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In May 2008, at the High Court of Bangladesh, a ‘community’ that has been ‘stateless’ for over thirty five years were finally granted citizenship. Empirical research with this ‘community’ as it negotiates the lines drawn between legal status and statelessness captures an important historical moment. It represents a critical evaluation of the way ‘political space’ is contested at the local level and what this reveals about the nature and boundaries of citizenship. The thesis argues that in certain transition states the construction and contestation of citizenship is more complicated than often discussed. The ‘crafting’ of citizenship since the colonial period has left an indelible mark, and in the specificity of Bangladesh’s historical imagination, access to, and understandings of, citizenship are socially and spatially produced. While much has changed since Partition, particular discursive registers have lost little of their value. Today, religious discourses of ‘pollution’ and ‘purity’ fold into colonial and post-colonial narratives of ‘primitivity’ and ‘progress’ and the camp draws a line in contemporary nationalist space. Unpicking Agamben’s (1998; 2005) binary between ‘political beings’ and ‘bare life’, the thesis considers ‘the camp’ as a social form. The camps of Bangladesh do not function as bounded physical or conceptual spaces in which denationalized groups are altogether divorced from ‘the polity’. Instead ‘acts of citizenship’ (Isin and Nielsen, 2008) occur at the level of everyday life, as the moments in which formal status is transgressed. Until now the space of citizenship has failed to recognise the ‘non-citizens’ who can, through complicated accommodations and creative alliances, occupy or negotiate that space. Using these insights, the thesis develops the concept of ‘political space’, an analysis of the way in which history has shaped spatial arrangements and political subjectivity. In doing so, it provides an analytic approach of relevance to wider problems of displacement, citizenship and ethnic relations.

Taking traditional communities as exemplifiers of 'tradition-in-action', this thesis is based on semi-structured interviews and observations with Amish communities in the United States and a Jewish community in the United Kingdom. This research challenges antithetical notions of inert tradition versus a fluid, dynamic modernity within sociological literature, which has a tendency to posit tradition as temporally and spatially outside of modernity. Drawing on literatures that intersect sociological disciplines, particularly community studies, religion, diasporas, tradition and theories of contemporary (late/liquid) modernity (Giddens, 1991; Bauman, 2000), it explores ways in which these Amish and Jewish communities - described here as religion-oriented diasporic communities - negotiate the fluid conditions of contemporary modernity. It asks questions about what these negotiations reveal about the nature of contemporary modernity and how shedding new light on community boundaries, belonging and practices helps us to rethink and challenge prevailing meanings of community under contemporary conditions. Through the findings, the research asserts that rather than being fixed, these communities exhibit varied communal boundaries, from non-negotiable to fluid, as well as fluctuating and contingent levels of belonging and socially situated practices and narratives that adaptively reproduce community to enable communal thriving. In so doing, it explores themes such as boundary-keeping processes, the appeal of embedding and the social/kinship networks that comprise community and form a basis for 'doing' community together. This research project makes methodological contributions, reflecting on the 'insider/outsider' researcher positionality, as well as cultural and logistical considerations with harder-to-access communities. Though these case studies are not intended to provide direct or simple 'like for like' comparison, themes emerging from both case studies highlight the multi-layered nature of belonging to communities conceptualised as traditional in a fluid, ever-changing modernity, effectively siting such communities and modernity as inseparable and co-constitutive.

This study explores three stages of migration of Czech and Slovak women who migrated to Britain between 1989 and 2004 to first work as au-pairs and later settled in the UK. It investigates their migration journeys through qualitative life-course interviews and examines the gendered nature of their motivations, their experiences of the migration process and their approach to integration, intertwined with their perpetually evolving sense of belonging. Conceptually the study is informed by Boyd and Grieco’s (2003) theoretical framework of temporal analysis of migration stages combined with intersectional insight and the theory of structuration. This theoretical combination acknowledges the interconnection of gender with several other social categories (such as class, nationality and race) that shaped individual migrants’ journeys, whilst it was equally able to recognise the impact of macro level forces on women’s choices and their continuous effort to be accepted as a fully recognised member of the host society. Some of the core concepts that arose from the interviews include the gendered nature of migrant domestic work, particularly in relation to ambiguity surrounding the au-pair scheme that resulted in a significant disparity between migrants’ and host families’ expectations of what au-pairs should do. The study also found that both the attitudes of migrants towards the home population and their understanding of how they were received by the British population were directly linked to the concept of gender, race and national stereotyping. The analysis suggests that these women’s motivations were affected by challenges of the post-communist transition period in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. It also discovered that migrants’ pre-conceived expectations of Britain as mostly white and middle-class society were met with starkly different complex reality of a multicultural and a class divided Britain. The findings show some evidence that the women utilised their gender and race to negotiate their initially unfavourable societal position in order to gradually improve their social capital, whilst the intersection of their nationality and class created specific barriers that hindered their original ambitions to pursue further education in the UK.

Capturing a snapshot of around the time of the 2015 general election, this research explored the motivations, experiences and thoughts of Germans living in the South-East of England regarding their decision to migrate and settle in the country. As lifestyle migrants, their motivations for moving to the UK - rather than being predominantly economic - are constitutive of an individualised pursuit of 'a better life'. Employment and education related reasons were as common among participants as personal life motivations like being with a loved one, and, likewise, a desire to experience life in a different culture. Their accounts of settling in the new environment are largely absent of serious difficulties, which is mostly due the cultural proximity of country of origin and destination, as well as the relatively high level of secondary (and in some cases tertiary) education they benefitted from before embarking on their migratory journey to the UK. Respondents displayed a strong desire to learn the 'British way of life' and blend in as much as they could by letting go of German habits and by purposefully not seeking out or associating with co-ethnics. Their ability to do so is attributed to their white, Western European privilege that provided them with the 'capital' to be able to visually blend in and have the necessary language skills not to depend on co-ethnics. Due to a perceived stigmatised national identity and a strong sense of unease regarding the 'slippery slope' of patriotism, most respondents identified more with transnational and local sources of identity rather than national ones. While this tendency is likely to stem from their nation's Nazi-past, their thoughts, convictions and self-reported behaviours suggest that they can be understood as part of a (possibly) relatively small, but symbolically significant emerging European civic culture facilitated by the European project of integration.