In Bridget Anderson’s and Vanessa Hughe’s edited volume titled Citizenship and its Others we get to investigate citizenship through attention to its Others. The volume reveals the partiality of citizenship’s inclusion and claims to equality by defining it as legal status, political belonging and membership rights. All of the volume’s chapters investigate the exclusion of migrants, welfare claimants, women, children and others.

Ben Rogaly’s chapter titled Class, Spatial Justice and the Production of Not-Quite Citizens (pp.157-176) looks into the archetypal good citizen is middle class. Ben suggests that it is important to explore what enables some people to fit the bill, while others are prevented from doing so, even if they wanted to. His chapter draws on individual life histories—narrated mainly, but not exclusively, by working-class people—to explore the structural process behind persistent class inequality and spatial injustice in the context of contemporary Britain, as it (apparently) emerges from the Great Recession. Ben uses the framework developed by US feminist philosopher Iris Marion Young, which she called the five faces of oppression (Young, 1990), together with insights from a later work that drew attention both to society’s responsibility for justice and to the possibilities for individual agency (Young, 2011). Ben connects these to calls for spatial justice emerging from the Right to the City movement.

Buy the book here.