Blog

Held on the last day of the Oecumene project's First Symposium, the workshop entitled 'Religious organisation and the political articulation of citizenship', explored many relevant and current issues concerning the involvement of religion in the public sphere. The workshop underscored the need for an inclusive cross-regional academic dialogue on this subject.

I'm just back from an exhilarating two-days at the ‘Opening the Boundaries of Citizenship’ conference, hosted by the Oecumene: Citizenship after Orientalism research project, at The Open University.

The decorations are up and the tree is full of colours. More than thirty children have adorned it with painted dried flowers and scraps of paper carrying their wishes for the future. The star does not appear on top, but hangs from one of the tallest branches of the small palm tree that was chosen as a Christmas insignia in the protest camp of Jobat.

When thinking about the Oecumene project, I reflect on what binds us together and what separates us in terms of our experiences of citizenship around the world. In my last blog, I wrote about the shared experience of statelessness, which has regrettably become a truly global case study for exploring how the absence of citizenship affects people. This time, I’d like to share some thoughts on another common or shared experience relating to citizenship, which caught my attention thanks to a recent decision of the African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child. It would seem that, whether we are perusing international legal standards or delving into the domestic citizenship law of any state picked at random, one notion emerges as a uniting principle: the best interests of the child.

State sovereignty in determining nationality legislation has led to a number of difficulties worldwide, including the lack safeguards against statelessness, and often discriminatory policies.  In the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, a substantially apparent flaw in state citizenship legislation is gender discrimination. Women rarely possess the right to pass nationality on to their children or their spouse – and maternal affiliation can only be the case in extreme circumstances. This leaves the acquisition of citizenship dependent on the male figures in the family. Individuals who have often lived all their lives within the country of their mother - and cannot leave - are unable to acquire her nationality. This situation is not only impractical, it also leaves thousands of people at risk of being born stateless.

It may seem bizarre that from its beginnings in March 2011, ‘Democracia Real Ya’ (DRY) – ’Real Democracy Now’ – could burst so dramatically into the public sphere with a series of demonstrations all across Spain.

At the heart of the exploration underway within the Oecumene project lies the concept of citizenship. Whether described in terms of membership or of participation, citizenship reflects some form of belonging, contributing to the drawing of dividing lines between ‘us’ and ‘them’.

In the last years two photographers, Edu Leon and Olmo Calvo, have been developing a project called Fronteras invisibles or invisible borders. Despite increasing obstacles created by the police when taking pictures, this project is still active with the aim of exposing the reality of identity checks and police raids in Madrid (Spain). These controls are carried out to identify, arrest, and in some cases, imprison in detention centers all those ‘foreigners’ who, for whatever reason, lack the immigration documents.

As millions will have filled in the indomitable lilac census questionnaire in the UK we should ask ourselves what “tomorrow” are we helping to “shape”? The primary use of the Census is stated as assisting various levels of government to provide key services. It will also undoubtedly be a goldmine for other quantitative researchers.

Engin Isin explores the meaning of the word Oecumene and how it relates to the content of the project. The meaning of this classical Greek word is somehow ambiguous which makes it all the more interesting and challenging for our project.

Is the visual political? The question has long preoccupied those who work in the field of visual culture. After all, as Barthes told us, photographs carry studium, but it is only the rare ones with punctum that make us stop and take note.

Media frames are representations of reality. Their resemblance to reality is always partial. They emerge through institutionalised journalism practices that favour certain stories over others and influence the language and images used to describe events. [1]

More may have been written about the explosion of politics in Arab worlds in the past two weeks than about 1848 in the last hundred and sixty years. I will leave proving this hypothesis to Google Books executives and their calculators who have developed a penchant for quantifying knowledge. If true, what does it say about the overaccumulation crisis of words? Do we say too much?