CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2012
| Author | Deneva, Neda Panayotova |
|---|---|
| Title | Assembling Fragmented Citizenship. Bulgarian Muslim Migrants at the Margins of Two States |
| Summary | This dissertation addresses everyday relations and imaginings of the state/s of Bulgarian Muslim migrants in Spain. More specifically, I look at the simultaneous normative and institutional incorporation in two polities and how this affects their enactment and re-configuration of citizenship. Living transnational lives, migrants have to deal on a daily basis on one hand with various state created and imposed categories (member of a cultural minority, citizen, migrant, regular/irregular worker, unemployed etc). On the other hand, they also stumble upon different institutions, norms, and have to handle numerous crisis situations. Drawing on extended ethnographic fieldwork in a Bulgarian Muslim migrants’ community both in Bulgaria and in Spain, I look at the ways migrants experience and negotiate this embeddedness on the margins of two states through their everyday practices and interactions with the state. As a culturally and economically marginalized minority population Bulgarian Muslims have developed a specific relationship with the Bulgarian state, which was translated and complemented through yet another ambiguous (semi-marginal) position they have taken up in Spain as migrant, EU-citizens and Muslims at the same time. Taking this as a starting point I embark on a more specific discussion of three fields where migrants interact with one or more states and supra state institutions. In the first part I look at the interplay between state imposed categories and self-identification on individual and group level. The second part is devoted to the idea of the worker-citizen and explores the idea of the deserving state. Here I explore the working practices and regulations on one hand, and the way people interpret and use unemployment as a security strategy or as a critique towards the state. In the third part, I look at the private sphere of kin relations and ritual which sustain and are transformed by the felixibilized migrants’ lives. I suggest that migrants assemble the different parts of their lives and the various levels of reference, institutional or personal, by relying on the trope that “live is always elsewhere”. I use the idea of assembling fragmented citizenship to describe the way people make sense of their lives and the way they improvise and negotiate their actions within manifold normative and institutional frameworks. |
| Supervisor | Caglar, Ayse; Monterescu, Daniel |
| Department | Sociology PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2012/deneva_neda.pdf |
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