Re-Making Citizenship: Migrant Women's Activism in the UK

Situated at the theoretical intersection of sociology and politics, this paper brings a critical lens to the study of citizenship by investigating and analysing the lives of migrant women living in the UK. Through interviews and participant observation conducted over a year, this paper examines how migrant women engage in individual and collective community work and activism against the backdrop of the UK’s changing immigration policies. The objective of this research is to shift away from the narrative of migrant women as passive victims to recognize the multiple ways in which they exercise agency, and in doing so, enact their own forms of “activist citizenship.” Isin (2009) uses the term to characterize the newly emerging types of citizen subjectivities that challenge the traditional notions of citizenship attached to modern liberal democracies. This paper asks a central question: what claims to “citizenship” are migrant women making through activism? How do these intersect with notions of belonging and identity? Ultimately, It seeks to understand how ‘non-citizen’ migrants engage, contest, transform, and otherwise resist new ways of regulating mobility and in doing so “enact forms of transnationalism and citizenship ‘from below,’” drawing our attention to “new spaces of citizenship that potentially enable both new ways of being political and new visions for the type of politics we wish to imagine in the world” (Nyers and Rygiel, 2012: 9). A rapidly growing international diaspora teamed with anti-immigration political discourse across the UK lends this research particular urgency, making it doubly important to centre the marginalized narratives of migrant women. This research will contribute to existing literature on forced migration, citizenship and migrant activism in the UK, particularly on the largely obscured narratives of women activists in Manchester.