Description
Situated at the intersection of sociology and politics, my PhD research brings a critical lens to the study of citizenship by investigating and analysing the lives of migrant women in the UK. Drawing on interviews and participant observation conducted over a year, it explores how these women engage in community work and activism amid shifting immigration policies.
This paper asks: what claims to “citizenship” are migrant women making through complaining? Ahmed (2022) defines ‘complaint activism’ as the persistent work of making noise and forcing institutions to expend their resources. My analysis shows how migrant women use complaint as a tool to make sense of their pain while gradually destabilising institutional power.
Building on Isin’s (2009) notion of ‘activist citizenship,’ I argue that by making complaints against state institutions (Ahmed, 2022), migrant women act as activist citizens who disrupt the given order. Through these acts, they blur state borders and demand accountability across scales of struggle, enacting transnational citizenship “from below” (Nyers and Rygiel, 2012).
Foregrounding migrant women as active agents rather than passive victims, this paper challenges dominant narratives that erase their political subjectivity. In a climate of intensifying anti-immigration discourse, this research highlights their agency and contributions to reimagining citizenship in the UK.
