ABSTRACT
The processes that position people as citizens of nations and as members of larger, smaller, or dispersed units of agglomeration need to be conceptualized together. Citizenship ought to be theorized as one of the multiple subject positions occupied by people as members of diversely spatialized, partially overlapping or non-overlapping collectivities. The issue is the elusiveness of the sense of belonging, the persistent perception people have that people are inevitably tangled in the weeds of social membership, but that this shifting, rocking and unstable entanglement requires complicated and often awkward manoeuvres and sensibilities. Small, ‘informal’ economic enterprises with a complex network of outwork have been actively encouraged by a government facing the highest unemployment rate in the European Union. Effectively, this reconfigures the lines between the concern adults are expected to show towards family and neighbours and the state’s own claims to provide ‘welfare’.
