Engin Isin
Biographic Data
| ID | 277332 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Engin Isin |
| GIVEN NAMES | Engin |
| FAMILY NAME | Isin |
| SIGNATURE | ISIN E |
| AFFILIATIONS | The Open University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7366-0224 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 41 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 591 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 39 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1987 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
A labour of love (the right to philosophy)
How can one respond except with gratitude to those who have laboured to think through Being Political published twenty years ago? I call this labour of love performing a/the right to philosophy (understood as a style of thought and a critical activity). Recognising the impossibility of discussing in detail the questions raised about Being Political by seven articles and nine authors, I discuss a few for further reflection. The questions raised ar…
How the Pandemic Made Sensory Power Visible
During the COVID-19 pandemic, three long-established forms of power—sovereign, disciplinary, and regulatory—have been conspicuously deployed around the world, as seen in lockdowns, quarantines, and behavioral rules. The pandemic has also revealed a fourth form of power: sensory power, which emerged with the rapid evolution of sensing and surveillance technologies. The data collected by tracking and tracing constitutes a planetary ecosystem for go…
Vibrant Death: A Posthuman Phenomenology of Mourning
Vibrant Death links philosophy and poetry-based, corpo-affectively grounded knowledge seeking. It offers a radically new materialist theory of death, critically moving the philosophical argument beyond Christian and secular-mechanistic understandings. The book’s ethico-political figuration of vibrant death is shaped through a pluriversal conversation between Deleuzean philosophy, neo-vitalist materialism and the spiritual materialism of decolonia…
Citizenship struggles: 25Th Anniversary Special Issue
The 25th Anniversary Special Issue features forty articles that reflect on the study of citizenship in the last 25 years and highlight some cultural, economic, political, and social struggles over various forms and effects of citizenship. The authors include diverse disciplines, perspectives, and trajectories and address various struggles that shape citizenship as a concept and practice in the 21st century. This introduction provides an account o…
Bedeutungen von Citizenship
The birth of sensory power: How a pandemic made it visible
Much has been written about data politics in the last decade, which has generated myriad concepts such as 'surveillance capitalism', 'gig economy', 'quantified self', 'algorithmic governmentality', 'data colonialism', 'data subjects' and 'digital citizens'. Yet, it has been difficult to plot these concepts into an historical series to discern specific continuities and discontinuities since the origins of modern power in its three major forms: sov…
Data Politics: Worlds, Subjects, Rights
Data has become a social and political issue because of its capacity to reconfigure relationships between states, subjects, and citizens. This book explores how data has acquired such an important capacity and examines how critical interventions in its uses in both theory and practice are possible. Data and politics are now inseparable: data is not only shaping our social relations, preferences and life chances but our very democracies. Expert in…
Doing Rights with Things: The Art of Becoming Citizens
The languages of ‘performance’ and ‘performativity’ have become prominent within the disciplines of social sciences and humanities and their interdisciplinary fields, enabling researchers to bridge between arts and sciences as well as sciences and politics. The reasons for this prominence are quite complex and derive from various sources involving a variety of uses, so that it is best to avoid imposing a singular meaning to this development. It i…
Data’s empire
The chapter examines the various ways that data captures and colonises minds, souls, bodies and spaces and makes data subjects through practices of production, accumulation, aggregation, circulation, valuation, and interpretation. We draw attention to how these practices operate together yet differently in the metropole and postcolony and produce different data subjects. By first describing how European empires in the nineteenth century invented …
Peuples mobiles: Configurations transversales
Cet essai tente de penser les « peuples mobiles » comme concept politique. Je considère les peuples mobiles comme norme et non exception, davantage comme des sujets politiques que des peuples sujets. Après avoir discuté la tension entre « peuples » et « mobiles », je m’appuierai sur l’ontologie historique de Ian Hacking pour comprendre comment un peuple advient. Et pour comprendre l’advenir du peuple, ou plutôt la tension entre un peuple qui se c…
Jak se stát politickým subjektem
Th is text looks at the early Communist intellectual movement in Slovakia (in an area that, for part of the time under discussion, was affi liated with the the Hungarian Soviet Republic) organized around the journal Kassai Munkás (Th e Košice Worker).By placing this movement in the context of the development of Western Marxism and the incipient Marxist aesthetics of György Lukács, who was among those who published in the journal, the paper charac…
Mobile Peoples: Transversal Configurations
This essay is an attempt to think ‘mobile peoples’ as a political concept. I consider mobile peoples as a norm rather than an exception and as political subjects rather than subject peoples. After discussing the tension between ‘mobile’ and ‘peoples’, I draw on Ian Hacking’s historical ontology for understanding how a people comes to be. For understanding how the people comes to be, or rather, how the tension between a people that constitutes its…
Data politics
The commentary raises political questions about the ways in which data has been constituted as an object vested with certain powers, influence, and rationalities. We place the emergence and transformation of professional practices such as ‘data science’, ‘data journalism’, ‘data brokerage’, ‘data mining’, ‘data storage’, and ‘data analysis’ as part of the reconfiguration of a series of fields of power and knowledge in the public and private accum…
Theorizing Acts of Citizenship
About the book: This book examines theories of how citizenship is mediated between lived experiences and formal entitlements in order to map out, confine, extend, name, and enact the boundaries of belonging to a polity. The authors introduce the concept "acts of citizenship" as an alternative way to investigate citizenship. This concept constitutes a significant departure from the way in which citizenship studies has been orientated over the last…
Acts of Citizenship
This book introduces the concept of ‘act of citizenship’ and in doing so, re-orients the study of what it means to be a citizen. Isin and Nielsen show that an ‘act of citizenship’ is the event through which subjects constitute themselves as citizens. They claim that such an act involves both responsibility and answerability, but is ultimately irreducible to either. This study of citizenship is truly interdisciplinary, drawing not only on new deve…
Citizenship after Orientalism: Transforming Political Theory
This edited volume presents a critique of citizenship as exclusively and even originally a European or 'Western' institution. It explores the ways in which we may begin to think differently about citi
Routledge Handbook of Global Citizenship Studies
Citizenship after orientalism: An Unfinished Project
This collection offers a postcolonial critique of the ostensible superiority or originality of 'Western' political theory and one of its fundamental concepts, 'citizenship'. The chapters analyse the undoing, uncovering, and reinventing of citizenship as a way of investigating citizenship as political subjectivity. If it has now become very difficult to imagine citizenship merely as nationality or membership in the nation-state, this is at least i…
Citizens without Nations
To broach the question of whether citizenship could exist without (or beyond) community, this paper discusses genealogies of citizenship as membership that binds an individual to the community of birth (of the self or a parent). It is birthright as fraternity that blurs the boundary between citizenship and nationality. After briefly discussing recent critical studies on birthright citizenship (whether it is civic or ethnic or blood or soil) by Ay…
Citizenship in flux: The figure of the activist citizen
La ville comme lieu du social
TheThinking Citizenship Series
10.1080/13621020802586552
Recasting the Social in Citizenship
Previous notions of what constitutes 'citizenship' within a country have been steadily challenged by the movement towards a globalized world. Examining the everyday habits of citizens and non-citizens, the contributors to Recasting the Social in Citizenship show how citizenship has increasingly been determined by social behaviours rather than by civil or political affiliations. Broadening the debate by interpreting the social not only as rights a…
Wills, deeds, acts: Women's civic gift-giving in Ottoman Istanbul
The waqf (plural awqaf) is the Islamic pious endowment founded for charitable purposes. The Ottoman waqf, especially between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, became a gift-giving practice of solidarity in which women played an active role in founding and maintaining endowments as benefactors. These endowments served almost exclusively civic public services. While there has been considerable research on women and waqf, by moving beyond inte…
Abject Spaces: Frontiers, Zones, Camps
Abject spaces are those in and through which increasingly distressed, displaced, and dispossessed peoples are condemned to the status of strangers, outsiders, and aliens (e.g., refugees, unlawful combatants, insurgents, and the conquered) and stripped of their (existent and potential) citizenship (rights of becoming political) in various emerging frontiers, zones, and camps around the world. There has been a veritable outcry against the fact that…
The neurotic citizen
Over the last three decades we have witnessed the birth of a subject that has constituted the foundations of a regime change in state societies: the neoliberal subject. As much as neoliberalism came to mean the withdrawal of the state from certain arenas, the decline of social citizenship, privatization, downloading, and so forth, it also meant, if not predicated upon, the production of an image of the subject as sufficient, calculating, responsi…
Investigating Citizenship: An Agenda for Citizenship Studies
This essay takes stock of our editorial collaboration in the past decade and outlines those ideas that we find most promising and approaches that are most fruitful in investigating citizenship. We offer it as an agenda; not so much a dogmatic sequence of principles as an ethos toward conceiving democratic citizenship as a cosmopolitan virtue. We propose a cosmopolitan mobility tax and a cosmopolitan goods and services tax to illustrate how that c…
City.State: Critique of Scalar Thought
The scalar thought that undergirds our understanding of modern bodies politic (cities, regions, nations, states, leagues, federations) assumes exclusive, hierarchical and ahistorical relationships among and between these bodies and conceals their fluid, multiple and overlapping forms of existence. This essay offers some critical reflections on the historical origins of scalar thought and suggests that thinking about bodies politic and belonging i…
Data politics
The commentary raises political questions about the ways in which data has been constituted as an object vested with certain powers, influence, and rationalities. We place the emergence and transformation of professional practices such as ‘data science’, ‘data journalism’, ‘data brokerage’, ‘data mining’, ‘data storage’, and ‘data analysis’ as part of the reconfiguration of a series of fields of power and knowledge in the public and private accum…
Engaging, being, political
Citizens without Nations
To broach the question of whether citizenship could exist without (or beyond) community, this paper discusses genealogies of citizenship as membership that binds an individual to the community of birth (of the self or a parent). It is birthright as fraternity that blurs the boundary between citizenship and nationality. After briefly discussing recent critical studies on birthright citizenship (whether it is civic or ethnic or blood or soil) by Ay…
The birth of sensory power: How a pandemic made it visible
Much has been written about data politics in the last decade, which has generated myriad concepts such as 'surveillance capitalism', 'gig economy', 'quantified self', 'algorithmic governmentality', 'data colonialism', 'data subjects' and 'digital citizens'. Yet, it has been difficult to plot these concepts into an historical series to discern specific continuities and discontinuities since the origins of modern power in its three major forms: sov…
Citizenship after orientalism: An Unfinished Project
This collection offers a postcolonial critique of the ostensible superiority or originality of 'Western' political theory and one of its fundamental concepts, 'citizenship'. The chapters analyse the undoing, uncovering, and reinventing of citizenship as a way of investigating citizenship as political subjectivity. If it has now become very difficult to imagine citizenship merely as nationality or membership in the nation-state, this is at least i…
Handbook of Historical Sociology
What is important in historical sociology? What are the main routes of development in the subject? This Handbook consists of 26 chapters on historical sociology. It is divided into three parts. Part One is devoted to Foundations and covers Marx, Weber, evolutionary and functionalist approaches, the Annales School, Elias, Nelson and Eisenstadt. Part Two moves on to consider major approaches, such as modernization approaches, late Marxist approache…
Who is the new citizen? Towards a genealogy
The essay establishes a theoretical framework and outlines an empirical research toward a genealogy of the citizen. It argues that a genealogy would focus on the conditions of citizenship rather than its content (rights and obligations) and extent (eligibility criteria). It describes class, territory and capital as such conditions and outlines significant episodes in which these conditions created different ideal types of citizen: warrior‐citizen…
TheThinking Citizenship Series
10.1080/13621020802586552
Ways of Being Political
What would creating a new image of the city entail? This essay argues for two moves: one ontological and one genealogical. First, we must recognize the difference between 'the political' and 'politics'. The essence of the political lies in the relations between beings that are established through their comportment toward each other and toward being. Thus, ontological investigations concern the political as the condition for the possibility of pol…
Introduction: Cities and citizenship in a global age
(1999). Introduction: Cities and citizenship in a global age. Citizenship Studies: Vol. 3, Cities and Citizenship in a Global Age, pp. 165-171
Citizenship struggles: 25Th Anniversary Special Issue
The 25th Anniversary Special Issue features forty articles that reflect on the study of citizenship in the last 25 years and highlight some cultural, economic, political, and social struggles over various forms and effects of citizenship. The authors include diverse disciplines, perspectives, and trajectories and address various struggles that shape citizenship as a concept and practice in the 21st century. This introduction provides an account o…
Mobile Peoples: Transversal Configurations
This essay is an attempt to think ‘mobile peoples’ as a political concept. I consider mobile peoples as a norm rather than an exception and as political subjects rather than subject peoples. After discussing the tension between ‘mobile’ and ‘peoples’, I draw on Ian Hacking’s historical ontology for understanding how a people comes to be. For understanding how the people comes to be, or rather, how the tension between a people that constitutes its…
Wills, deeds, acts: Women's civic gift-giving in Ottoman Istanbul
The waqf (plural awqaf) is the Islamic pious endowment founded for charitable purposes. The Ottoman waqf, especially between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, became a gift-giving practice of solidarity in which women played an active role in founding and maintaining endowments as benefactors. These endowments served almost exclusively civic public services. While there has been considerable research on women and waqf, by moving beyond inte…
The Gift of Law: Greek Euergetism and Ottoman Waqf
Modern social and political thought has approached the questions of politics, law, and citizenship from the vantage point of a fundamental divide between the occidental and oriental, or archaic and modern, institutions. This article creates a concept, the gift of law, by staging two gift-giving practices as two historical moments: Greek euergetism and Ottoman waqf. While it is indebted to Mauss, our articulation of the gift of law also owes to th…
Citizenship, class and the global city
(1999). Citizenship, class and the global city. Citizenship Studies: Vol. 3, Cities and Citizenship in a Global Age, pp. 267-283
The urban geography of underdevelopment: A case of petty commodity production
Who is the new citizen? Towards a genealogy
The essay establishes a theoretical framework and outlines an empirical research toward a genealogy of the citizen. It argues that a genealogy would focus on the conditions of citizenship rather than its content (rights and obligations) and extent (eligibility criteria). It describes class, territory and capital as such conditions and outlines significant episodes in which these conditions created different ideal types of citizen: warrior‐citizen…
Citizenship and Identity
Citizenship, class and the global city
(1999). Citizenship, class and the global city. Citizenship Studies: Vol. 3, Cities and Citizenship in a Global Age, pp. 267-283
Introduction: Cities and citizenship in a global age
(1999). Introduction: Cities and citizenship in a global age. Citizenship Studies: Vol. 3, Cities and Citizenship in a Global Age, pp. 165-171
Handbook of Citizenship Studies
Citizenship Studies: An Introduction
About the book: From women's rights, civil rights, and sexual rights for gays and lesbians to disability rights and language rights, we have experienced in the past few decades a major trend in Western nation-states towards new claims for inclusion. This trend has echoed around the world: from the Zapatistas to Chechen and Kurdish nationalists, social and political movements are framing their struggles in the languages of rights and recognition, …
Ways of Being Political
What would creating a new image of the city entail? This essay argues for two moves: one ontological and one genealogical. First, we must recognize the difference between 'the political' and 'politics'. The essence of the political lies in the relations between beings that are established through their comportment toward each other and toward being. Thus, ontological investigations concern the political as the condition for the possibility of pol…
Introduction: Reorienting Historical Sociology
The title of this volume is an aporia. 'Handbook' implies that the volume guides the reader toward the established and the known. Yet the volume is not a panoramic view of the contemporary practice of historical sociology, nor does it offer a comprehensive view of the field. Moreover, historical sociology occupies an ambiguous space between history and sociology. While it would be impossible to sum it up in a few sentences, one of its defining ch…
Handbook of Historical Sociology
What is important in historical sociology? What are the main routes of development in the subject? This Handbook consists of 26 chapters on historical sociology. It is divided into three parts. Part One is devoted to Foundations and covers Marx, Weber, evolutionary and functionalist approaches, the Annales School, Elias, Nelson and Eisenstadt. Part Two moves on to consider major approaches, such as modernization approaches, late Marxist approache…
The neurotic citizen
Over the last three decades we have witnessed the birth of a subject that has constituted the foundations of a regime change in state societies: the neoliberal subject. As much as neoliberalism came to mean the withdrawal of the state from certain arenas, the decline of social citizenship, privatization, downloading, and so forth, it also meant, if not predicated upon, the production of an image of the subject as sufficient, calculating, responsi…
Engaging, being, political
The Gift of Law: Greek Euergetism and Ottoman Waqf
Modern social and political thought has approached the questions of politics, law, and citizenship from the vantage point of a fundamental divide between the occidental and oriental, or archaic and modern, institutions. This article creates a concept, the gift of law, by staging two gift-giving practices as two historical moments: Greek euergetism and Ottoman waqf. While it is indebted to Mauss, our articulation of the gift of law also owes to th…
Theorizing the European city
Theorizing the European city - 1
Abject Spaces: Frontiers, Zones, Camps
Abject spaces are those in and through which increasingly distressed, displaced, and dispossessed peoples are condemned to the status of strangers, outsiders, and aliens (e.g., refugees, unlawful combatants, insurgents, and the conquered) and stripped of their (existent and potential) citizenship (rights of becoming political) in various emerging frontiers, zones, and camps around the world. There has been a veritable outcry against the fact that…
City.State: Critique of Scalar Thought
The scalar thought that undergirds our understanding of modern bodies politic (cities, regions, nations, states, leagues, federations) assumes exclusive, hierarchical and ahistorical relationships among and between these bodies and conceals their fluid, multiple and overlapping forms of existence. This essay offers some critical reflections on the historical origins of scalar thought and suggests that thinking about bodies politic and belonging i…
Investigating Citizenship: An Agenda for Citizenship Studies
This essay takes stock of our editorial collaboration in the past decade and outlines those ideas that we find most promising and approaches that are most fruitful in investigating citizenship. We offer it as an agenda; not so much a dogmatic sequence of principles as an ethos toward conceiving democratic citizenship as a cosmopolitan virtue. We propose a cosmopolitan mobility tax and a cosmopolitan goods and services tax to illustrate how that c…
Recasting the Social in Citizenship
Previous notions of what constitutes 'citizenship' within a country have been steadily challenged by the movement towards a globalized world. Examining the everyday habits of citizens and non-citizens, the contributors to Recasting the Social in Citizenship show how citizenship has increasingly been determined by social behaviours rather than by civil or political affiliations. Broadening the debate by interpreting the social not only as rights a…
Wills, deeds, acts: Women's civic gift-giving in Ottoman Istanbul
The waqf (plural awqaf) is the Islamic pious endowment founded for charitable purposes. The Ottoman waqf, especially between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, became a gift-giving practice of solidarity in which women played an active role in founding and maintaining endowments as benefactors. These endowments served almost exclusively civic public services. While there has been considerable research on women and waqf, by moving beyond inte…
Citizenship in flux: The figure of the activist citizen
La ville comme lieu du social
TheThinking Citizenship Series
10.1080/13621020802586552
Citizenship after orientalism: An Unfinished Project
This collection offers a postcolonial critique of the ostensible superiority or originality of 'Western' political theory and one of its fundamental concepts, 'citizenship'. The chapters analyse the undoing, uncovering, and reinventing of citizenship as a way of investigating citizenship as political subjectivity. If it has now become very difficult to imagine citizenship merely as nationality or membership in the nation-state, this is at least i…
Citizens without Nations
To broach the question of whether citizenship could exist without (or beyond) community, this paper discusses genealogies of citizenship as membership that binds an individual to the community of birth (of the self or a parent). It is birthright as fraternity that blurs the boundary between citizenship and nationality. After briefly discussing recent critical studies on birthright citizenship (whether it is civic or ethnic or blood or soil) by Ay…
Routledge Handbook of Global Citizenship Studies
Political science (33 works) · Sociology (32 works) · Law (31 works) · Politics (28 works) · Citizenship (24 works) · Epistemology (16 works) · Philosophy (16 works) · Gender Studies (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Art (6 works)