Comparative Citizenship Policy and Practice
Political Science 560
Fall 2012
Professor Kristen Hill Maher
Office: 4111 Adams Humanities
Phone: (619) 594-4873
Email: kmaher@mail.sdsu.edu
Course schedule: Peterson Gym 244, Monday 4:00-6:40pm
Office hours: Thurs 2:00-3:30pm, and by appointment
Themes and Objectives
This course will address the policies and practices of citizenship in cross-national perspective.
Citizenship – the relationship between the individual and the polity – forms the basis for democratic
politics and individual rights in contemporary Western politics. It is a concept that developed in
conjunction with the modern notion of the nation-state. However, there has been little agreement about
what citizenship properly is or what it should entail. Popular, policy, and scholarly discourses use the
concept in wildly varying ways. For this reason, one of the first tasks of our study of citizenship will be to
sort through some of the most common ways that it is framed in contemporary politics. Our approach to
citizenship, then, will be “comparative” in two regards: in the evaluation of multiple philosophical
traditions, and in cross-national comparisons between different political systems and cultures.
One of the key contemporary approaches to citizenship explores how various groups are excluded
from full membership, either through legal means or through less tangible social hierarchies that produce
differences in status, or what Judith Shklar calls “standing” or “somebody-ness.” Every polity involves
hierarchies of inclusion, rights, and standing that effectively result in tiers of membership, in second-class
citizens even among those who are hypothetically legal equals. The study of citizenship therefore often
involves a study of marginality, exclusion, disenfranchisement, and subordination within particular
societies. We will be engaging these literatures particularly as they relate to racial and ethnic minorities
and indigenous groups, and will likely also discuss exclusions based on religion, sexuality, gender, class,
and homelessness.
A second key theme in the literature (and hence in the class) focuses on the rights and claims to
membership by immigrants or migrant workers. The transnational migration generated by global markets,
war, and economic insecurity has produced a world in which millions of people do not live in the state in
which they formally hold citizenship. This migration has therefore increased the demand for dual
citizenship statuses or dual nationalities. It has generated a class of those who are formally “stateless.” It
has complicated the administration of rights. And it has made all contemporary polities more culturally
and linguistically diverse, such that continued definitions of membership in political community along
“national” (often racial) lines leave many residents disenfranchised.
The readings then divide roughly into three topic:
1. Theories of citizenship. What are some of the dominant ways of conceiving of political
membership in Western societies? What constellations of rights and responsibilities are
popularly imagined to accompany citizenship?
2. The social boundaries of citizenship. How do we reconcile the implicit egalitarianism of the
citizenship concept with the reality of deep social and political inequalities based on race,
gender, religion, class, and position in the global economy? How might different policies and
practices of citizenship permit a more democratic political order in a globalizing era?
3. States, rights, and transnational migration. How can we administer rights or organize inclusive
polities when people do not stay put? How can citizenship rights be organized, apart from the
traditional nation-state model? What are the practical and cultural obstacles to a transnational
citizenship or rights regime?
In addressing these themes, the readings will draw from a range of cases, primarily from North America
and Europe, but also from Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East. Students with particular regional
interests are encouraged to introduce further comparative cases in class discussion and in their research.
This course has six main objectives. By the end of the semester, you should have gained:

general expertise regarding some of the major citizenship literatures, particularly as they concern
migration, marginalization, and identity;

improved analytical skills;

more sophisticated skills in reading for arguments;

more effective writing skills;

skills in conducting independent research, particularly in locating, evaluating, and analyzing
articles in scholarly journals; and

skills in developing analytic reviews of scholarly literatures.
Assignments, process, and grading criteria
The primary bases for evaluation in this course will be two kinds of written assignments. First, you will be
asked to prepare a written response to the assigned readings, submitted by e-mail before class. These
responses will serve as the basis for class discussion as well as a substitute for an examination over the
course materials.
The second kind of writing assignment will involve research in two stages. First, you will be asked to
conduct a thorough library search on a topic of your choice relevant to citizenship and construct an
annotated bibliography on it, due October 22ndh. Afterwards, you will be asked to craft an analytic
literature review about the sources you found, due December 10th.
Both graduate and undergraduate students will be asked to make a class presentation on your topic and the
literature you found at some point in the semester. We will put together a presentation schedule in our
second class meeting and will have presentations begin the week thereafter, through the end of the
semester.
These assignments are designed not only to hone your research and analytical skills, but also to broaden
the scope of literature discussed in class.
Our course meetings will be conducted seminar-style, with the objective of generating critical analysis and
debate grounded in the course readings. I will generally begin each meeting by situating the readings in
context within the larger literatures on citizenship and identifying some of the major points of debate. Past
this introduction, the impetus for discussion will be student-led. You are encouraged to pose questions or
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offer critiques and commentary, perhaps based on the written response you have prepared. The quality of
the course will depend strongly on the quality and consistency of student participation, which therefore
will be weighted heavily as part of course grades.
Grading Criteria:
Reading responses (total of 8)
Annotated bibliography
Analytical literature review
Class presentation
Participation (including both attendance
and quality of contributions in class)
30%
15%
25%
10%
20%
Guidelines for reading responses
In 8 of the 11 weeks in which there are readings assigned, you will be asked to prepare a written response,
due by Sunday evening by 10pm by e-mail (kmaher@mail.sdsu.edu). Please either type your response
in the body of an email, or else type it in a word processing program and then cut/paste it into the body of
an email. Please do not send them as attachments. Put your name and the date or week # in the subject
line.
In the span of 2-3 double-spaced pages, each response should fulfill the following three functions:
1. A brief summary of what you believe to be the major contribution(s) of the week’s readings and
the arguments they made. In weeks when we address work by multiple authors, you should
attempt some kind of synthesis. Ideally, your response will offer a cogent statement of each text’s
argument while also observing critical differences among them or common threads throughout.
One of the key goals of the response will be to demonstrate that you have read all the assigned
texts and comprehended them well enough to summarize/synthesize them. When you quote the
text directly, please cite page numbers. When you paraphrase the text, please cite the general
page range (or at a minimum, the chapter of a book) that the information came from. Careful
citation permits me to look up the materials you are referencing in cases when I suspect you have
misunderstood the text; it helps me give you the benefit of the doubt.
2. A critique of some aspect of the argument, method, or findings in one of the readings. A second
key goal of the response is to engage the readings analytically and develop your own evaluations
and positions about them. It is not enough to be able to simply repeat what others have said.
Rather, as scholars yourselves, you should be able to step back from what you have read, critically
appraise it, and even hold imaginary debates with its authors. To get you started, you might
consider:




Did the author make some claims that you did not feel were appropriately supported with
evidence?
Were portions of the argument unfounded or particularly well done?
Were the assumptions the author seemed to make (e.g. about human nature, the political
process, or anything else) appropriate?
Were the methods used adequate to answer the questions being addressed?
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

3.
Did the argument or the findings have implications that the author does not note?
Do you see ways that this study might be applied to other contexts, and if so, do you think the
results would be similar?
A question in response to the reading. This question should demonstrate some substantive
engagement with the reading, or some inferential thought using the reading as a point of departure.
You would be welcome to bring technical questions (such as, "when did Germany begin its
guestworker program?") to class and introduce them as part of the discussion, but they are not
appropriate as reading responses. Rather than just asking a question, you should explain why this
question occurs to you and/or why you believe it to be an important line of inquiry. You may be
asked to offer your question in class as a basis for discussion, so please do try to identify questions
that might tap into something controversial or interesting to discuss.
Although these responses are about the course texts, they should be written in your own voice. You are the
author taking the week’s readings into consideration and analytically engaging with them. In that regard,
you are welcome to use the first person (“I”), and you might want to imagine yourself describing the
week’s text(s) to someone else. While you do not need to include a formal introduction to the response,
you might want to start out by identifying the key themes as you saw them and giving a quick punchline
(preview) statement about your own evaluation and critique. Thinking of yourself as the analyst and
author of your response will help you to give the whole paper an analytic tone and prevent you from
merely repeating what an author has said.
These written responses have several objectives. Perhaps most importantly, they will serve as a substitute
for exams on the readings. For that reason, you are encouraged to take them quite seriously, and not to fall
behind in submitting them. The single most important thing you can do for your grade in this class
will be to keep up with the readings and reading responses.
These responses are also intended to help you process what you have read such that you are ready to be an
active participant in discussion. I will use them to help structure the class conversation, based on the
patterns I see in the points of confusion, disagreement, or interest.
Your responses will be graded according to the extent to which you have fulfilled the spirit of the
assignment. It is much better for you to turn in an incomplete response and receive a mediocre grade than
it is to have a missing response.
Responses turned in past the Sunday 10pm deadline will be marked down, and those later than Monday
at 11:00am will not be accepted. This somewhat draconian policy is necessary in order for the reading
responses to fulfill the above objectives.
However, also note that you have 8 responses due for 11 weeks in which there are readings assigned. You
are expected to read the assigned materials every week and to participate actively in class, but there will be
three weeks that you will not need to turn in any writing. You are encouraged to use these “freebies”
strategically so that you have a buffer for when you get sick or have an emergency later on in the semester.
If you receive some low scores that you would like to eliminate, you may do more than the required
number of responses, and I will count only your eight highest scores.
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Guidelines for annotated bibliography
All students will be asked to select a research topic related to citizenship, to conduct a thorough library
search in journal databases in order to become familiar with the range of scholarship in that field, and to
create an Annotated Bibliography by October 22nd.
The range of topics you may address will be left quite open as long as it falls within the general scheme of
the course. Generally speaking, a good strategy will be to investigate a topic related to citizenship in a
particular international context (such as the position of Puerto Ricans in the U.S., citizenship standing of
Arabs in Israel, Maori citizenship claims in New Zealand, guestworker programs in Canada, etc.). Those
with a strong background in political theory may instead opt to engage a theoretical literature (such as
debates over multiculturalism) without pinning it to a particular empirical context.
Completion of this assignment will require a number of steps. Start by reading or reviewing the course
texts that most closely relate to your topic. You might take particular note of how these readings fall short.
For instance, do they seem to overlook or misrepresent critical issues? Do they adopt a limited perspective
on the topic (geographically, ideologically, methodologically)?
After grounding yourself on how your topic has been covered (or not) so far in the course materials, it is
time to head to the library. Conduct a search for relevant journal articles using the library’s databases for
scholarly journals, such as Worldwide Political Science Abstracts, ProQuest, Academic Search Premier
(EBSCOhost), Ingenta, JSTOR, Columbia International Affairs Online, Sociological Abstracts, and PAIS
International. Each database includes a different set of source journals. You should conduct searches in
multiple databases using multiple search terms in order to maximize your possibility of finding interesting,
relevant articles and to make sure that you have a handle on the scope of what is “out there” in the
literature. Again, this search process should be a matter of charting out the broad landscape of the
literature on a topic, such that you are prepared later to write a well-informed and effective literature
review.
Many articles are available in full-text form through interlinked databases at SDSU. Look for the words
“Find Full Text” and click on it. Occasionally, you will run across articles that are only available in hard
copy at the library. If they have abstracts that look promising, they will require an actual trek to the actual
library to look the journal up on the shelves, which you do with a call number, just like a regular book.
The other possibility is that the article is not carried through our library at all, but can be ordered through
Interlibrary Loan (ILL). These days, ILL orders generally take a week or less, and they are delivered
electronically for you to download. If you get started early enough, this will be an option for you. In these
days of tight budgets, I am finding that ILL is necessary increasingly often.
Some guidelines about appropriate sources: please limit your search to scholarly (aka peer-reviewed or
refereed) journals or else policy briefs from respectable institutions. Articles from newspapers, popular
periodicals (such as Time or The Atlantic Monthly), or journals that do not have a peer-review process will
not be acceptable. You can confirm whether a journal is peer-reviewed by reading the journal’s article
submission information or by looking the journal up in a resource book available behind the reference desk
at the library, Magazines for Libraries. You can also generally tell which articles are scholarly by length
(at least 10pp long) or formatting (does not include catchy graphics). Some databases permit you to limit
your search to scholarly or peer-reviewed articles by checking a box in the Advanced Search form.
You should include only research articles and not book reviews, which will also be listed in article
databases. One clue here will be length. Book reviews tend to be 1-5 pages long, while scholarly articles
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tend to be roughly 10-45 pages. In some databases, you can eliminate all results besides full-length
articles by selecting “Feature” under “Document Type.”
Also, please focus on current research (roughly 1995-present), unless there is a good reason given your
topic to address the issue historically.
Another way to find relevant sources once you have found at least one article that is very relevant to what
you want to focus on would be to start with that article’s literature review and bibliography. Look up the
other relevant sources you find in the bibliography, and then when you find other relevant articles, look up
the sources they are citing, as well. This is a particularly good way to tap into a “conversation” among
authors who all specialize in your field and to ensure that you are identifying a coherent literature instead
of some random collection of articles.
If there is a very limited scholarly literature on your chosen topic, you may supplement the sources you
include in your bibliography with research-based studies published by think tanks or nonprofit institutions
such as The Migration Policy Institute, The Urban Institute, or The Public Policy Institute of California.
Do be skeptical about any research you find through a regular web search until you are certain about the
credentials and motives of those who have produced it. The Columbia International Affairs Online
database at the library also includes some policy research briefs.
The other alternative to bolster your bibliography would be to locate edited academic anthologies on your
topic. Chapters in such anthologies written by academics would be a fair substitute for journal articles, but
please do not use more than two chapters from the same book (unless you build a larger bibliography with
a larger number of sources).
Once you hone in on a topic, you might build your source list by selecting your most relevant article and
then looking through its bibliography to see what other sources are listed that might be a good prospect for
you.
If you encounter problems identifying or evaluating articles, please feel free to ask me or the subject
librarian (Carolyn Baber, 594-6990, cbaber@mail.sdsu.edu, LA 1101A) for assistance.
What should you submit on Oct 22nd? Two things: an annotated bibliography, and a description of your
research process.
1. Annotated Bibliography. Entails a list of your best and most relevant sources. Undergrads should have
a minimum of 10 good sources, and Grads should have at least 15.
Each source should be documented in some standard bibliographic style (e.g. APSA, APA, Chicago
Style). For guidance on the Political Science APSA style, see
http://writing.wisc.edu/Handbook/DocAPSA_RefList.html.
Each source should also include annotation, which is basically your own summary of:
 what the article does,
 what it argues,
 what it appears to contribute, and
 what you made of it.
These annotations can be relatively informal since they are for your own use as well as for this assignment,
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but they should engage the article as a whole and not simply as an abstract or title. You don’t need to read
everything thoroughly, but you should at least skim each one for argument and evidence, reading
especially the whole intro and conclusion.
When the article offers an abstract by the author at the beginning, it can be very tempting to simply cut and
paste into your annotated bibliography. However, there are two problems with this approach. First, it is
plagiarism unless you pop the whole thing into quotes and cite the author. Second, it doesn’t offer your
own take on the article or engagement with it. Annotations should be a way for you to notate what each
article is doing and your own commentary about it as a piece. Later, when you are writing a literature
review, you will find your own words much more helpful than the author’s.
2. An informal written page describing your research process. Which databases did you use? Were
particular search terms especially fruitful? Was it difficult to find relevant articles, or were you inundated
with too much information and need to narrow the scope of your search? Did you encounter unanticipated
obstacles or make any discoveries? How did you end up defining your topic? The research process is
always somewhat serendipitous; this section of the assignment is your opportunity to comment on how the
library muses treated you, how your topic evolved, and how you ended up with the sources you have.
This assignment will be graded according to the following rubric/criteria:
Annotated Bibliography (80%)
 Good breadth, number, and quality of sources
 Complete citations in some consistent style
 Appropriate analytic annotations for each text drawing on your own observations about the
article and using your own language.
Documentation of search process (20%)
 Clear, transparent account of where you looked, how you found your sources, and how you
managed the process of defining the scope of your topic.
Guidelines for the Analytic Literature Review and Presentation will be given out later in class.
Source Citation and Plagiarism Policy
In their written work for this class, students are welcome to use any consistent system for citation (APSA,
Chicago Style, MLA, etc.) For guidance on the Political Science APSA style, see
http://writing.wisc.edu/Handbook/DocAPSA_RefList.html.
Two other good resources are available to you: 1) I have posted a short document on Blackboard (under
Course Documents) laying out “Citation Guidelines” on how to cite various kinds of sources, and how to
avoid plagiarizing when you paraphrase. 2) The library has an excellent tutorial on avoiding plagiarism:
http://infotutor.sdsu.edu/plagiarism/index.cfm. If you have ANY doubts about citation, use the resources
available.
There is a zero-tolerance policy for plagiarism in this course. You will not receive credit for:

Work that has been substantially produced or edited by someone else. Students are welcome to
work together on assignments and to attend university tutorials for writing, but each student
clearly should be the author of his/her own coursework.
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

Papers that use facts, ideas, or phrasing from any source without acknowledging that source both
in the text and in a full bibliographic citation at the end.
Papers that fail to acknowledge the use of directly quoted material with quotation marks.
Paraphrasing in your own words is fine, but should still acknowledge the source of information
with in-text and bibliographic citation.
Violations of university plagiarism policies will result in a failing grade for the course and a mark on your
permanent record with the university.
Texts
In an effort to keep costs down and to diversify the range of materials we cover in class, I have ordered
only three books, relying heavily on journal articles available in electronic form through the SDSU library.
I have posted links for them on Blackboard, where you can download them for free. Note that in order to
access most library databases from off-campus, you will need your Red ID and a library password.
The books for this course are available for purchase at KB Books (287-2665) across the pedestrian bridge
from the student center, as well as from the campus bookstore. I am also working to put one copy of each
on reserve at the library.
Meeks, Eric V. 2007. Border Citizens: The Making of Indians, Mexicans, and Anglos in Arizona.
UT Press.
Soysal, Yasemin. 1994. Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe.
Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press.
Calavita, Kitty. 2005. Immigrants at the Margins: Law, Race, and Exclusion in Southern Europe.
Cambridge UP.
Schedule
You are expected to come to class prepared to discuss the assigned readings even in weeks when you are
not writing a response, and your participation grade will reflect the extent to which you are well prepared
to contribute to class discussion. Texts that are not in the three books are available for download through
Blackboard. Note that if you are off campus, you may sometimes need to enter a student ID and library
password (which you can easily obtain here: http://library.sdsu.edu/help/create/reset-pin).
Citizenship: History of a Concept
Aug 27
Introduction to course themes, requirements, and texts
Historical conceptions of citizenship
Contemporary issues of citizenship
Sept 3
Labor Day Holiday – no class
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Sept 10
Citizenship theory – England and the U.S.
Marshall, T.H. 1988. “Citizenship and Social Class.” Excerpts from The Citizenship
Debates: A Reader, Gershon Shafir, ed. University of Minnesota Press, 93-111. (BB)
Fraser and Gordon, “Contract versus Charity: Why is there no social citizenship in the
United States?” (BB).
Smith, Rogers. 1988. “The ‘American Creed’ and American Identity: The Limits of
Liberal Citizenship in the United States.” Western Political Quarterly 41, 2: 225-251.
(BB)
The Politics of Boundaries and Exclusion
Sept 17
The historical construction of racial identity and citizenship standing in Arizona
Meeks, Border Citizens: The Making of Indians, Mexicans, and Anglos in Arizona, chpts
1-4
Sept 24
Meeks, Border Citizens, chpts 5-8
Oct 1
Cultural citizenship, nationalism, and indigenous politics in the Americas
de la Peña, Guillermo. 2005. “Social and Cultural Policies Toward Indigenous Peoples:
Perspectives from Latin America.” Annual Review of Anthropology 34: 717-739 (BB)
Hooker, Juliet. 2005. “Indigenous Inclusion / Black Exclusion: Race, Ethnicity and
Multicultural Citizenship in Latin America.” Journal of Latin American Studies 37, 2:
285-310. (BB)
Jenson, Jane and Martin Papillon. 2000. “Challenging the Citizenship Regime: The
James Bay Cree and Transnational Action.” Politics and Society 28, 2: 245-264. (BB)
Recommended:
Yahar, Deborah J. 1998. “Contesting Citizenship: Indigenous Movements and
Democracy in Latin America.” Comparative Politics 31, 1: 23-42.
Albro, Robert. 2010. “Confounding Cultural Citizenship and Constitutional
Reform in Bolivia.” Latin American Perspectives 37, 3: 71-90.
Oct 8
Roma in Europe, minority rights, and multiculturalism
Vermeersch, Peter. 2008. “Exhibiting Multiculturalism: Politicized Representations of the
Roma in Poland.” Third Text 22, 3: 359-371. (BB)
Koulish, Robert. 2003. “Attitudes towards Roma Minority Rights in Hungary: A Case of
Ethnic Doxa, and the Contested Legitimation of Roma Inferiority.” Nationalities 31,
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3:327-343. (BB)
Rovid, Marton. 2011. “One-size-fits-all Roma? On the normative dilemmas of the
emerging European Roma policy.” Romani Studies 21, 1: 1-22. (BB)
Recommended:
Vermeersch, Peter. 2003. “Ethnic Minority Identity and Movement Politics: The
case of the Roma in the Czech Republic and Slovakia.” Ethnic and Racial Studies
26, 5: 879-901.
Vermeersch, Peter. 2005. “Marginality, Advocacy, and the Ambiguities of
Multiculturalism: Notes on Romani Activism in Central Europe.” Identities:
Global Studies in Culture and Power 12:451-478.
Citizenship Amidst Mobility
Oct 15
Migration, Dual Nationality, and External Citizenship
Wucker, Michele. 2004. “The Perpetual Migration Machine and Political Power.” World
Policy Journal 21, 3: 41-49. (BB)
Escobar, Cristina. 2007. “Extraterritorial Political Rights and Dual Citizenship in Latin
America.” Latin American Research Review 42, 3: 43-75. (BB)
Bauböck, Rainer. 2009. “The rights and duties of external citizenship.” Citizenship Studies
13, 5: 475-499. (BB)
Recommended:
Jones-Correa, Michael. 2001. “Under Two Flags: Dual Nationality in Latin
America and Its Consequences for Naturalization in the United States.”
International Migration Review 35, 4: 997-1029.
Oct 22
Research workshop
Annotated bibliographies due
Oct 29
State regimes of migrant incorporation in Europe and “postnational membership”
Soysal, Yasemin. 1995. Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in
Europe. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, Chpts 1, 3-5,7-9
Recommended: Chpts 2 and 6
Nov 5
Guestworker regimes in Spain and Italy
Calavita, Kitty. Immigrants at the Margins: Law, Race, and Exclusion in Southern
Europe, chpts 1-3
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Nov 12
NO CLASS – Veteran’s Day Holiday
Nov 19
The contradictions of migrant incorporation
Calavita, Immigrants at the Margins, chpts 4-7
Nov 26
Gender and migrant rights in a global economy
Maher, Kristen Hill. 2004. “Globalized Social Reproduction: Women Migrants and the
Citizenship Gap.” In People Out of Place: Globalization, Human Rights, and the
Citizenship Gap, Alison Brysk and Gershon Shafir, eds. New York and London:
Routledge: pp. 131-151. (BB)
Ong, Aihwa. 2009. “A Bio-Cartography: Maids, Neo-Slavery, and NGOs.” In Migrations
and Mobilities: Citizenship, Borders, and Gender, Seyla Benhabib and Judith Resnik, eds.
New York University Press, 157-184. (BB)
Rodriguez, Robyn M. 2002. “Migrant Heroes: Nationalism, Citizenship and the Politics
of Filipino Migrant Labor.” Citizenship Studies 6, 3: 341-356. (BB)
Recommended:
Rodriguez, Robyn M. “The Labor Brokerage State” (BB)
Ong, Aihwa. “Latitudes of Citizenship” (BB)
Dec 3
Co-ethnic migrants and “return” migration from the diaspora
Tsuda, Takayuki. 2000. “Acting Brazilian in Japan: Ethnic Resistance Among Return
Migrants.” Ethnology 39, 1: 55-71. (BB)
Fox, Jon E. 2007. “From national inclusion to economic exclusion: ethnic Hungarian
labour migration to Hungary.” Nations and Nationalism 13, 1: 77-96. (BB)
Cook-Martin, David and Anahi Viladrich. 2009. “The problem with similarity: Ethnicaffinity migrants in Spain.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 35, 1: 151-170. (BB)
Recommended:
Warner, Elizabeth. 2004. “Unilateral preferences granted to foreign national
minorities by a kin-state: A case study of Hungary’s ‘Status Law.’” Georgetown
Journal of International Law 35, 2: 379-432.
Finals Week
Dec 10
Student Presentations
Literature reviews due
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