Young people talking about citizenship in Britain.

Abstract

‘Vocabularies of citizenship’ and their meanings vary according to social, political and cultural context, and reflect different historical legacies (Bussemaker and Voet 1998; Carens 2000; Saraceno 1997; Siim 2000). They are translated into ‘lived citizenship’: ‘the meaning that citizenship actually has in people’s lives and the ways in which people’s social and cultural backgrounds and material circumstances affect their lives as citizens’ (Hall and Williamson 1999, p. 2). Yet, ‘very little is known about the realities of how different people understand themselves as citizens’ (Jones and Gaventa 2002, p. 28). This conclusion, reached in a recent review of the citizenship literature, echoes the earlier observation in an empirical study by Conover et al. that much theoretical debate in the North about the meaning of citizenship is ‘conducted in what is virtually an empirical void’ (1991, p. 801). Although there have since been a few studies of how citizens themselves understand citizenship, compared with recent theoretical outpourings the empirical void is far from being filled. This chapter reports findings from a three-year qualitative, longitudinal study of how young people in Britain negotiate the transitions to citizenship. One hundred and ten young people in the East Midlands town of Leicester, aged 16 to 17, 18 to 19 and 22 to 23 in 1999, were interviewed.1 There was a gender balance and about one in eight was Asian, predominately of Indian-Hindu background (to reflect Leicester’s main minority ethnic community). Given the salience of paid work to contemporary characterizations of citizenship, the group was stratified according to ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ status as a proxy for Seven