Presented in person and online. Zoom details provided below.

By Birth or by Trump: Citizenship and New Right Populism
During his three presidential campaigns, first term in office, with a second underway, Donald Trump has sought to delegitimise and undermine birthright citizenship in the United States, despite constitutional protections under the 14th amendment. On numerous occasions Trump has pledged to abolish birthright citizenship altogether, irrespective of the US Constitution. Trump’s opposition to the 14th amendment, mirrors broader prejudiced, new right, populist, scepticism of universal claims to rights, and instead distinguishes between ‘legitimate’ citizens and othered gradations of citizenship awarded to immigrants and their descendants. Since 1980, other countries have, somewhat quietly and discretely, ended automatic birthright citizenship, including Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. Trump’s rhetoric and hostility to the 14th amendment, accompanied by anti-immigrant hysteria, has brought the relationship between citizenship and birthplace onto open platforms (primarily social media) where new right populist ideologies are invoked to delegitimise people’s attachments to places, destabilising connections to communities and belonging to countries. This seminar explores the relationship between citizenship and new right politics, whose adherents seek to demarcate people based on birth, descent and mobility. These demarcated gradations of citizenship have important implications for rapidly changing anthropological understandings of identity, rights and belonging, further problematising assumptions about culture and place.

Speaker: 
Greg Rawlings is an Associate Professor in Social Anthropology at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. From 2019–2023 he was the Head of the Social Anthropology Programme. His main areas of research and teaching cover globalisation, transnationalism and citizenship, informed by the relationship between anthropology and history. He has two specialist areas of research. The first includes coverage of tax havens, taxation and offshore finance, focusing on both historical and contemporary periods. The second aspect of Greg’s research concerns the ethnohistory of citizenship, nationality and statelessness in the decolonisation of empire, focusing on Vanuatu where he has conducted ethnographic fieldwork. He has broadened these interests to consider citizenship more generally.

Zoom: 
https://anu.zoom.us/j/87802807372?pwd=fbu3BD3PcmaIXpt3VU4srkznBENqkG.1
Meeting ID: 878 0280 7372
Password: 277792