Grounding Citizenship: Toward a Political Psychology of Public Space

This article considers the political nature of public space and explores its psychological relevance as a natural arena of citizenship. Drawing on literature in social psychology, environmental psychology, and political geography, the article addresses how common understandings of normative behavior in public are often based on particular constructions of place and people‐space relations. In so doing, it shows how such culturally shared “locational” notions are essentially contested in relation to their political significance and ideological orientation within a particular public socio‐spatial context. It is argued that claims for and demands on public space are enshrined in broader struggles over the psychological boundaries of belonging, identity, and civic entitlements which are central to the contentious issue of citizenship. This is illustrated through the analysis of an emblematic struggle over a public space located in the Old Town of Barcelona between 1999 and 2007, triggered by the social appropriation of an undeveloped urban lot. The article pinpoints how considering the material dimension of public space may also enrich existing psychological approaches to citizenship.     

Young people's emotional geographies of citizenship participation: Spatial and relational insights

The inclusion of more ‘active’ citizenship concepts within citizenship curricula has been a pattern noted in many countries in recent years. Yet, rarely are young people's citizenship identities, and how these are shaped by emotional and relational experiences of being citizens in communities, considered in such curricula. In this paper, I explore the citizenship narratives of young people from two New Zealand high schools and examine how emotions formed a significant aspect of their citizenship perceptions and participation. These emotions were constituted in and through relations and non-relations with other young people at school, as well as with members of their local communities at various inter-locking spatial scales. Focusing on emotional geographies of citizenship participation offered insights into how young people were forming their citizenship identities at the intersection of their geographies of gender, race and class, and how these experiences shaped, motivated and sustained citizenship participation. The study highlights the complexity of young people's emotional experiences in relation to their citizenship identities and participation and the need to understand this affectivity in greater depth, especially within policy contexts.     

The strategic performance of heterotopic experiences in higher education: Imagining spaces of potentiality for new South African identities

In an interview published in Esprit, Achille Mbembe asks “what is ‘today’, and what are we today? What are the lines of fragility, the lines of precariousness, the fissures in contemporary African life? And, possibly, how could what is, be no more, how could it give birth to something else?” As a response to this question of African identity, this article is twofold. Firstly, I aim to draw together an argument that recent and ongoing debates about decolonising knowledge (including Mbembe’s 2015 WISER lecture and open public conversations with the #RhodesMustFall [#RMF] student movement) can be read as part of the search for ways “to be otherwise”. In fact, higher education (HE) institutions should be, can be, and often are, crucial spaces of potentiality in this regard. An essential part of realising Mbembe’s vision of a new kind of human, therefore, would be to ensure that institutions in the contemporary HE landscape recognise, embrace and therefore (paradoxically) become what they are, namely “heterotopias”. Heterotopology is a metaphor Michel Foucault suggests in his 1967 lecture Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias. Accepting that HE is a heterotopically discursive site, this article provides a brief, broad Foucaultian heterotopology of the contemporary HE landscape, with specific reference to the South African context. It focuses on Foucault’s three types of heterotopia (crisis, deviation and compensation) and his six principles of heterotopia. Secondly, it would be something of a performative contradiction if this article were merely to follow the conventions of a traditionally organised philosophical argument about an engaging metaphor (“heterotopia”). As an experimental “strategic performance”, the writing itself aims to produce a heterotopic reading experience, thereby joining in the heuristic excavation of experience, which is the task of the heterotopia. It draws disparate, clashing elements into a complex textual web, which should generate at least some feeling of disturbance or cognitive dissonance. In the article’s fissures and joints, readers should find points of entry for critical and creative thinking. As Johnson puts it in his analysis of Foucault’s metaphor, “heterotopias glitter and clash in their incongruous variety, illuminating a passage for our imagination”.     

“This is My Community”: Reproducing and Resisting Boundaries of Exclusion in Contested Public Spaces

The way that public space is structured has significant implications for identity, social interaction, and participation in society. For those experiencing homelessness, with no or limited private space, survival hinges on the accessibility and livability of public space. However, the increasing privatization of public space in the United States has contributed to the implementation of anti‐homeless ordinances in cities, restricting sitting, standing, panhandling, and sleeping in public. This study analyzes data from interviews with housed and unhoused community members, text from a local policy document, and ethnographic observations to explore how boundaries between “insiders” and “outsiders” are drawn in public space and mediated through individual discourse. Our findings suggest that boundaries of exclusion are constructed through dominant narratives that portray the unhoused as a threat to safety and economic vitality, thus justifying the need for regulation and punishment through the criminalization of homelessness. Yet, informants also demonstrate resistance to this narrative by discussing how criminalization of homelessness perpetuates dehumanization, violence, and economic inequality. Policy implications for the regulation of public space are discussed.     

Public Participation and Scientific Citizenship in the Science Museum in London: Visitors’ Perceptions of the Museum as a Broker

ABSTRACT

Science museums in Europe play an emerging and important role as brokers between the public and policy-making institutions and are becoming platforms that enable scientific citizenship. To do so, museums rely on the participation of their visitors. However, little is known about the relation between visitors’ interest to participate, their engagement with science, and their perceptions of the museum as a platform of scientific citizenship. This study analyzes visitors’ interest in 3 levels of participation: Sharing opinions and feedback (the museum as “forum”); co-developing programs and activities; and participating in the governance of the museum. Quantitative analysis of the data from a survey conducted among 364 adult visitors to the Science Museum in London reveals that interest in the forum function of the museum does not depend on visitors’ prior engagement with science, but rather on how the museum enables the scientific citizenship of its visitors. However, for interest in co-development the reverse was found—previous engagement and frequent visits are more important than scientific citizenship. The forum function of the museum and its perceived role in public policy further determine visitors’ interest in museum governance.     

Daily Occupations,Routines, and Social Participation of Homeless Young People

Homelessness disrupts young people’s participation in the productive occupations that facilitate transition to adulthood, impairs social connections, and has a disorganizing effect on their time use. Semi-structured focus group interviews were used to explore how 19 homeless young people perceived their daily routines, meaningful occupations, and social participation to be impacted by the experience of homelessness. Occupational therapy practitioners can use the findings from this study to inform the development of comprehensive community-based programming aimed at increasing social opportunities, developing balanced, healthy routines, decreasing intrinsic and extrinsic barriers to residential stability, and promoting participation in productive and leisure occupations.     

‘The tables have turned’: Sport,emotion & the passive counter-politics of youth citizenship

This article considers the intersections between sport, emotion, and youth citizenship. I explore the emotional dynamics of citizenship of young people, in relation to sport, and within the context of liberal immigration polity in Singapore. In this qualitative study, I conducted video-elicitation written interviews (VEWI) with twenty-two Singaporean youths to understand the multiple ways in which young people negotiate and conceive of their citizenship through emotion, specifically in relation to an emotionally charged sport space. With the 2010 Moscow World Table Tennis Team Championships as the focus of this study, this article explores young people's ‘emotional subjectivities’ of citizenship to make sense of their strategies in articulating resistance through a form of passive counter-politics to top-down power relations of citizenship governance in Singapore. An emergent spatiality of emotional citizenship in relation to spaces of modern sport is identified, contributing to debates in geography and beyond.     

Public knowledge,attitudes, and beliefs about homeless people: Evidence for compassion fatigue?

Media reports suggest that the public is becoming impatient with the homeless—that so-called “compassion fatigue” has gripped the nation. This characterization of public sentiment could have important policy consequences—restrictive measures can be justified by growing public impatience, and progressive housing policies seem infeasible within a hostile climate of opinion. But evidence to support the compassion fatigue notion is anecdotal. We examine the issue by tracking the results of public opinion polls and by reporting detailed evidence from a nationwide random-digit dial telephone survey (N=1,507) concerning knowledge attitudes and beliefs about homeless people. To be sure, the public sees homelessness as an undesirable social problem and wants something done about it. However, although the homeless are clearly stigmatized, there is little evidence to suggest that the public has lost compassion and is unwilling to support policies to help homeless people.     

Complex Processes of Religion and Spirituality Among Midwestern LGBTQ Homeless Young Adults

The role of religion and spirituality in young people’s lives is diverse and multifaceted. Little research has examined how religion shapes the experiences of socially marginalized groups, such as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) homeless young adults. This study illustrates how Midwestern LGBTQ homeless young people interpret the role of religion and spirituality in their lives. Drawing from a sample of 22 LGBTQ homeless young people between the ages of 19 and 26 years, we qualitatively explore how they distinctively frame religion, spirituality and religious identity through an intersectional lens of their life experiences. Our findings demonstrate the complex ways that young adults from multiple marginalized social groups can interpret religion in the unique context of their social environments. Many young people highlighted the positive impact of religion and spirituality in their lives by constructing them as sources of resilience. Other LGBTQ young adults also discussed how religion was often a source of stigma that interacted with participants’ highly vulnerable social environments and backgrounds. Implications for service providers and policy improvements are discussed.     

Locating Impropriety: Street Drinking, Moral Order, and the Ideological Dilemma of Public Space

Drawing on research in urban sociology, cultural geography, and social psychology, this paper explores some of the moral rules that govern social relations in public places. In particular, we consider how certain practices become classified as everyday incivilities—infractions of the moral order that sustains public life. In order to develop this notion, we draw illustrations from an ongoing research project that is investigating social attitudes towards "street drinking," an activity that has led to the creation of "alcohol-free zones" in over 100 British cities during the past decade. As an emergent theme, this research has suggested that the classification of street drinking as either acceptable or unacceptable conduct is contingent upon the social construction of public space that users invoke. This theme is discussed in the context of wider struggles over citizenship and social control in the public domain—struggles manifest within "ideological dilemmas" (Billig et al., 1988) over the limits of free conduct, the tension between open and closed public spaces, and the attempt to distinguish "admissible" from "inadmissible" publics.     

Singing together in the park: Older peoples’ wellbeing and the singingscape in Guangzhou,China

The importance of adapting to later life is becoming increasingly apparent to older people as their concerns about health and wellbeing grow. Based on extensive fieldwork between 2020 and 2021 in Guangzhou, China, with older people who consider “singing together in the park” as an essential and popular everyday leisure activity, this article demonstrates how subject (older people), activity (singing), and place (park) integrate into a therapeutic space, the singingscape. Singingscape is presented in three distinct aspects: on the physical level, singingscape indicates an essential embodied experience of the connection between internal body and external environment, from which the older people can relax physically and mentally and acquire a sense of wellbeing; on the social level, singingscape fosters a positive atmosphere, where older people gain a collective sense of belonging and maintain social rhythm and social interactions with their peers; and on the imagined space level, fanciful landscapes and emotional imagination are advantageous to the wellbeing of older people. In the conceptual sense we argue that singingscape is located, experienced and integrated. Lastly, we advocate that attention should be paid to the construction of urban public spaces as vital infrastructure for older people in their everyday leisure activities.     

Citizenship and immigration a current review

The presence of immigrants and their activities challenge traditional notions of citizenship centred on the conflation of national and state membership. Four dimensions of citizenship— defined here as membership in a socio-political community—are identified: legal status, rights, identity, and participation. Discussion centres on the constraints and determinants of naturalization, the extent to which rights are linked to personhood rather than membership in a nation-state, and the challenge to state identity and cohesion produced by multiculturalism. It is suggested that future research should consider citizenship as participation. This dimension highlights how immigrants’ transnational activities challenge traditional views of citizenship. We cannot, however, dismiss the importance of the state. The concept of participation is therefore also important since it focuses attention on dynamic interactions between the individual and the nation-state.     

Citizenship,religion, gender and the politics of belonging: a case study of white,middle-class christian men in the East Midlands,United Kingdom

Religion, and in particular Christianity, is losing ground in the UK as fewer people identify as Christian and more people report having no religion. Although religion remains influential in politics, education and welfare, the role and legitimacy of religion in the public sphere is highly contested. This context of religious and cultural change provides the background for a case study of white, middle class, Christian men in the East Midlands and how they understand and experience citizenship in everyday life. The article examines how religious faith and citizenship are linked, and whether religion provides resources or barriers to citizenship. The article argues that the interviewed men draw on both status and practice based understandings of citizenship, and on both instrumental and expressive forms of masculinity, depending on context. Notably, some of the men invoke a defensive discourse in reference to alleged threats posed to Christianity by secular forces and by Islam. The findings have larger implications for the politics of belonging in the UK and Western Europe.     

One mosque and the negotiation of German Islam

In the last half century (pious) Muslims and their communities have become integral parts of German cities. They are creative cultural producers and religiously inspired urban citizens. Mosques are central nodes in urban Muslim religious and cultural geographies where believers negotiate pious identities and lifeworlds, configure pious public personae and modes of civic participation. In this paper I introduce the Al-Nour Mosque as a unique node in the religious and cultural geography of the southern German state capital of Stuttgart. I examine this mosque as an urban space where individual and communal religiosities and religious cultures are discussed, formulated, tested and practised. My central question is how urban culture and religion are negotiated in the context of a mosque community. I argue that urban culture and religion are negotiated not only in mainstream public spaces or established churches but also in invisible places like mosques. Based on several years of ethnographic fieldwork in Stuttgart, I analyse the creative role of the Al-Nour Mosque in the construction of religious subjectivities, negotiations of urban religiosities and religiously inspired urban cultures. Analysing exemplary events, activities, cultural and religious negotiations in the Al-Nour Mosque, I demonstrate that places like the Al-Nour Mosque are dynamic elements of the urban religious and cultural geography.     

Separate or together? Women-only public spaces and participation of Saudi women in the public domain in Saudi Arabia

Gender segregation in the public domain has become a cornerstone of the Saudi interpretation of Islam (Doumato 2009). It is a development that has led to the coming about of extensive separate public spaces that are only for women (Doumato 2009; Hamdan 2005; Le Renard 2008, 2014). In these women-only public spaces, women undertake activities that are by them and for them, therewith reinforcing the existence of these separate structures. This institutionalisation and practice of women-only public spaces, as well as its opposite phenomenon of ‘mixing’ between the two sexes (ikhtilā?) however is contested and led to a heated debate. This debate centres around the question of whether and if so, how women should participate in the public domain. Starting with an overview of the historical development of women-only public spaces and ikhtilā? in Saudi Arabia, I will show how these have evolved. Drawing on fieldwork among urban, educated Saudi women, I shed light on how attitudes and strategies of female respondents regarding women-only public spaces and ikhtilā? are related to their ideas about their presence in the public domain and notions of ‘the liberation of women’, ‘empowerment’, and ‘the rise of women’. I conclude by demonstrating how ideas about the participation of women in the public sphere are positioned as part of the construction of a local, ‘enchanted’ modernity (Deeb, 2006) that has a material and a spiritual dimension.     

Decision-Making by Children and Young People in the Home: The Nurture of Trust,Participation and Independence

This article presents the findings of a qualitative research study of children and young people (aged 7–17 years) in Ireland. It seeks to investigate whether, for the children and young people involved, the home is a space where supportive, trusting family relationships can be nurtured; where independence grows with age; and where parents listen, discuss and explain decisions made. It furthermore outlines the views and experiences of parents with regard to children and young people’s participation in the home and will focus on relational and spatial aspects of child participation within the home. The study recognizes children and young people as social actors and is also informed by a relational and spatial approach to children’s participation which recognizes the respective roles and positions of children in facilitating child participation. The results indicate that age and issues of trust and tokenism were significant barriers in young people’s participation and decision making at home. Key enablers of children and young people’s participation included spaces where discussion can happen at home, good family relationships, being listened to by parents, trust and growing levels of independence with age, seeing decisions as fair and having the rationale for decisions explained to them by parents. Among suggestions for improvements the most important were designated family spaces for discussion, encouragement of active listening by parents, and promotion of explanation by adults of their decisions.     

The Potential for Expressing Post-secular Citizenship Through the Deobandi Doctrine

Islamic education has been regarded as a thorn in the side of religious minority community integration into the nation state, and consequently to the expression of citizenship. Expressions of citizenship are associated with public participation while Islamic education is more readily associated with retreat and isolation of religious communities. At the same time the pervasiveness of religion in public life has led to calls for the post-secular—that is where religious communities are present in secular society. Habermas demonstrates that a public which is literary constituted through critical rational communication is an effective means with which individuals can participate in the public sphere of modern society. Literary publics get constituted when three features are satisfied; writing, reading and discussing matters of common interest. The article considers the features of a literary public in relation to a review of some literature on the Deobandi education movement. The article argues that Islamic education at Deobandi institutions is able to constitute a literary public through the use of common texts in vernacular languages which are accessible to individuals who can then read and discuss them. The article suggests, then, that Islamic education within the Deobandi network of institutions opens up fascinating possibilities for expressing of post-secular citizenship requiring further research.     

Visualizing homelessness: a study in photography and estrangement

This article reports a qualitative study of how homeless people visualize their life in hostels and on the streets of London. Using a photo‐production technique, the research enabled participants to show their situation as well as to tell about their experiences. Participants were given cameras and asked to take photographs typical of their day as homeless people, this material being the subject of a subsequent interview. This provided both visual and text data that were analysed together so as to establish different engagements of the participants with the city and with domiciled people. Presenting the material from six of the participants, these different engagements are described with reference to issues of estrangement, exclusion and visualization employed as explanatory concepts. The article identifies and compares the different ways in which homeless people attempt not only to survive but also to [make their home] in the city. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Learning to feel at home. Governing homelessness and the politics of affect

The emotional and affective dynamics of homelessness are an established matter of concern in geographical research. Geographers have called attention to homelessness as an embodied phenomenon and to the emotional distress that affects people experiencing homelessness. What has achieved less attention though are the politics of affect that characterize spaces of care. Attempts to make homeless people ‘housing ready’ often target emotions and try to provide clients with a sense of belonging and feelings of responsibility in matters of housekeeping and homemaking. The paper takes these attempts to create emotionally stable ‘housing ready’ selves as a point of departure to open a set of broader questions concerning the nature of encounters between the welfare state and its citizens. It shows how spaces of care address ‘housing readiness’ as a personal ability and thereby abstract from the complex affective entanglements and prepersonal conditions that characterize dwelling. To highlight the paradoxical effects of therapeutic approaches to dwelling as a subjective emotional skill that can be mastered, I contrast the notion of ‘housing readiness’ with recent work in the field of affective geographies that allows for a different articulation of dwelling as a dense web of practices, atmospheres and relations between people, spaces and things.