At this event, Dr Jean Beaman will introduce a framework of "suspect citizenship" to demostrate how ethnoracial minorities are consistently excluded from the boundaries of full societal inclusion. Her framework is based on years of ethnographic research on France’s current antiracist movement and mobilisation against state violence.

The concept of suspect citizenship is examined at the nexus between active citizenship, belonging/non-belonging, antiracism at a macro level, and activism against state violence. It is argued that postcolonial plural societies like France position certain populations as suspect or suspicious due to their ethnoracial assignment. Dr Beaman considers how certain populations are automatically rendered suspicious or suspect by virtue of their ethnoracial assignment on both micro and macro levels, and how this construction of citizenship is not merely a postcolonial formation. The discussion extends to how individuals resist being categorised as suspect through mobilisation against state violence, as well as how suspect citizenship exists without state recognition of ethnoracial difference. Suspect citizenship, therefore, serves as a framework and mode for understanding and interpreting how colonial hierarchies are maintained in postcolonial or neocolonial societies.

Meet our speakers and chair

Jean Beaman (she/her) is Associate Professor of Sociology in the PhD Programme 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. She is author of Citizen Outsider: Children of North African Immigrants in France (University of California Press, 2017), as well as numerous articles and book chapters. She is also an Associate Editor of the journal, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power and a Corresponding Editor for the journal Metropolitics/Metropolitiques.  She was a 2022-2023 fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, and a Co-PI for the Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar grant, “Race, Precarity, and Privilege: Migration in a Global Context” for 2020-2022.

Kristin Surak is Associate Professor of Political Sociology at LSE. Her research on global mobility, nationalism, and Japanese politics has been translated into over a dozen languages. Her most recent book, The Golden Passport: Global Mobility for Millionaires (Harvard University Press 2023), provides the first ethnographic analysis of the global market in the sale of citizenship to the wealthy and has been covered by the BBC, NPR, Foreign Affairs, The Economist, and other news outlets around the world.