Around the world, a new kind of diasporic citizenship is appearing, especially among diasporic people such as German-born Berliners of Turkish origin. Drawing on interviews conducted over a fifteen-year period, Forging Diasporic Citizenship explores the dynamics of everyday life for these Ausländer (or “outsiders”). These people are obliged to define themselves by their Otherness, but it is their relatedness to German society that transgresses traditional concepts of both German and Turkish identity. In this work of narrative research, Gül Çalışkan explores the tensions between the experience of displacement and the politics of accommodation as the Ausländer make claims to citizenship, articulate the ways they are rooted, and seek to achieve recognition. Through examining the social encounters, life events, and everyday practices of these German-born Ausländer, Forging Diasporic Citizenship constructs a theoretically sophisticated, transnationally applicable hypothesis regarding the nature of modern citizenship and multiculturalism.

Gül Çalışkan is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at St. Thomas University, Fredericton, located on the unceded and unconquered territory of the Wəlastəkewiyik. She is the editor of Gendering Globalization, Globalizing Gender: Postcolonial Perspectives. Çalışkan’s research and teaching focuses on the broad areas of citizenship (as a social practice) and global social justice within global and transnational sociology. Her research and teaching are informed by postcolonial studies. In her research projects, she engages in narrative inquiry to examine the complex relations between global processes and everyday realities.

This is an outstanding contribution to the current sociological literature on citizenship, with an in-depth analysis of how an increasingly diverse German society negotiates modes of belonging and social integration regarding German-born citizens of Turkish descent.

Ayhan Kaya, Department of International Relations, Istanbul Bilgi University:

In a period characterized by right-wing populism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, racism, nativism, and humiliation, Forging Diasporic Citizenship reminds readers of the forgotten importance of socio-economic and political realities of inequality, injustice, deindustrialization, poverty, unemployment, and exclusion.