This book introduces the concept of 'act of citizenship' and in doing so, re-orients the study of what it means to be a citizen. Isin and Nielsen show that an 'act of citizenship' is the event through which subjects constitute themselves as citizens. They claim that such an act involves both responsibility and answerability, but is ultimately irreducible to either.
This study of citizenship is truly interdisciplinary, drawing not only on new developments in politics, sociology, geography and anthropology, but also on psychoanalysis, philosophy and history. Ranging from Antigone and...

Anxieties over the Islamic face covering and over the proper management of otherness in liberal democracies seem to have reached a new peak with the introduction of legislation banning the burka in France and Belgium, and recent proposals for similar statutes in Quebec. What assumptions are contained within Western secularism and revealed in these attempts at legislating women s religious clothing?
This book presents a collection of essays which take secularism/laicite and the regulation of public expressions of religious commitment as their points of departure, exploring the...