| dc.description.abstract | This thesis concerns how citizens and noncitizens act together in solidarity and how the state criminalises such actions, focusing on a case study of the Franco-Italian borderzone. Taking a performative approach to understanding the rights claims made by citizens and noncitizens, I propose understanding these actions as “acts of passage”, which participate in the contestation over who can act as a subject of rights. The different actions taken by citizens and noncitizens highlight the tensions between citizenship in law and citizenship in practice, and therefore I argue that practices of solidarity between citizens and migrants can be theorised as acts of citizenship because they make claims for rights and inclusion in a way that challenges exclusionary bordering practices. When citizens and migrants enact citizenship in solidarity, the boundary between citizen and noncitizen becomes blurred. In this context, people are challenging citizenship as a bounded legal category based on national identity in favour of an active form of citizenship as a practice of inclusion. The thesis studies two sites on Franco-Italian border: the Roya Valley, where an independent collective began welcoming migrants in 2016, and Briançon, where people have mobilised to help approximately 16,000 migrants who have crossed from 2017-2022. A year of ethnographic fieldwork carried out in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic revealed how actions ranging from assisting people in danger in the mountains to mundane tasks, like doing laundry and buying train tickets, take on political meanings. Such activities, when done for and with people without legal status, may be relegated to the margins of legality, but become political. The thesis draws on this political ethnography to demonstrate how citizens and noncitizens together challenge the state’s practices of migrant exclusion to enact an expansive citizenship yet to come. | en_US |
