Passport power: the value and semiotics of citizenship in a post-pandemic world

Citizenship is a status granted to almost all human beings at birth. It is a fixture of contemporary international order, central to global governance, trade, diplomacy, and Western ideals of liberal democracy. However, citizenship is not a natural status with inherent, everlasting value. Rather, it is an extremely dynamic social institution that incorporates notions of inclusion/exclusion, rights, everyday conduct, acts of deliberation and debate, policy and political participation, and global mobility, all at once. Critical scholars argue that citizenship works much like the air we breathe: all around us, but largely unnoticed (Spiro 2020). In this respect, it operates much like discourse - language and other semiotic resources in use - in that its nature is broadly unquestioned in citizens' everyday lives. In very basic terms, most citizens of Western countries take their citizenship for granted. However, citizenship is also highly valuable. It means a lot and is worth a great deal to both the states which grant it, and the individuals who have it granted on them (or 'earn' it, often through great sacrifice). Given this value, how is citizenship sold, marketed, branded and appreciated in modern everyday life? How do these discursive, evaluative, and economic processes intersect with globalised forms of social inequality and immobility? This project's core aim is to complicate common understandings of the meaning and purpose of citizenship, and to explore (and expose) citizenship for what it is: ultimately, a resource for regulating and exploiting modern-day privileges of global mobility.The proposed project employs sociolinguistic (critical discourse analysis, narrative analysis) and visual/social-semiotic methods to examine dominant representations and ideologies circulating around this oft-cited yet often taken-for-granted concept. It will enrich understanding of the discursive foundations of citizenship against backdrops of late capitalism, unequal global mobility, consumer culture, and neoliberalism. In sum, I will analyse citizenship from a broad-based, global perspective, recognising that the social, political, and economic value of citizenship (the concept) and particular citizenships (e.g. Australian, Swiss, Irish) is effectively a rhetorical construct. It is a product sustained through interpersonal conversation, material, performative texts (e.g. passports), ceremonial practices, branding, institutional media and marketing, digital discourse, and banal, everyday communication. Until now, these textual and discursive underpinnings for citizenship - the mediation of this institution through language and other forms of meaning-making - has gone somewhat overlooked.Overall, the proposed project will bridge the gap between scholarship describing transformations of citizenship in the current day, and scholarship investigating the sociolinguistics of global mobility and the political economy of language. To do so, I examine 4 'articulations' of the value of citizenship (i.e. 'sites' of citizenship discourse, where citizenship is marketed, appraised, and evaluated): citizenship-by-investment (CBI), passport design, citizenship ceremonies, and social media support groups during COVID-19. Studying these articulations allow me to explore 3 theoretical, critical, and applied objectives:-to describe how citizenship is established in discursive and semiotic practices as a valued/valuable commodity;-to link dominant discourses of citizenship in the current day to historical relations of power, the market, migration, colonial exploitation, and prejudice; and-to raise awareness about the (discursively-enacted) commodification of citizenship, in order to redress the inequalities and injustices implicated in this process.Informed by critical studies of the sociolinguistics of global mobility, forms of linguistic commodification (Heller 2010) and the centrality of language to marketing practices (Kelly-Holmes 2019), the proposed project thus contributes analysis of the commodification and marketisation of citizenship to scholarship investigating the contemporary political economy of language (e.g. Martín-Rojo and Del Percio 2019). The productive framework I will develop for understanding the semiotics of citizenship is a vital undertaking in an era of uneven mobility, climate emergency, and stark social inequality, with institutions strained by the pandemic and refugee flows. The project's scholarly outputs include a submitted book proposal (monograph), and progressive findings will be disseminated through four publications (D1-D4 in the included schedule) and four oral presentations at high-level conferences in the fields of sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and discourse studies.