Hello everyone!? Although I’ve been a member of this blog for quite sometime, I have yet to log on, introduce myself and get posting!? It is a real pleasure to read all of your posts, and I’m pleased to be a part of it.? And of course, many thanks to David for setting this blog up and quietly but persistently reminding us to use it.

Very very broadly, I’m working on the relationship between citizenship and new media, at least the ways in which new media discourses claim to extend, transform, reconstitute or even all out create new kinds (or dimensions) of citizenship.??Amidst all the claims that?new media is transforming the ways we think of belonging, geographies, nation-states and social, cultural and political? forms of membership, I found it difficult to differentiate between what citizenship?is, what it can be and particularly how it might be changing.? So despite the numerous criticisms?(i.e. glaring ethno and eurocentrism, a total lack of empirical support and what some might term ‘discrepancies’ between civic entitlements and human rights), I found T. H. Marshall’s civil, political and social dimensions - in addition to his critique of capitalism and committment to social equality - a critical starting point for thinking about citizenship.?

As you can imagine I was pleased to hear of a new T. H. Marshall fellowship and exchange program developed by LSE, the social science research?centre of Berlin (WZB) and the University of Bremen.? The new collaboration was launched on Jan.18th with a talk on ‘Citizenship and Social Policy in 21st Century Europe.’? Although the speakers were articulate, the themes have been well rehearsed in the literature and in my opinion there was too much talk about pensions.? Nonetheless, there were a few points I thought would be worthy of posting.

Jane Lewis (of LSE) spoke about gender and citizenship and focussed on the ‘profound shift’ in the relationship between gender and the state,?particularly regarding the kind of social expectations attached to gender.? Lewis was primarily referring to the shift in the ‘women-as-domestic-carers and men-as-breadwinners’ model.??The new model is that women are now as obligated to work as their male counterparts as ‘citizen workers’ rather than citizen-carers/mothers. However, Lewis makes clear that the discursive justification for these shifts do not speak of gender but are discussed in terms of market growth and potential contributions to the maintenance of nations. Lewis concluded by noting that althoug these changes have not been accompanied by gender equity, creating an alternative model of citizenship (in contrast to the citizen-worker) based on the citizen-worker-carer will lead to greater developments in gender equity.

I’m intrigued by the idea of ‘citizen-carer’ but am not convinced that such a model will address gender (or other) inequities.? When it comes down to it, ‘caring’?has long been part of women’s unrenumerated obligations to state and society and maybe I’m missing something, but?I don’t see how extending such citizen obligations to all genders will change the socio-economic inequities around the gendered division of labour.

Stephan Leibfried spoke on the tensions (or as Marshall claimed - the war) between capitalism and citizenship. Beginning with the 1997 Amsterdam Treaty, new politics of citizenship and equality have been emerging (nationality and gender). In the European constitution, there now 18 categories of equality. Some of these include colour, social origin, property, birth, disability and more… I find this interesting in terms of changing expectations/practices of and to citizen rights and obligations. However, I still need to some work around the differences between civil liberties, human rights and civic entitlements; I find it interesting to contextualize the many emerging communications rights within a much broader expansion of rights based frameworks.

Also, Liebfried spoke about the transformation of citizenship from ethnic nationalist notions of citizenship to member citizenship. Again, not new, but it has interesting implications as far as the relationship between media and citizenship?go.? Perhaps more interesting are the implications of an ever widening rights-based citizenship…

Media btw, was almost totally absent from this talk.

All for now, but hope y’all keep posting!

Zoe

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