The central problem addressed in this fellowship was the problem of citizenship deprivation, i.e. the possibility for states to deprive citizens of their citizenship. Mostly visible in times of crisis, citizenship deprivation is presented as a symbolic measure aimed to safeguard the national community from an internal threat. The research focused on the affective aspect of citizenship deprivation, looking at the ways in which affective frames enable state to legitimize citizenship deprivation despite well-documented legal barriers. Studying the ways in which states legitimize practices of citizenship deprivation is important because it ties into histories of repression that raise questions about security practices and their implications for expressing citizenship today. Indeed, practices of citizenship deprivation raise important questions about politics of belonging and repression.
The objectives of the fellowship were to make room for studying the histories of citizenship deprivation in the UK and the Netherlands, as well as to practice qualitative methods that support such interdisciplinary research while addressing histories that often remain invisible. A focus on creative methods has grown out of this practice, resulting in innovative propositions tying creative writing-knowledge practices to pedagogical and epistemological reflections.
In our times when colonial histories can no longer be ignored leading to a fundamental revisiting of institutional spaces of belonging and repression, tying the study of citizenship deprivation to the practice of creative methods made space for rethinking the ways in which history is written; for observing the tenacity of institutional repressive politics; as well as making room for alternative ways of writing that enables to write about our traumatic histories of the past and of the present.
