Mapping Subaltern Acts of Citizenship – The Emotional Topography of Urban Border Regimes

This paper contributes to debates on citizenship and political subjecthood in turbulent times by advancing the concept of emotional acts of citizenship. It argues that under conditions of intensified bordering, migration, and urban precarity, marginalised subjects enact alternative understandings of belonging, political agency, and the right to the city through everyday practices. Focusing on subaltern forms of citizenship, the paper conceptualizes emotional acts of citizenship as quotidian practices through which migrant subjects contest subtle forms of exclusion, reclaim their bodies, and generate alternative relations of belonging and participation within the city. Empirically, the paper explores how state borders are emotionally experienced, negotiated, and transformed by migrant subjects in urban contexts. Grounded in a critical feminist research perspective and a practice-theoretical understanding of emotions, it shows how emotional practices inscribe normative border orders into bodies and urban spaces, thereby shaping power relations beyond territorial or legal demarcations. From this perspective, borders are approached not as fixed institutional arrangements, but as lived and embodied relations that are continuously reproduced and contested in everyday urban life. Methodologically, the study combines ethnographic border regime analysis with participatory and arts-based approaches. Based on a local case study in Hamburg, the paper investigates migrant struggles over participation and belonging within the European border regime through collaborative engagement with migrant co-researchers and local artists. Drawing on counter-mapping approaches, the research employs artistic forms of spatial analysis—including painting, creative writing, and photography—to engage with embodied experiences of borders in the everyday urban lives of migrant subjects. In doing so, the paper shows how artistic creation not only facilitates an understanding of subjective experiences of space and spatial production but also challenges dominant politics of visibility. Through their artistic engagements, the co-researchers articulated an alternative gaze on the city and formed an emotional community that collectively challenges established orders of citizenship. In this sense, the artistic research practice developed here functions both as a power-critical mode of knowledge production and as an empowerment practice contributing to the creation of alternative spaces of political belonging and participation. Building on this empirical material, the paper develops two theoretical concepts of subaltern resistance: the art of urban presence and the art of urban care. These concepts capture emotional and embodied practices of spatial appropriation, subject formation, and community-building through which urban belonging is performatively enacted and claims to citizenship are articulated beyond formal recognition. The analysis thereby demonstrates how urban space functions as a strategic site of encounter and action for subaltern subjects, enabling alternative understandings of citizenship beyond a national-statist framework. By approaching citizenship through the emotional topography of urban border regimes, the paper traces how emotional power relations unfold in everyday interactions – relations through which political order is both constituted and contested. In doing so, it contributes to critical debates on citizenship beyond methodological nationalism and highlights the transformative potential of everyday emotional practices for rethinking citizenship and political belonging in turbulent times.