Towards a newer framework: A critical field relational approach of citizenship as enactment in spatiality

The paper moves beyond static conceptions to investigate citizenship within the performative turn. By seeing citizenship as enactment in produced spaces (spatialities) (Lefebvre 2009), in the context of Bourdieusian asymmetrical fields (Bourdieu 1979; 1984; 1998; 1990; 1991) the paper offers new ways to explore the constitutive phenomenon of citizenship and alterities in a social field. The paper argues that such a conception opens up the space in which ‘emergent subject positions’ in an asymmetrical field can be conceptualized and investigated - in dialectical relations to material(s), structures, each other. As well as in relational discourses that prevail in an analytical ‘space/field’. Furthermore, the paper demonstrates how the study of citizenship requires engaging with the political ‘boundaries’ of the analytical field. In this light the paper calls for a critical orientation towards the ontological and analytical constitution of the field of citizenship (in enactment politics). Taken together, the paper forwards two key insights in conceptualizing citizenship as enactment in spatiality; firstly a centralization of dialectics in underscoring the constitutive phenomena of citizenship. Secondly, a critical approach to studying and investigating citizenship. Keywords: Relational turn, critical approach, spatiality, performative turn