5th ISA Forum of Sociology (6-11 July 2025)

In this session, we invite contributions that address citizenship from a biographical and family history perspective, reflecting on the ways rights and duties can change during the life course and how social inequalities shape biographical trajectories. Mobility (and in particular migration) can lead to the renegotiation of citizenship and belonging, especially in contexts of arrival, and thus warrants a processual biographical analysis of these changes. And the formation of (post-)colonial states changed the citizenship status of many people, due to the redefinition of boundaries: the resulting negotiations of inclusion/exclusion often play a role within families to this day.

Possible questions are:

How do rights and duties, forms of participation and constructions of belonging develop over the course of a lifetime?

What is the role of intersectional social inequalities, based, for example, on gender, age, migration experience, or indigeneity, and how do these develop and change over time,? How are they processed biographically?

In which ways are different statuses a driver of biographical thematization and in which ways are biographical experiences and accounts used in activists’ struggles?