client is shot by the police in the job centre, as happened to Christy Schwundeck on 19 May 2011 in Frankfurt am Main? (see Thompson in this volume). What about the responsibility of society when a veiled Muslim woman is shot inside a courtroom, as happened to Marwa El-Sherbini on 1 July 2009 in Dresden? (see Weiß in this volume). What does it say about this society when the killing of the 19-year-old Kurd Qosay Khalaf on 6 March 2021 by the police in Delmenhorst was not only committed by racist cops but also covered up systematically by the police chiefs, the prosecutors and the court? This list must not get any longer, but it does not seem to end here. The contributions in this part of the volume address such questions with reference to theoretical and empirical debates. Another important strand in discussing racism in Europe in general, and especially in the context of institutional racism, is the question of whiteness. The European debate on race faces the challenge of finally critically addressing whiteness and white privilege, while at the same time not rendering anti-Semitism, anti-Roma racism and anti-Muslim racism marginal or invisible; all of these must be analysed and fought in their connections and as expressions of plural racisms. In the German social sciences, there has been a strong post-WW2 tradition of focusing on anti-Semitism in research, and, somehow derivatively from this, on racism against Roma as the foremost attitudinal and socio-psychological predispositions of majority members of that society (= white Germans) (Stender 2016; Benz 2020; End 2016). Psychoanalysis, and the work on the authoritarian personality of Theodor W. Adorno and the other members of the Frankfurter Schule, were very influential here. This research focused on the privileged, prejudiced perpetrator, the personalised and very much individualised, misguided and deviant “racist” as a bad apple, while the general population and the academy remained innocent. This attention produced a blind spot in structural explanations for racism, and additionally the focus on perpetrators marginalised the lived and embodied experience of persons victimised and harmed by racism. The obscuring of everyday and institutional racism was completed by the use of terminology that drew attention to group-focused enmity, Ausländerfeindlichkeit, and xenophobia. Examples of institutional racism addressed in chapters in this volume are the labour market and Christian churches (Lewicki and Supik), the security system (Thompson and Douglas) the legal system (Weiß) and communal welfare institutions (Hinrichs and Neuburger).
6 Language: Voices and Signs of Citizenship
In the development of political rights as the ‘right to vote’ and be or become a citizen of a nation state, ‘property’ and the ‘right to property’ have played a crucial role over the centuries. Initially, only those with property had the right to vote; subsequently, this was extended to all (white) men, irrespective of property, and much later to women. After the ‘Short Twentieth Century’ (1914–1991), as Eric Hobsbawm called the period from the start of the First World War to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, ‘language’ seems to be new ‘property’ which has emerged as the arena where fierce battles of ‘belonging’ are fought and contested, and wars of inclusion and exclusion are executed. It is therefore not a matter of coincidence that language testing has become the new common sense and a prerequisite to gain citizenship (as a status) in most European countries. The poignant paradox seems to be that even after proving the ability to speak, write and communicate in the required language, English or German, as the case may be, the right to claim the said language as one’s own is not (necessarily) given. The yardstick of measurement seems to constantly move and be shifted arbitrarily. In this context, even those in the third or fourth generation with a familial history of migration either from erstwhile British colonies, or as descendants of former labour migrants or political refugees in Germany, need to strike out and reclaim their right to this property, the common ‘language’.
Language can be a barrier, but, more often than not, it simply seems to work as means of communication, and an effective one at that. Societies of migration like in Britain and Germany have a great deal of experience in real terms with languages and multilingualism. Germany has long been the hub of inward and outward migration and mobility in Continental Europe. Ever since the nation state came into being exactly one and half centuries ago in 1871, it has been a thoroughfare for many a community and people of varied nationalities. Since the middle of the twentieth century, there have been more immigrants to than emigrants from Germany. This notwithstanding, it is only with great reluctance that Germany has tolerated the depiction of a ‘country of immigration’ at the beginning of the twenty-first century. There has also been a huge amount of denial about and resistance to the everyday and ubiquitous nature of linguistic diversity.
What role does the so-called ‘national’ language play in a country with a long colonial past like Great Britain and in a nation state with shifting geographical borders and imagined historical discontinuities like the Federal Republic of Germany? What role does the multilingual soundscape of the public spaces and educational institutions play among young and old? How does the interplay of languages and citizenship work in tandem, creating and producing legitimate and illegitimate speakers of the languages, some with more but others with marginal prestige? And most importantly, how can exclusion created through language be reclaimed and cast in a new light through reappropriation, modification and making ‘language’ one’s own? The title of this section raises many more questions than it can possibly address. The (troubled) relationship between the plurality of languages and the supposed singularity and uniqueness of nation states is negotiated at different levels and by several players with varied results in a contingent and provisional manner.
Aoileann Ní Mhurchú and Radhika Natarajan present a paper each and share their readings and suggestions in an interview conducted by Malte Kleinschmidt. They touch upon various facets of multilingualism in society, media and educational settings and, in the process, introduce themselves through their research and findings. One of the underlying themes is a search for inherent contradictions noted in the differential treatment meted to languages and the varied value attached to them, both in society and in education. It is therefore pertinent to look at what themes have been swept under the carpet or de-thematised and reassemble them in a new fashion in this exchange of ideas.
In her paper “Unfamiliar Acts of Citizenship”, Aoileann Ní Mhurchú foregrounds the theme of resistance and how it takes shape through cultural praxis, intensive and creative use of languages, by playing and toying with words. This can transpire through popular culture and rap texts; it can be in the creation of a new dialect. She strides through various languages, vernaculars and nation states, not just describing and comparing the varied situations in Ireland, France and Germany but also illustrating how resistance takes shape concretely and palpably through creativity. She questions the concept of AoC, elaborating on the subversive nature of ambiguity and how it facilitates agency. Those in positions of power and vested with the possibility of deciding and determining matters take their own privileges—linguistic, material and otherwise—for granted; this renders it invisible and makes it appear self-evident. It is the stylistic questioning of this comfortable retreat that the creative usage of words, phrases and inversions evokes. Indeed, this seems to threaten the self-assuredness of the ‘national language’ belonging solely to the privileged. It is thereby no coincidence that those deemed as the Other are imagined as ‘voiceless’ and without a say, without any language, in fact. This, despite or perhaps because their articulateness is undisputed and their audibility crystal-clear.
In her paper entitled “Recalibrating the Narrative on Multilingualism and Citizenship in Germany”, Radhika Natarajan ponders on the impact of two laws, passed in Germany around the turn of the century, which pertain to citizenship and immigration policies, respectively, and revolve around access to and use of the German language. The first, in 2000, affecting children and school-going pupils, pertains to nationality law which shifted from German nationality being solely determined by descent, jus sanguinis, to also taking the place of birth into account, jus soli. The second, in 2005, concerning adults, relates to immigration law and the rights of third-country nationals shaping spousal migration, and has centred around knowledge of the German language as a key factor in its stipulated requirements. She suggests looking at legislative and educational structures as ‘corsets’ that both support and enable as well as constrict and limit movement and innovation. The legislative change has unwittingly set the tone for a new normative order and forced a reshuffling of the political and educational vision for the future.
The section ends with a written conversation with Katrin von Horn and Mirko Widdascheck, the co-founders of the Refugee Law Clinic at the University of Hannover. They describe how their initiative came into being, the factors they had anticipated, what needed forethought (like training as counsellors) and their experience at the international level. Their commitment to counselling and advising asylum seekers was spurred on when they realised that there were many refugees in and around their city, and that they as students of law were in a unique position to render help by simply providing the right information. Interestingly, they went about counselling and the preparation in a systematic manner, looking for translators among students at the university (and found more than a hundred in their pool) and by streamlining the counselling. ‘Language’ does not seem to have been a challenge because they were not expecting the asylum seekers to know German, and, apart from the translators, they used their own knowledge of foreign languages when needed. As student activists, it is perhaps the principle of realistic expectations and the awareness of one’s limitations in terms of interpreting the prevailing law and ruling, clarifying the prospects to those seeking advice and managing expectations, while continuing to be empathetic to the difficult and fraught situation, that seem to have mattered.
7 The Digital as a Sphere of Citizenship
The field of digitalisation is often associated with a range of technological developments related to the storage, dissemination and analysis of data we have observed in the second half of the twentieth and at the beginning of the twenty-first century. As a basis for fundamental social change in today’s society, its implications remain ambivalent. While there is a line of discussion which frames digitalisation as the ultimate force, with the potential to build a more efficient society (e.g. Brynjolfsson and McAfee 2014), others regard it as having disastrous effects on society and the economy (e.g. Zuboff 2019; Balsmeier and Woerter 2019). In any case, we can say that digitalisation affects the conditions of performing rights claims and associated practices.
For the field of citizenship, the invention of the Internet, as a social space in which new forms of communication open up opportunities for grassroots activism, on the one hand, and the manipulation of populations via social media, on the other, plays a big role in changing the conditions of how citizenship can be performed. Debates on digitalisation therefore often centre on the role of the subject and its autonomy, which is often either connected to the promise of emancipation or the ways in which algorithms channel information and influence subjectivation (Block and Dickel 2020). One crucial aspect of these developments is the ways data are processed and placed in relation to each other in order to make predictive statements about people’s behaviour in different fields of society (O’Neil 2016; Mau 2017; Nassehi 2019), for example, in their decisions as consumers, voters or in the field of predictive policing.2 Pinar Tuzcu and Douglas Becker address the question of prediction from different angles. Tuzcu brings arguments from post-colonial theory into the debate and shows how colonialism is embedded in predictive technologies. The observation and manipulation of people, Tuzcu argues, reproduces relations of exploitation and inequality between the Global South and the Global North. In prediction, colonial categorisations of people are structuring the algorithms of data processing and digital manipulation of or intervention in social and political processes and so, in turn, are reinforced by the prediction praxis. Becker, while focusing on discourses around predictive policing, especially on patterns of criticism, figures of interpretation and interconnections of scientific and non-scientific discourse contexts, makes a similar point: as these discourses show, the ‘old’ racism is being renewed within an ostensibly neutral technology in which algorithms are based on racist categorisations of people. These two chapters show how digital technologies are embedded today, not only as facilitating communicational tools in our daily lives, but in ways that reconfigure regimes and AoC. While civil society and activism have gained new possibilities for mobilising within social struggles in many parts of the world, e.g. in the Arab Spring or the protests against the Chinese government in Hong Kong, the very same instruments of digitalisation can turn from being opportunities for political participation into means of restriction and repression too. This is also the case when they are used for surveillance, as discussed, for example, in the debate about the Pegasus spyware which was used to get access to iOS and Android devices in July 2021.
When we ask how society can deal with the effects of these dynamics, the development of a critical understanding of the ways technologies work as well as how to deal with them, politically and in daily life, seems to be crucial. Richard Heise and Steve Kenner address digital citizenship education as a way to establish a basis for critical debate, and argue that civic education needs not just to transfer non-digital insights to the digital sphere, but to respond to the specific needs of people acting in the digital sphere where perspectives of care, solidarity and inclusive citizenship often seem scarce. In contrast to the other contributors to this section, they focus more on the question of acts than of regimes of citizenship, for example, by discussing acts like hacking, witnessing and commoning.
As the contributions to this part show, there are good reasons why we should regard the discriminatory effects of algorithms as a form of technological racism. Machines and technologies reproducing racial or gender bias should be seen as aspects of institutionalised social inequalities, just as hate speech on social media is part of everyday discourse. Hate and bias transported and hidden in algorithms form an invisible but even more rigid and uncompromising (infra-)structure of the contemporary social.
As academics, we are experiencing digitalisation right now: the Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated the spread of digital technologies in our everyday lives. Academics are home-office-bound like hardly any other professional group, but they are also highly privileged with the option they have to work at a protective social distance and horribly deprived of a lot of what sociality means. During the pandemic, a huge self-experiment had to be conducted in how far the digital can replace the physical presence in terms of online meetings, classes and conference sessions which moved people weirdly nearer to and farther from each other at the same time. We learnt a lot about what is lost and gained, and the effects of this rationalisation will become clearer in time. The different interviews and conversations via Zoom and e-mail that have enriched this volume by bringing in more interactive, relational thinking would not be there without the contact restrictions resulting from the pandemic.
In fact, this book would maybe only have been a conference, and many of the ideas now worked out here might have evaporated again after oral presentations and debates between people who were physically present. The decision to produce a book rather than to go online, however, is a kind of old-fashioned stubbornness on our part, and it gave us the richness of engaging with each other’s thoughts and ideas in much deeper and more intense ways.