Questioning the Neoliberal Subject: Migrants’ Narratives of the UK Citizenship Test Process

Citizenship tests are fascinating vantage points from which to observe the experience of state power, specifically the type of citizens they aim to ‘produce’ through their technical requirements and the political discourses that surround them. Arguably these tests are intended as moment of hailing, or interpellation (Althusser 1977), through which norms are internalized.

Instead, drawing on 157 interviews with migrants in Leicester and London who are at different stages in the UK citizenship test process, we consider whether and how these attempts are internalized, resisted and the space that lies in between. We analyse the connections participants make between the requirements of the test, on the one hand, and their understandings of themselves as political agents, on the other. Through these accounts we consider the analytical purchase of the figure of the ‘neoliberal subject’ (Suvarierol and Kirk 2015; Turner 2014) and explore her contradictions. Some participants draw on neoliberal repertoires of active (knowledgeable) citizenship whereby they have to prove they are agents of ‘social cohesion’ yet also simultaneously present themselves as politically passive, strategizing for individual rather than collective ends. Others engage actively in formal and informal political processes for collective ends and even use the resources of the citizenship test to this end, while formally distancing themselves from it. The test itself is experienced as both enabling political agency and constraining it.  We suggest the figure of the  ‘citizen-negotiator’ to capture the spectrum of political selves that is revealed through these experiences.