Genealogies of Citizenship

Margaret R. Somers is Professor of Sociology and History at the University of Michigan. A leading figure in historical, political, economic, and cultural sociology and social theory, she recently received the Inaugural Lewis A. Coser Award for Innovation and Theoretical Agenda-Setting in Sociology.

• 1. Theorizing citizenship rights and statelessness; Part I. Citizenship Imperilled: How Marketization Creates Social Exclusion, Statelessness, and Rightlessness: 2. Genealogies of Katrina: the unnatural disasters of market fundamentalism, racial exclusion, and statelessness; 3. Citizenship, statelessness, nation, nature, and social exclusion: Arendtian lessons in losing the right to have rights; Part II. Historical Epistemologies of Citizenship: Rights, Civil Society, and the Public Sphere: 4. Citizenship troubles: genealogies of struggle for the soul of the social; 5. What's political or cultural about political culture and the public sphere? Toward a historical epistemology of concept formation; Part III. In Search of Civil Society and Democratic Citizenship: Romancing the Market, Reviling the State: 6. Let them eat social capital: how marketizing the social turned Solidarity into a bowling team; 7. Fear and loathing of the public sphere: how to unthink a knowledge culture by narrating and denaturalizing Anglo-American citizenship theory.

'Margaret Somers has an astonishing variety of disciplinary competences and constantly poses new questions and working on parallel fields in order to build a network of concepts and arguments. The strong connection that she establishes between conceptual analysis and a practical commitment to the emergence of new democratic forms and republican citizenship is an essential aspect of the creative character of her work.' Etienne Balibar, Université de Paris X Nanterre, and University of California, Irvine