Lecture | Research Seminar
Citizenship and the Unpredictable: Navigating Citizenship Acquisition Processes in Greece
- Date
- Monday 6 November 2023
- Time
- Location
- Pieter de la Court
- Room
- 1.A01
This work in progress paper explores the processes of legal citizenship acquisition in Greece. In the last years, the legal framework concerning citizenship has undergone significant changes enabling access to Greek citizenship both to so-called “second generation” migrants and other migrants under specific requirements.
In my talk I will illustrate some of the paths and ways in which noncitizens- citizenship applicants work within constant unpredictability, a shifting and fragmented legal framework, and long entrenched ideas of citizenship at a historical moment when the citizenship regime in Greece appears to become more including and open. I will engage with the issues of uncertainty and contingency and I will particularly discuss the ways in which citizenship applicants engage with this uncertainty. As I will show, the path to the “Identity Card” is not a linear process from illegality (or illegalization) to legality and (hopefully) to legal citizenship, but a route full of potholes, turns, setbacks, and unexpected side roads and deadends. Citizenship applicants do a lot of guesswork; a what-if work; a work within contingency with unpredictable outcomes.
Bio Katerina Rozakou
Katerina Rozakou (PhD University of the Aegean) is Assistant Professor of Social Anthropology at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences in Athens. Her research is at the intersection of political anthropology, solidarity, humanitarianism, migration, the state, and bureaucracy. She has held postdoctoral positions at Princeton University and the University of Amsterdam where she also taught. Her first research project was a study of solidarity, based on extensive research with volunteers assisting refugees (monograph "Out of love and solidarity", 2018 in Greek). She has conducted research on the ways in which the state "manages" and produces the illegality of migration in Greece and on the political mobilization of Afghan refugees. Her ongoing research project entitled Naturalization Bureaucracies examines the processes of citizenship acquisition in Greece.
Research program Social Citizenship and Migration
This lecture is co-organized and supported by the interdisciplinary research program Social Citizenship and Migration