Citizenship Migration & Global Development: New Hegemonies, Old Problems.

Dislodged from its initial disciplinary locations in law, sociology and political studies, reference to citizenship (and rights) is insidiously slipping into the conceptual discourse of a wider array of disciplines. Anthropologists, for example, apply the term as a means to bypass the homogenizing and reifying implications of well used concepts such as ethnicity and culture. At least part of the intention in conceptual substitution may arise from efforts to think more globally on the one hand, and to better account sociologically for internal differentiation amongst so-called ethnic, and cultural groups marked as other through the migration process. Certainly, anthropologists have moved far beyond the simplifying equations of migration as precipitated in rupture followed by a clean break. Citizenship needs similar attention for its elasticity; migrants are not simply moved from one national container to another . On this point, concepts such as transnationalism and long distance nationalism remind us of the multiplicity of boundary crossing attachments and obligations migrants carry with them (economic, political, legal, social, familial and subjective). How might such an unlocking of people and place be applied to a mobile concept of citizenship? In this paper I will critically examine the theoretical and methodological implications of the conceptual turn to citizenship with a view to identifying discursive elisions. The paper is particularly concerned with processes of migration, development and the question of class. Racism and gender exploitation also need to be relentlessly examined for their persistent reworking in the global sites where migrants locate themselves. Do new vocabularies of citizenship distract attention from the ever present processes of class, gender and racialized differentiation which attend migration, both in migrant sending and receiving contexts? What is gained from this new lens and what is obscured. Examples are drawn from ethnographic research on Philippine gendered labour migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]