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This paper focuses on how immigrant activists interact with the host state in socio-political spheres where they exercise their citizenship. Located in Taiwan's New Southbound Policy (NSP), this paper adopts the concept of 'act of citizenship' to analyse Vietnamese activists' interactions with the NSP. This paper finds that the NSP appropriated immigrant women's motherhood and family relationships in order to boost tourism and facilitate Southeast Asian language acquisition in the short term and to enhance Taiwan's relationship with Southeast Asia in the long run. In response, immigrant activists utilised the NSP to build their own capacity and to realise their acts of empowerment, compassion and contestation in the family and public domains. They not only improved individuals' wellbeing but also made the Taiwanese state accountable for gender bias and inequality. These findings offer a much needed gender perspective into immigrant activists' dialectical relationship with the migration state of Taiwan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates how Eritrean refugees in Israel and civil society organisations who engage with refugee issues contest the exclusionary politics of asylum in Israel. It presents various acts of claims-making initiated by Eritrean refugees themselves or in response to hostility by others, as well as acts inaugurated by Israeli civil society organisations on behalf of or with refugee populations. Drawing on the concept of activist acts of citizenship developed by Engin Isin, the paper subsequently analyses to what degree those acts have redefined aspects of social and political membership for Eritrean refugees in Israel. In a further step, it shows the limitations of such acts in terms of developing a solidaristic refugee-citizen agenda that profoundly challenges hegemonic public discourse and political debate. The paper concludes by arguing that activist acts of citizenship are best studied in relation to the transformative power they may have on the various individuals engaging in them, but not as a strategy for a wider politics of resistance, as ultimately nation state politics continue to determine the actual realisation of concrete rights. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the factors that shape the political agency of psychiatric service users/survivors. I begin by outlining an Arendtian framework for thinking about political agency and its sources. I then use this framework to explore the politically empowering and disempowering factors that users/survivors face, drawing upon evidence from the writings of user/survivor activists and organisations, newspaper articles, and psychiatric professional publications, published in the UK between 2006 and 2016. The insights of this examination are of wider interest for two reasons. Firstly, they elucidate the obstacles to political action facing the growing number of people diagnosed with mental disorders. Secondly, they suggest what a future in which politics is increasingly fought out in medical terms means for citizens' political agency generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considering the neoliberal commercialization of sexual politics, this article argues for a reconfiguration of sexual citizenship as activist, relational, and embodied. By doing so it aims to challenge the contemporary de-politicization, individualization, and hegemonic normalization of sexual citizenship. While the activist and relational dimension consider how the dominant manifestation of sexual politics may be disrupted, the notion of embodied sexual citizenship draws attention to the ways in which the ability of doing so is materially conditioned. This article proposes a framework through which sexual citizenship can be re-politicized as a collective and accountable project, moving beyond the need of self-production through consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

TheRefugee Protest Camp Viennastarted in 2012 as a protest against the living conditions found within the biggest reception centre in Austria, and turned into a highly visible protest movement organized by asylum seekers and activists. In this paper, I investigate how and to what extent this protest movement, through a form of contentious politics, succeeded in challenging exclusionary policies and improving asylum seekers’ rights and living conditions. By moving from socially and spatially isolated locations into the centre of the city, setting up a protest camp in a park, and by seeking shelter in a church, the protest movement generated different modes of resistance, forms of mobilization and collective action. In exploring the connection between spatial strategies of the protest movement and relational ties within the movement, I contribute to debates within Critical Citizenship Studies. Specifically, I emphasize the relevance of place for creating alliances and networks and for making citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Greek citizenship regime in the first decade of the 21st century has been described as one of the most restrictive in Europe. The campaign 'No to racism from the baby's cot' was created in mid-2000s and called for legislative changes that would allow second-generation immigrants born and/or raised in Greece the right to acquire Greek citizenship. Building on critical studies of citizenship and using life-history interviews, the article explores the political formation of two leading activists who were involved in the campaign, charting the evolution of their experiences and struggles. This way, it shows that citizenship is more than a formal legal entitlement and citizenship struggles are part of the process of making and being a citizen. The story of Loretta Macauley, president of the United African Women's Organization, focuses on the African women's contribution to the campaign and situates this within a broader practice of sisterhood and struggle in line with Black feminist intersectionality. The story of Michael Afolayan, a young second-generation activist involved in the campaign, provides a view of black youth involvement in specific forms of political participation, drawing attention to the 'hybrid' identity behind the term 'second generation immigrant' and the serious implications this identity has for collective action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the discussion on addressing practices of translation in activist and advocacy environments in Japan. Topics include exploring the micropractices of language use in online discussion boards and the significance in negating legitimate presence; and bringing along different dimensions of accessibility, translation, and corporeal communication remaining an underexplored perspective.

This article analysis the socio-political form of the migrant squats, and the socio-spatial interactions they foster and generate. Drawing on empirical research, it focuses on the Athenian context where, since September 2015, political groups belonging to the anti-authoritarian and Left-libertarian movement, occupied some empty buildings to host migrants in transit through the country. From a political perspective, the squats are interpreted here as strategies of struggle to gain access to the space of the city and they also constitute instances of migrant activism and resistance to the European border regime. Moreover, migrant occupations represent practices and sites for contesting citizenship, intended as a category of political status; as such, they exceed the limits of this category and move beyond the boundaries of the nation-state, originating practices of citizenship 'from below', while at the same time they produce subjectivities that choose to 'opt out' of citizenship as a legal status. This article is situated within the contextualisation of space and autonomy. Migrant squats are looked at from the angle of the 'gaze of autonomy', since they are aimed both at contesting citizenship as an exclusionary feature, and at revindicating the activists' (both migrants and non) presence in the space of city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In October 2014, on the anniversary of a large migrant shipwreck in the Mediterranean Sea, activists in Europe and Africa commemorated the victims and protested their deaths by launching theWatchTheMed Alarm Phone. The Alarm Phone functions as a ‘hotline’ for travellers who find themselves in emergency situations when crossing maritime borders towards EUrope. Its shift-teams offer information, advice and the possibility of raising public alarm, also in order to pressurise (state) rescue services to act. Based on my own engagement in the project, I portray an activist network that acted on the desire to intervene more directly in a deadly space that is often considered a ‘maritime void’ or as ‘reserved’ for state and EU (border) authorities. I argue that the Alarm Phone’s transformative political potentiality arises precisely from its capacity to connect its constitutive engagement in (under the surface)mobile commonsthat facilitate ‘unauthorised’ human movement with public campaigns that call for and (thereby) performinternational citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]