Download a PDF version of this program's poster.

Across the academic disciplines and in popular political discourse, the past two decades have seen a tremendous resurgence of interest in the subject of citizenship. All agree that citizenship is a desirable condition, yet citizenship's meaning in analytical terms is often uncertain. Citizenship stands, variously, for the enjoyment of rights, for active political participation, for experiences of collective identity and solidarity and for a kind of (usually national) legal status. But how do these understandings relate to one another? The idea of citizenship raises additional questions. What, for instance, should we understand to be citizenship's domain or domains of action? The concept has traditionally been conceived as relevant exclusively to the political and to the state, but it has more recently become associated with the economy, culture and civil society at large. And how should we understand citizenship's relationship with the nation-state? Various processes of globalization, including accelerating transnational migration, the strengthening of international human rights regimes, the proliferation of transnational advocacy networks, the rise of global civil society, the increasing salience of cross-national diasporic communities, and the demands of multi-cultural accommodation and cultural autonomy, have reshaped citizenship in all its dimensions and have raised new questions about the condition of citizenship, both now and into the foreseeable future. Who, finally, constitutes citizenship's rightful subjects? The idea of citizenship evokes commitments both to deep inclusiveness and to bounded community. Although citizenship's universality has always had its limits, political struggle has expanded the range of subjects able to claim citizenship's mantle. Still, tensions between the universal and the particular, in both ethical and cultural terms, consistently structure our debates over citizenship and its boundaries.