Suspect Citizenship: Rethinking Belonging and Non-Belonging in Plural Societies

The Sociology Department’s Symposium Series welcomes Jean Beaman, associate professor of sociology at the City University of New York.

Abstract: Based on years of ethnographic research on France’s present antiracist movement and mobilization against state violence, Professor Beaman introduces a framework of “suspect citizenship” which demonstrates how ethnoracial minorities are constantly outside of the boundaries of full societal inclusion.

She argues that postcolonial plural societies like France position a certain populations as suspect or suspicious, due to their ethnoracial assignment. Professor Beaman examines suspect citizenship at the nexus between active citizenship, belonging/non-belonging, antiracism at a macro level, and activism against state violence.

She considers how certain populations are automatically rendered suspicious or suspect by virtue of their ethnoracial assignment on micro and macro levels, and how this construction of citizenship is not just a postcolonial formation. She discusses how we can understand how individuals resist their categorization as suspect through examining mobilization against state violence, as well as how suspect citizenship exists without state recognition of ethnoracial difference.

Suspect citizenship is therefore a framework and mode for understanding and making sense of how colonial hierarchies are maintained in postcolonial or neocolonial societies.

Jean Beaman (she/her) is associate professor of sociology in the Ph.D. program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY), and on leave from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research is ethnographic in nature and focuses on race/ethnicity, racism, international migration and state violence in both France and the United States.