Care-tizenship

Precarity, Social Movements, and the Deleting/Re-Writing of Citizenship

Bibliographic Data

ID4524896
AuthorsM Casas-Cortes (0000-0001-9390-4022, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, corresponding author)
Year2019
Volume23
Issue1
Pages19-42
Publication date2019-01-02
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueCitizenship Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1362-1025 • E-ISSN: 1469-3593
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/13621025.2018.1556248
OpenAlexW2909866012
LanguageEN
Citations received23
References cited22

A series of activist efforts across Europe have been organizing under the umbrella concept of precarity, with a long trajectory of movements facing flexibilization policies, austerity programs and migratory restrictions. The rise of precarity activism in Spain has worked at the intersections of increasing vulnerability and mobility producing a prolific body of activist literature and rich repertoire of strategies. This paper explores how alternative concepts of citizenship have developed within debates among precarity organizing prior to and after the financial crisis in Europe. Concretely, feminist precarity collectives in Spain came up with the play-on-words of ‘Care-tizenship’ to evoke a different notion of political belonging with updated collective rights. The original Spanish term is arguably the result of a typo: an accidental switching of the order of vowels in the word ciudadanía resulted in cuidadanía, which totally changed the root word: from city to care. Caretizenship suggests a community of practice forged by ties of caring relationships, mutually attending to basic needs in a context of increasing vulnerability among local, migrant and emigrant populations. While far from a working institution, this activist theorization provides a ‘horizon’ to work toward constituting an opening of political imagination

Austerity · Citizenship · Institution · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Precarity · Social movement · Social science · Sociology · Employment and Welfare Studies · Gender Studies · History · Law · Social Policy and Reform Studies