Talking Citizenship : Governmental and Vernacular Discourses
While critics announce the death or decline of citizenship, analysts also need to attend to the proliferation of « citizenship talk ». Governmental discourses circulate around questions of nationality and access to citizenship and address issues about the rebalancing of rights and responsibilities (« droits et devoirs »). They also seek to remake citizenship in new directions : here asserting the importance of « activation », there the identity of the citizen-as-consumer of public services. Vernacular discourses exist in complex relationships to such official formations, linking questions of roles, identities, relationships and desires in unpredictable and unstable ways. This paper explores some of the analytical problems posed in the process of studying discourses of citizenship. These range from the methodological problematic of discourse analysis to questions of subjection, incorporation and the dynamics of consent and dissent in the discursive field of citizenship.