Citizenship beyond Binaries: A Critical Dialectic/ Geographic Approach

This paper provides a synthesis among Bourdieu’s relationalism, Lefebvrian production of space and Isin’s genealogies of Citizenship to create a new avenue for the conceptualization of citizenship – “Critical Dialectic Geography’’. The paper overcomes the traditional binaries of ‘us/them’ in conceptualizing citizenship as enactment in particular spatialities (as well as in asymmetrical fields). This opens up the space in which ‘emergent subject positions’ in an asymmetrical field can be conceptualized and investigated -as citizens and manifold alterities in dialectical relations to material(s), structures and each other. The paper exemplifies these nuances by means of a case study of the Lasnamäe residential neighborhood in Estonia. A space largely populated by the Russian language minority where historical legacy, ethnic identity and representations of ethnicity shape different subject positions, orientations and strategies for being political. Further, the case study exemplifies how such an approach demands a critical orientation towards analytical selection of ‘social and academic’ fields in conceptualizing and representing forms of citizenship.