Final Report Summary - PROFACITY (Profane citizenship in Europe - Testing democratic ownership in hybrid situations)
Executive summary:
By concentrating on hybrid social situations (not strictly within the norm), the research project PROFACITY experimented with novel forms of citizenship that modified the borders of legal citizenship. These forms of citizenship involved practical activities that coped with existing systems or milieus, whose challenge was the continuing invention of the democratic principle itself i.e. the 'right to have rights'. Such practices asserted and translated into reality the 'right to the city' (droit de cite) that was not recognized straightaway, which we called profane citizenship. Our intent was to use profane citizenship as an analyzer of democratic ownership.
The research project PROFACITY examined in what way practices of actors who were in situations in which they had to make do with their faults, handicaps, lack of resources, were taken (or not) into account as alternatives to legal citizenship. Qualitative surveys were conducted within the scope of three overlapping research domains (languages and codes; attestations of identity; and tests of urbanity). The results of these surveys were submitted to the professional and institutional representatives concerned (Sensing).
Project Context and Objectives:
Project context
Even though the Lisbon Strategy (2000) defined the zones to which European citizenship would apply in the years to come (work for all, social integration, participation in the society of knowledge), one cannot avoid noticing the difficulty in turning these powerful principles into facts. On the one hand, research into the detailed daily activities of the European Community's inhabitants (working, studying, going into entrepreneurship, living, speaking, communicating, attesting one's identity, discussing, taking sides ) shows that having access to spaces where action and recognition are possible depends on social, national and ethnic criteria quite restrictively. On the other hand, legal citizenship has not produced the effect democracies had counted on: participation in national and European consultations has been weak, and though the trend might be reversed, when people do participate, it is often to oppose what is being proposed or even to reject it outright. Finally, it is apparent that the formal framework of legal citizenship is being outflanked insofar as people take refuge in their communities, or take part in social rebellions, or escape by breaking down psychologically or falling into using emergency expedients (alcohol, drugs, antidepressants), or even explode through individual or collective actions that cast doubt on the very meaning of 'civic' and 'civil' (vandalism, hooliganism, the return of racist acts).
Project objectives
At the theoretical level, we enriched the concept of democratic ownership by referring it to a policy that included human rights and by associating it with practically invisible forms of civil initiatives in situations involving "have-not" people. From this point of view, the concept of translation milieus became the object of an original and productive theoretical construction. The concept of profane citizenship was usefully compared with other entries for citizenship (ordinary, social, participative...) that confronted present-day legal citizenship. This theoretical advance should enable contemporary thought to consider the changing and dynamic transformations of the content of citizenship in the European contemporary context.
Fieldwork
PROFACITY concluded with an inventory in each of its research domains (languages and codes; attestations of identity; and tests of urbanity), confirming the hypothesis that underlay the research project, namely: experiments with novel forms of citizenship, that we called profane citizenship, took place in very specific contexts as both historical backgrounds (covering different periods of history) and national particularities related to the domains played a significant role.
Consortium methodology
We proposed cross-investigations into three research domains (languages and codes; attestations of identity; tests of urbanity). We did not divide the consortium into as many groups of specialists as there were research domains, which would have meant juxtaposing competences and results without taking advantage of our combined analytical strength in the framework of PROFACITY. On the contrary, thanks to a research scheme that mixed specializations at the very outset, from survey design to result presentation in front of Sensing groups, we set up working groups (seminars, mixed research groups, symposia) to guarantee that references, problems and languages could circulate among all the people concerned.
Project Results:
A - PROFACITY scientific posture and main hypotheses
On the profane
If we mobilise the expression, 'profane citizenship', we shall have to explain this usage. The French word, 'profane' encompasses various meanings, covering two lexical fields: on the one hand, expertise, on the other hand, the sacred. And the conjunction between these two fields of reference is not coincidental.
In the first lexical field, profane (or lay) is seen against expertise. A person is called a layman (profane) if they have no knowledge of a science or an art, with the following synonyms: foreign to a discipline, ignorant (a word to be found in both French and English), incompetent, inexperienced, uninitiated, novice. Translating the French word 'profane' poses difficulties - profane may insist on the uninitiated, while lay-man emphasises the practical rooting of a man of the field. This dichotomy between two poles of knowledge - that of experts and that of laypersons - is eminently political and debatable. An author such as J. Rancière (2004), when referring to Jacotot, pleads for the 'equality of intelligences' precisely aiming at challenging the natural and obvious character and the hierarchy between those who know and those who do not know, which is itself indexed to a hierarchy of knowledge.
Anthropology of knowledge and sociology of sciences have also contributed to confusing matters, while calling for a new breakdown between expertise and lay knowledge. Anthropologists such as A. Strauss (1992) or U. Hannerz (1992), who have been interested in relationships between laypersons and professionals or laypersons and specialists, have long shown that there is not a layperson on the one hand and a specialist on the other, but depending on situations, the roles may change. They have also defended the idea that laypersons dispose of knowledge from experience which contribute to collective intelligence.
In the field of the sociology of sciences, for instance in conflicts on interpretation of environmental or medical risks, authors such as B. Wynne or M. Callon have taken on a lay-expert with expertise from the field to whom they attribute rationality (even if its of a different type) and for whom they plead for the right to participate in formulating the truth and policy. B. Wynne (1996) emphasises that knowledge that is turned towards experimenting is flexible, not dogmatic and open, and that this knowledge is complex, reflexive, dynamic and innovative, and that material, empirical and theoretical aspects flow into them Irrespective of qualities or flaws, they are epistemologically alive and substantial. M. Canne criticizes models which brutally or gently and pragmatically deny the layperson any competence for participating in the production of the only valid knowledge: that which may be described as scientific. To the contrary, he pleads for a model of coproduction of knowledge which tends to surmount limits by actively involving laypersons in elaborating knowledge that concerns them (1999).
The second lexical field of the concept of the French world 'profane' coincides with the English term, 'profane' and is related to the sacred. This is the opposition that E. Benveniste takes up etymologically in his son article, 'Profanus et profanare' (1960), insisting upon the proximity and the overlapping character of the sacred - which is withdrawn into the temple so as to participate in a sacred rite (sacere) - and the profane - which remains in front of the le temple (pro fanum), in the public sphere. Tradition, he writes, wanted the flesh of the consecrated animal to be returned to the public sphere after the ceremony, and a great banquet was organised in which everyone had the right to consume the flesh of the consecrated animal. 'The offering is consecrated, and then profaned through its consumption. ' Being profaned is not in opposition to the sacred, but to the contrary, it mean returning the sacred to a primal state, that of the community. 'The quality of profanum does not apply to everything that is not in fact sacred but what has ceased to be so. ' Profanation is the moment of returning to the public sphere from what had separated it, and there is a sort of re-appropriation or re-integration of the sacred within the profane. This form of 'reconciliation' is symbolically denoted by the banquet, the people's consuming of the consecrated meat, i.e. its profanation. Here, we take note that Benveniste specifies that the profane is not only designated by what is negative (what is not sacred) but also by what is positive (what is present in the public sphere - the polis). We also note that while he is committee etymological clarification of the meaning, he manages to establish a demarcation between such things and acts which are hidden from the public, who are deemed to be uninitiated, incapable of attending the ritual, and on the other hand the public sphere as a place which is open to all, rendered public.
From this etymological understanding of profanare as a return to the sacred in the common sphere, G. Agamben (2005) offers a more critical and political understanding of the idea. Profanation ( ) involves neutralising what is being profaned. Once it is profaned, what was unavailable and remained separated loses its aura so as to be returned to use. It is a political operation « which disactivates systems of power and returns those spaces which it had confiscated to common usage. For Agamben, the political, active and radical dimensions are designated by the term, profanare. For this author, to profane is to detach oneself from the control of power, which had confiscated the common use of places, and to return those places to precisely what they are: commonplaces.
If these models, focussed on expertise and the sacred equip us to approach the operability of the 'profane' in politics, a complementary dimension, which also plays a role in issues of citizenship, also seems to be added: the public dimension. With the reflections of the anthropologist, James Scott (2008) as a support, we are encouraged to introduce the distinction between public transcripts and hidden transcripts, as much on the side of those who hold dominant norms as on that who hold non-dominant norms. For crucial stakes (which the surveys in this book take account of in various ways) are to be found in the fact that knowledge, information and data are or are not put in the public domain, made accessible to the public, to the layperson, to the uninitiated or to those who are not in the innermost circle.
Profane citizenship
What openings does the use of the expression 'profane citizenship' make possible? To what extent does this formulation, given the variety of its potential meanings, make it possible to open up new approaches to issues of citizenship, and even answer the question 'what is citizenship? ' How can we imagine and how can we validate answers which are not aimed at reproducing a mechanical dualism, which on the one hand views the institutional and formal vision of law - people are deemed to be citizens if they fulfil the conditions for gaining access to the status of citizenship - and on the other who defend a more 'activist' version of citizenship - people are deemed to be citizens if they, through their own action, manage to open up access to citizenship.
We must immediately avoid a source of confusion: profane citizenship is not intended to designate the citizenship of the profane or of laypersons. If it is true that part of the surveys in this book look at individuals or groups who were not recognised for their competence as experts, our work specifically contributes to blurring this line. On the basis of a position which detaches itself from labelling positions that create a demarcation between experts on the one hand and laypersons on the other, we have emphasised dissymmetry and the reciprocity of perspectives which lead experts in a field to recognise that they are laypersons in another field, and on the other hand, persons who are deemed to be laypersons in one field to be recognised as expert in that field but with another vantage. On the other hand, the contribution of the layperson allows us to formalise and validate statements and practices differently, referring, from the lay point of view, to experiences of citizenship which also generate the effect of framing rendering objective. Thus, the notion of 'profane citizenship' announces a strong programme aiming at renewing the epistemological or even ontological foundations of citizenship. Allow us to explain.
The 'profane' or layperson, in the coordinated meaning of public and uninitiated (someone deemed to be ignorant who has no access to the hidden spaces of the powers over the polis), specifically designates a position which de-naturalises what is presented as obvious and beyond debate in the application of the law. Here, the profane consists of a point of resistance to the effect of authority of knowledge and the expert formatting of citizenship (including citizenship as underpinned by science) and particularly those of the law, political sciences and political philosophy. As researchers in the social sciences, we are authorised to take up and to document those decisive deviations between what is said to be citizenship and what is perpetrated in its name, between a citizenship based upon formal institutional principles and a citizenship which is implemented, politicized, rendered controversial in various fields of expertise and the experience of situations.
A pluralistic work of diverse surveys
The surveys that we are accounting for in this work looked at the issue of profane citizenship from contrasting vantages. For one of the specific stakes of this group work is to have recognised the semantic variety behind this common notion, a movement of positive diffraction which can be illustrated by the question: What does being a citizen and not being a citizen at the same time mean? The answer to this question is not and need not be unambiguous. It is the openness of this term to being used in diverse operative contexts for varying phenomena that proves its heuristic value.
The surveys were conducted from October 2009 to November 2010 in 5 countries: with young immigrants aged between 12 and 22 in the Netherlands (ethnographic survey and questionnaire submitted to 608 native youths and immigrant youths); with (10) deaf students and (16) isolated deaf people in Portugal; with (24) people erased from the citizenship register in Slovenia; with (10) illiterate people in France; with (45) undocumented families, women, youths and single people in France and Belgium; with (20) managers of ethnic businesses/kebabs in Lyon and Amsterdam. The surveys consisted of interviews and studies of the interviewees' environment: interviewees' relatives, associations, collective action groups, lawyers, press and TV journalists, teachers, social workers and sign language interpreters, politicians and public policy-makers. We also observed 46 identity checks at the Part-Dieu railway station in Lyon.
These surveys were conducted on the basis of a conjunction of several methods:
- desk study: review of literature from the press, TV news bulletins, websites, administrative and official documents, statistics, legal texts and laws, court decisions, administrative orders, and lawyers' files;
- quantitative questionnaire;
- ethnographic research: interviews and personal life accounts, participative observations, follow-ups, discussions by means of focus groups, participation in the activity of collective action groups, associations, social services centres or schools;
- synchronic and diachronic approaches; and
- reflective feedback on the surveys: varied forms of discussion sessions about the results of the research into all the fields covered (sensing).
The right to be there. Parts of the surveys addressed the issue of the right to be there. The contribution of the Slovene authors consists of documenting conditions that make it possible for citizens who had citizenship rights under the Yugoslav Federation to find themselves in a situation of illegal residing aliens or undocumented persons from one day to the next, inasmuch as they had been 'erased' from the registers of residents, with rights which were inferior even to those of foreigners since they had not even been given the legal right to enter the territory. It is also around these issues that the surveys on the undocumented in France and Belgium were carried out. Even if these surveys did not restrict themselves to revealing careers or strategies of presence on the territory with a view to obtaining papers to regularise their situation, they took into account the activities, the milieus and the mediation that made the paths those undocumented people take possible. On the margins of the status of formal citizenship, we can find individual, professional and artistic mobilisation which will have an impact upon the conditions of the possible regularisation of status. It is also the point to the survey carried out on identity checks in the public sphere to show how technical and regulatory police and administrative measures (of prefectures and customs) de facto lead to a public policy of controlling foreigners within a territory.
As regards a strictly legal definition of citizenship, the contrasting illumination of those places in which law is executed show that there is not always a clear-cut division between what is 'authorised' by and what is prohibited by law (Jean Carbonnier, 2001). These borders are anything but hermetically sealed, and work carried out by the combined effort of all involved forces, (which in this respect are hybrid because they involve both those persons who are involved in a situation which is not legal as well as their professional or personal supports, and the State officials who are in charge of examining their case and enforcing the law) continues to thicken the ties between the two spheres of law and non-law. These surveys help to complicate all of the sequences implied by these situations, the outcome of which is more or less open, uncertain and experimental, imposing a survey on the meaning of decisions to be taken in a situation of uncertainty upon the actors.
But what is also suggested by the detour by non-law put forward by J. Carbonnier is that law does not sum up every regulatory aspect of access to 'real' citizenship. Thus, we see surveys interested in people whose situation is not legal or persons who are concerned by the various national forms of asylum rights or the right of refugees which depend upon specific law applied to foreigners waiting for their legal situation to be resolved. They show how such places as schools, businesses, health, lodging or accommodation become strategic areas for setting up and experimenting with administrative rules, which are in tension with the implementation of forms of recognition of citizenship.
The right to have rights. If we broaden the question of 'having rights' to 'being able to exercise rights', the answer to the question 'What is profane citizenship' should be asked beyond mere situations involving formal and legal citizenship which has been recognised by the State. What is at issue is in such a case not (only) the possibility of presenting an official legal title recognising status as a member of the 'nation', it is (also) the translation of presence into a right to have access to rights. The legitimacy and practicability of rights to rights (for instance to education, health and work) for people or categories who run up against the difficulty or even impossibility of gaining access to rights interferes with formal rights as recognised by the law. Here, too, a dual intrigue may be illuminated by our surveys: either the law or regulations can be challenged because they obliterate access to rights for certain persons or groups, including citizens; or the tangible conditions of the functioning or practical organisation of such and such a field invalidate the competencies (which are not recognised) of concerned members.
The fields covered by the surveys presented in this work are related to this problematic of rights to rights which concern persons or groups who do not at base have problems of recognition of their formal citizenship, but who experience the limitation prohibiting their access to rights for which they believe they have legitimate expectations. This is for instance the case of the deaf, who while being formally recognised as citizens run up against many obstacles or barriers to exercising their rights as citizens in the way they are taken account of. Our study shows how this issue of the right to rights is not asked independently of the models of how the instituted society takes care of them and the outcome of controversies in the spheres of both experts and laymen (such as hearing devices, recognition of sign language, bilingualism). The comparative surveys conducted with isolated deaf people and schools that do or not recognize sign language, showed that where it is recognized, sign language plays a significant role in the process of socialization of deaf children and contributes to integrating deaf children both into the hearing realm and groups of deaf people. Conversely, the survey focused on isolated deaf people that do not sign, showed that they are deprived of a reference linguistic community, a socializing group of people that can sign, and in spite of all their efforts, they are subject to discrimination.
Similar questions, which however do not necessarily appear in the public arena (or differently, if at all), are raised in the surveys on illiteracy. Here, again, the concerned subjects are not necessarily not in possession of formal legal citizenship, however they run up against obstacles to the full exercise of the rights of person because of their particular relationship to a command of the written language. In contrast to what is possible in the world of the deaf, there are no groups of illiterates, but instead strategies to make their illiteracy invisible (even among family members) which make it possible for them to live and survive, sometimes even to live well and to protect their ways of muddling through which allow them to conceal this aspect of their lives.
By way of contrast, these two situations show what is at stake even in the way these issues are addressed publically. If on the one hand, this may show a sort of public recognition of persons or groups and the assertion of the desire to take account of their respective specificities by identifying them as a 'target group', it can also ipso facto present forms of discrimination of these persons or groups by setting them apart from their formally recognised citizenship. Our surveys, by going quite far in the scale of observing individual and inter-individual situations, point to the sequential networks which interlink situations and contexts, and the effectiveness of non-law in the implementation of rules allowing for (or prohibiting) access to rights. These situations then appear to be hybrid to the extent that they create an interaction between aspects that depend upon the major formats of public action or the institutions on the one hand, and aspects that depend upon initiatives taken by the concerned persons or groups, or their representatives and their supports.
Freedom(s) of the city and the right to be. In the secularised States of contemporary Europe, the issue of regulating cultural differences is framed both by legal and regulatory conditions depending upon national contexts, and by rules which J. Carbonnier refers to as 'non law'. School, the municipality, health, culture and commerce are all fields which are subject to this dual jurisdiction. One of which emanates from public authorities and is translated (or not) into public policies which either homogenise or particularise the diverse origins of citizens. The other emanates from individual or group initiatives. In both cases, these practices of law and non law render public a presence which is anchored in diverse histories and traditions with which they entertain various relationships. The question 'What does it mean to be a citizen and a non-citizen at the same time' also crops up in these situations, when citizenship is seen in its cultural, historic and memorial diversity, challenging all principles of reference to nationality and its uniqueness. The issue of law is not challenged directly, since the concerned persons or groups may be in a situation of regularity within the legal frameworks of formal citizenship. What is at issue in these situations are the practical and legal conditions for framing these various forms of taking part in the public sphere and the extent to which actors who are making use of their competencies and asserting a right to have rights, a right to initiatives, a right to contribute, a right to be there and to show enterprise are actually able to act.
The two fields of investigation mentioned above are contrasted. In the case of ethnic businesses, our investigation started from the urban presence of these businesses and their role in the way the city functions and their visibility, and aimed at documenting how these initiatives taken by people or communities which often stem from immigrant populations and have formal citizenship are integrated into diversified urban forms of consumption, movement and life. Not only did the investigation document this phenomenon but it also showed the resources, the competencies and the activities necessary for people taking the initiative of setting up and giving a lasting form to these economic and commercial forms, which attract a variety of customers and also offer a place for a public and customers whose religion or culture is Muslim. While the public discourse of town planners tends to refer these questions to the domain of private 'entrepreneurial' activities, our survey has shown how to the contrary obstacles and successes in showcasing a 'halal' convention allow them to make these urban forms prevail in contemporary cities, despite the controversies in the 'public debate' which such practices give rise to. From this point of view, the capacity to respond to diverse styles of consumption and procuring supplies on the part of diversified urban populations is related to the public assertion of a right to have rights. However, the resonance of this conjunction, in terms of 'cultural citizenship' resounds differently depending upon the public cultures which are taking effect, which are both urban and national cultures.
In the survey of the life patterns of young foreigners in the Netherlands who drop out of the school system prematurely, the question is put from another vantage. Given the observation that neither Dutch school nor Dutch society has the capacity to make these young people comply with the 'national' norm on a sustainable basis and that society itself is producing an otherness which may represent a danger for public order, the Netherlands' (social welfare) State has set up a series of initiatives to try to deal with these situations. Either it acts upstream, in schools, or downstream, so as to improve conditions for gaining access to the employment market. The questions that arise are then the following: To what extent are such top-down initiatives effective? To what extent will they have an effect upon the youth? Are they convincing? Do they produce results? The also looks at bottom-up initiatives, coming from the groups themselves who assert a right to be present in Dutch society which respects their cultural identity (for instance access to jobs for young women of Muslim origin). Here, the survey is broken down into various objectives. On the one hand, it aimed at understanding factors of 'social dissidence' for young people who undergo exclusion and the citizenship of which is viewed by Dutch society as being problematic (even when they are formally citizens). It also aimed at reproducing the points of view of these young people, which are distinct from those of their teachers, regarding their own situation and future in Dutch society. Finally, it aimed at documenting public initiatives of veiled young women who are trying to conquer a right to difference and recognition in the Dutch public sphere.
The questionnaires and ethnographic surveys showed that, regarding the future of these young people at school, in society and in the labour market, teachers are pessimistic whereas these young people are quite optimistic. They draw such optimism from the patterns of their parents at school and in society, and from the support they get from their families that consider their educational and social achievements of paramount importance. However, even though they remain confident, such optimism is restrained by the lack of concrete support from their parents in their work at school and in the guidance on courses to be followed, by the negative experiences they go through and by the discrimination which they say they are subject to. Contrary to the judgments that prevail in Dutch society, they assert their attachment to their town quarters, and claim their behaviours and the right to organize themselves as they want. At odds with conceiving citizenship based on the pre-requisite of assimilation into Dutch society, they consider that they can be Dutch citizens without having to give up their groups orientations which they do not consider as an obstacle to their participation in Dutch society even if they criticize some aspects of it. The points of view of these young people on themselves and their participation in society differ from those of their teachers. These experts - although they wish they would help these young people see through - are influenced by the public discourse on immigration, and have a tendency to attribute educational problems to the individual rather than to the school system. This results in hindering the development of full citizenship while the points of view from these young people are not fully taken into account and challenge the meaning of 'being a Dutch citizen'.
Because of their very contrast, these two fields of investigation make it possible to document a public dimension of citizenship which is manifested beyond the formal right to be legally recognised as citizens. At a collective and public level, these two case studies point to standards of business, the city and culture when cultural differences are asserted or even displayed, thus making inherent tensions within the cultural complexities of societies that claim to be pluralistic and democratic even more acute. What is at stake through the negotiations of a right to difference and to participate is experimenting with forms of citizenship and the public life, putting differentiated practical value systems to the test and transforming them at the same time.
Translation milieus
So as to establish what processes are at work between legal citizenship as defined by the law and the infinite diversity of acts and initiatives in society and ordinary life, the investigation has equipped itself with the notion of translation milieus, which it has devoted care to documenting and examining as a problematic. The notion of translation milieus aims at going beyond taking account only of experts in citizenship, whether professionals or activists in non-profit organisations acting by way of solidarity. It suggests remaining close to the course of action and experience of initiatives or groups rather than focusing on scenes of participative democracy, hybrid forums or scenes of consensus, aiming at integrating the point of view and action of ordinary citizens (Callon et al., 2001). Finally, this notion is not limited to emphasising the unexpected participants of individual actors and groups, supposed to be autonomous so as to assert the right of points of view and interests that otherwise would not be taken into account (Rancière, 1995).
The notion of translation milieus was more an incentive for producing descriptions or operations of translation, which are neither identified or related to patented translators nor considered in the sole format of a chain of intermediaries retranslating the words and positions of persons into a position of visibility or official status, whether bottom up or top down. The idea of translation milieus, put forward for further elaboration, is not to be confused with that of the sociology of translation and the theory of the actor-network of Michel Callon (1989), in which a multiplicity of associations of human and non-human actors, adopting strategies and alliances, forming complex maps of networks of actors, help us to recognise resistant forms of reality and truth. If the idea of a translation milieu does not restrict translation to actors alone, the operation of translation within the sole mode of cooperation is not limited to looking for a consensus on behalf of populations who are marginalised or excluded from citizenship. The idea of translation milieus is to the contrary an incentive to produce open descriptions of translation operations, and not descriptions oriented around the normative horizon of broadening the possible meaning of the norm, 'citizen', or through the ambition of introducing situations of marginality into a formal framework. It should also make it possible to carry out investigations and understand how and through which operations translations which deny citizenship were made possible, or who diverging interpretations of acts or representations of citizenship are produced.
The notion of translation milieus also refers to an ecological conception which makes us speak of language as a milieu, law as a milieu, the city as a milieu, or scenes of shared interpretations as a milieu. It conjointly induces us to pay attention to actors who translate while making milieus or make milieus while translating, as well as the cognitive or event-oriented operations of translation. Its conception, which is both flexible and oriented, has given it the status of a sort of guide for paying attention to spaces, moments, operators and operations. It showed its validity both as a tool for exploration and analysis of various field of investigation and objects of research, while taking account of their singularity and their national contexts. At the same time, it went through the investigations like a concept to be elaborated, the contours of which remained to be specified and which had to be given consistency.
At the beginning of our research, differences in perspectives emerged which we need to recall here so as to take account of where we came from, which questions were asked and which paths were taken. From the beginning, translators were listened to, including operators which were as diverse as professions, competencies, scenes, objects, procedures and expertise. Nevertheless, the gamut of translators, the places they occupy and the roles they play, as well as the operations of translation they participate in, required specification and examination in their situations.
The investigation in Belgium on the undocumented led us to take account of organisations and networks with humanitarian and religious conceptions as translation milieus; one example is the Protestant Social Centre, which plays an active role among undocumented foreigners. Socio-artistic networks which develop artistic creativity for and with these foreigners, who are themselves producers of artistic creations and recognised as such, produce a translation milieu and give other versions of experience. But this role in translation milieus is reinterpreted, questioned during the scenes in which researchers or members of civil society share their experiences, their interpretations, discuss their conclusions and actions, of which they 'look for the meaning', and that they may help to change the functioning of and their way of seeing social realities.
The survey conducted in the Netherlands on young non-European foreigners who had dropped out of school led us to go beyond a conception of translation focusing upon teachers and professionals in education and social action who follow up and accompany these young immigrants. The translation milieu becomes the space for updating things which have not been specified by thought or influences of public or political discourses on modes of thought and analysis of educational milieus. Following investigation and upon the basis of its findings it can also become the space for expressing paradoxes and contradictions between perceptions and interpretations of the place and future of young immigrants in society by themselves or by professionals.
The investigation conducted in France on illiterates, who do not present themselves as a group and refuse to be marked, registered or rendered visible as illiterates, raised the question of milieus in which practices would or would not be translated into citizenship. Translation milieus as they were approached in this case are not formed around measures on behalf of the illiterate but upon the basis of the initiatives of the latter. They aim at becoming indistinct parts of society in which they take part, by maintaining networks and extending them on the basis of commercial and non-commercial exchanges. There is thus no pre-existing translation milieu which is delimited and fixed. Discovering translation milieus may mean exploring the locus of family bonds and social networks, social experiences and exchanges such as a 'protecting milieu' as much as a 'translating milieu'.
Translators who make it possible to translate initiatives and mobilisations into citizenship cannot be the only ones to be taken into account. Well intended modes of translation should be investigated. Acts, strategies through they manifest their ownership in the social space, whether indirectly or not, cannot be considered independently of the institutional systems with which they are in tension. Finally, concurrent translations which may take the form of cooperation, but also of conflict, controversy, or incomprehension, or other translations that do not aim at broadening citizenship, but to the contrary restricting it or even depriving people of it, should also be examined.
The investigation of the erased in Slovenia led researchers to wonder how the apparently administrative act of the pure and simple erasure of non-Slovenian Yugoslav citizens had been made possible. The description of the erasure and its effects in terms of translation milieus led to the analysis of the discourses which contributed to this or which subsequently were opposed to it while acting as vehicles for divergent ideologies. The approach in terms of translation milieus made it possible to show how these discourses refer to one another upon the basis of a higher hierarchical discourse. The hypothesis was that arguing this dominant discourse had become invisible and that its suppositions which defined what was or what was not a citizen following the break-up of Yugoslavia and the independence of Slovenia, were accepted by common sense without being questioned. Part of the investigation consisted in seeking out an unstated argumentative sequence, which is subsequently imposed not as a supposition but as an explicit fact. But the initial approach also became more complex with the compilation of substantial documentation throughout the investigation. This showed how, from an initial situation in which 'they were all citizens of Yugoslavia', a large variety of produced argumentative sequences were affected by other discourses, which led to inflections of the notion of translation milieus, related to the authors of the statement and towards understanding the intertextuality of the discourses.
Doing translations. These questions and approaches in each investigation made it possible to reconsider and reformulate what could act as a translation in such a situation or for such and such a population, from what, by whom, how and in which terms. They also made it possible to grasp the translation milieus which are not part of the usual repertory of scenes of democracy, public debate or recognised and instituted resources of public and social life. Finally, the formation of translation milieus was envisaged at the interface of worlds with different perspectives, the interpretations of which are in tension and interaction, at the conjunction of discourses, objects, and scenes in which they are made visible and invisible. This is the case of certain milieus which are both places and objects of perspectives and interpretations in interaction, of interconnections, negotiations and co-productions. Law, the city and language are thus considered to be translation milieus.
For undocumented foreigners in France, uses of law and rights in society are not limited to experts. Such uses unveil translation milieus that produce their own interpretations of the law and stress the uncertainty therein. These situations, these experiences and these measures of testing access to legal citizenship designate a multiplicity of practical procedures residing by legal, political, economic social or media supports which implement logics of interaction and coordination, alliances and conflicts, visibility and invisibility and complementarity. These use of law and of rights, which does not exclusively come from support groups, legal exports or mere representatives of the administration manifest tensions between various interpretations of citizenship. They also illuminate practices with their share of what is implicit, what cannot be said or is hidden and contradictory interests. Finally, they point to the need for and demand for new norms, as well as new forms of normative elaboration.
In the case of the kebab businesses, it is the city and its resources of urbanity that appear as the translation milieus to be explored. Thus, one must grasp how commercial offers are appreciated or not by those who go there, what type of contribution is recognised or attributed to them, to what extent their civility is referred to a common good of urbanity and not only private or community strategies for settlement. What is at stake through these approaches also is aimed measuring to what extent this quality is recognised or not, if it interferes and if it concerns institutions of the governance of agglomerations, both in their functions of maintaining public order and maintaining and promoting the quality of life of the urban dwellers.
In the case of identity checks in the public sphere and all the more in a train station, a place of passage and movement, it was suggested that the situation of checking identities by the police be observed as a translation milieu. Here, we can see the effects of a policing of citizenship with its instruments, with civil servants, their techniques of control and selecting people for controls, their files and interconnections, their forms of presence and management of situations in visible and tangible terms. However, this milieu is not only that of the police. The situation publicly shows what should happen discretely behind the scenes and outside the vision of the public. This milieu is not just that of the police doing its job. People being checked are a part of it, just as the public, passers-by who are more or less concerned with or indifferent to the scene. Beyond this, the train station itself is the translation milieu of citizenship.
Hybrid situations
The investigations presented in this work finally highlight a common notion designated by the term, hybrid situations. These situations are hybrid in many respects: in respect of legal citizenship, conception and enforcement of rights, configurations of actors, and scales set in given societies. They concern both individuals or groups that, in spite of being legal citizens, are not or feel not recognized as full citizens, and, conversely, individuals or groups that have not or have been deprived of legal citizenship and participate in the community all the same, feel or claim the right to be recognized as citizens not in the strictly formal framework of citizenship. Therefore, hybrid situations are about de facto or de jure citizenship that recognizes the right to be there and the droit de cite. Such citizenship and the rights attached to it are no longer just granted, claimed and gained, but are now also asserted, exercised, used and negotiated by a configuration of actors that do no longer stand in a face-to-face situation with the State or between experts and laymen. Individuals, groups, collective action groups, institutions and their representatives interact with each other in hybrid situations. Their schemes for action hinge on multiple interests, rules, norms and laws whose interpretations differ from one actor to another, and involve a varied range of scales and territories.
Hybridity stems from all these elements and their layouts in situations, and this is the content of such hybridity that our investigations aimed at showing and documenting. In each context and each situation, attention must be paid to forms of hybridity in order to be able to single out the actors and their cohabiting, cooperating, opposing or negotiating schemes for action, the competencies and the rules that result from joint production both in the realm of law and non law.
Situations in investigations then show that this droit de cité does not only depend upon a right acquired upon birth or through naturalisation, but is also obtained through work which is carried out in situations and contexts by mobilising actors, places, mediation and representations, according to social logics which have to be discovered and documented.
Inside and outside institutions. These situations may involve agents, operators and contexts which are on the one hand related to public or private institutions, which are supposed to take charge of the matters at hand in one way or the other. But on the other hand, they might also enlist persons, groups or their representatives (for instance in non-profit organisations or professional associations) who are immediately concerned with these issues and who take 'initiatives' on them, on their own behalf or on behalf of groups within the broader family or groups of peers. In the former case, there is a trend to apply instructions, established roles, and administrative or market logics; in the latter, there may be logics either of compliance or resistance to what is expected of an ordinary citizen, his or her conduct and his or her participation.
Institutions are no more disembodied than non-profit organisations. These organisations are implemented by workers or agents of the institution or the organisation, who depending upon the case at hand dispose of certain margins of manoeuvre for carrying out their function. By the same token, people involved who take initiatives are not totally outside all institutions. They have to come to terms with the 'harder' or softer aspects of rules and law, and must find forms of accommodation throughout the constraints with which they are confronted, for if not they incur risks of exclusion.
Thus, networks of ramification are woven, which are also hybrids and bring together heterogeneous human and non-human elements, files, agendas, techniques, meetings, regulations, legal provisions, economic and urban constraints, etc. Moreover, these hybrid situations are contextualised and are to be found in places, over durations, and in frameworks which leave their mark on both the material and symbolic formatting of the situations at hand. In this respect, elements from the strict reference to law (such as the case of the erased in Slovenia) or other more ideological or political elements (such as the existence of a nationalist current of opinion) may contribute to the concrete formatting of hybrid situations.
Hybrid expertise. The hybrid character of situations also concerns the knowledge and competencies at hand. There too, knowledge which is elaborated in an original way, depending upon a great level of technicality (for instance in law or medicine) can cohabit with practical knowledge or the hands-on approach described in French by the expression, 'savoir-y-faire' (to take on a distinction made by G. Delbos, 1983), which does not necessarily requires academic training, even if 'profane' or lay knowledge is as much a repository of abstraction and rationality as expert knowledge (Wynne, op. cit.). What also characterises this knowledge in hybrid situations is that they are not necessarily unequivocally attached to 'bearers' of knowledge. We may, in this respect, refer to a logic of distributed knowledge, depending upon the context, and vis-à-vis which laypersons may adopt the position of experts and experts the position of laypersons (Cahiers Profacity n°6, 2011 ; Battegay A., Coelho O., Vaz H., 2012).
How are varying types of expert and lay knowledge combined and linked in these fields which have been investigated? Are they practiced separately or are they distributed over various members of a family, of a group marked by interiority, networks of mutual assistance, or professional or political support groups? Are they mobilised homogenously and continuously, or are they differentiated according to embedded time sequences? In the field of the deaf, the investigation shows how the different models of taking charge (medically or socio-anthropologically) do not mobilise the same forms of expertise, both from the vantage of the medical corps and that of the families or the deaf persons themselves. Not only do we see that we are not dealing with the same forms of expertise, but we are not dealing with the same combinations of expertise. In the field of rights to urban recognition, forms of initiatives tend to mobilise the entrepreneurial competencies which are confronted with legal, economic, financial and business issues, but also require the capacities to occupy visual positions in the public arena on sensitive issues and make attractive commercial propositions.
Between positions and discourse. Hybridity, in the situations examined in this work, may finally apply to the duality of positions and discourse. Persons and/ or operators engaged in these situations are so engaged in various positions and in various capacities, including the researchers who are conducting the investigation. The discourse and points of view which have been collected during this investigation are marked by differences in positioning. It is thus fair to talk of a distribution of points of view. But mapping points of view is complex. There may be relations of power between places, and this may be translated in proceedings established upon the basis of situations - effects of authority or influence, the imposition of silence on certain aspects, shameful or unspeakable areas, spaces of revelation, etc. There may also be distortions between an expected and an expressed viewpoint, discrepancies between places occupied and positions taken, and between explicit and implicit forms of partiality.
B - Main scientific results
Surveys of the different case studies designed were carried out by appealing to a mix of different research disciplines, and by using the concepts of profane citizenship and translation milieus that could apply to those situations and experiences differently. The surveys resulted in contextualized definitions of profane citizenship in the light of experiences and operations. Firstly, we will describe the contours of these contextualized interpretations by showing how the concept of profane citizenship was interpreted, and what was the heuristic, methodological, documentary, and conceptual profit from the research strategy. Secondly, we will present several models of profane citizenship whose construction was fuelled by those surveys. These models should account for rather theoretical work proposals than set paradigms. Thirdly, in this concluding section, we will present configurations of translation milieus that emerged from our research approaches of contextualized profane citizenship. Finally, we will address the relation between science, making sense, and citizenship. In this respect, we will not intend to establish any normative scientific posture or normative theory of knowledge as far as profane citizenship is concerned. We will raise open-ended questions at work within and between the different investigations carried out in the framework of PROFACITY.
Interpretations of profane citizenship
The notion of profane citizenship was understood and reinterpreted in various ways in the investigations which were carried out. Nevertheless, in their approach and conceptualisation, all researchers regarded as pertinent the fact that profane citizenship made it possible to deviate from the purely legal conception so as to conceive of citizenship or forms of citizenship which were at work. They also retained the need to eliminate an ambiguity which links the idea of profane citizenship to the understanding of experiences of 'vulnerable groups'. Such an association might let us believe that the notion of profane citizenship is only limited to 'vulnerable' groups which for various reasons are on the margins of legal citizenship, and that it essentially designates the practices through which these 'groups' assert their participation in and contribution to the life of the polis in contrast to or apart from legal definitions of citizenship.
Profane citizenship in models
From these investigations, or as an echo of them, several proposals of models of profane citizenship were sketched out. Here, we shall try to present four, treating them less as definitive models than as possible ways of giving form to the prolongation of the investigations and their contributions. This gamut of interpretations can be described as being limited on the one hand by the approaches of profane citizenship which attempt at least to fix the contents and delimit the contours, and on the other hand by conceptions that turn profane citizenship into a heuristic category of methodology as much as of analysis, opening up to the understanding of singular forms of participating in the life of the polis.
Profane citizenship and translation milieus
In hybrid situations in which forms of citizenship are experienced or tested, translations take place which initiate, accompany or participate in profane interpretations of citizenship. These processes of translation of citizenship, carried out upon the initiative of actors which go beyond the usual, official or institutional non-profit organisations, intermediaries or interlocutors for the concerned groups and individuals, are activated by a number of operators and operations, which have effects of requalification or disqualification in tension with official citizenships. At the end of this route in various fields of investigation, the configuration and scope of these translation milieus and the profane interpretations of citizenship they produce can be specified.
Making science and making meaning: one of the stakes of what is profane in citizenship
The contours of profane citizenship and translation milieus as they have been sketched here leave the paths of contagion or democratic appropriation uncertain. It is true that the idea emerges that these paths are not in a direct linear relationship: they do not follow paths which have been traced by intermediaries who would make products of experience pass from bottom to top or from top to bottom, and the translators who play a role in transformations of citizenship are confused neither with professionals, nor with non-profit organisations. Nevertheless, several positions are emerging through these investigations as to how science and meaning can be made in the problematics of profane citizenship. For the notion of profane citizenship involves at least four aspects, which appear to be remote from one another but which are present in this work, sometimes in the form of mutual tension.
Potential Impact:
A - Policy advice and policy implications
In order to sketch the possible policy implications that could be drawn from the PROFACITY project, it is necessary to reiterate its main focus: 'profane citizenship' referred to the different ways the actual concept of citizenship could be transformed by actions of people who are considered as 'profane' - i.e. without an expertise concerning the situation they experienced - and are excluded from regular rights or barred partial access to take part in society and to contribute to it. Profane citizenship was therefore not so much a well-defined state of citizenship, but rather a continuing process of reflecting on and of (re)constructing current forms of citizenship, a process based on the actions of persons organising their 'rights to have rights' where these rights seemed to be missing or to be out of reach.
In the PROFACITY research project, by dealing with different matters varying from illegality to deafness, we developed three lines concerning policy implications that could be inferred from such a perspective:
-The first line is to look at the national level and the EU level for the necessary support of new constructions of citizenship by deploying experts and by reconsidering expertise in a different way.
- The second line concerns the establishment of so-called translation milieus (translating environments), in which experts and non-experts, citizens and non-citizens cooperate in varying ways in order to develop new forms of knowledge and create innovative practices of citizenship, and their role in stimulating, sustaining the empowerment of the actors concerned.
- The third line concerns the policy implications that could be formulated regarding the (scientific) methods ('sensing') used to enhance the involvement of experts and non-experts, citizens and non-citizens in research practices, which also includes the research strategy, in hybrid situations, to take account of the lesser visible actions that are contributing to new forms of citizenship.
Some guidelines could be elaborated and refined in connection with PROFACITY.
One of the main findings was that scientific or professional experts should not have dominated when attempting to resolve questions of exclusion or marginality, in short, about forms of citizenship, but they should have been part of the problem to be analysed. Expertise or specialized knowledge was involved in the construction of the boundaries between normality and deviance, between belonging and exclusion. These implications had to be disentangled, and only then could these experts reflect on their role as contributing or not to the policies and the practices of (non-)experts/(non-)citizens, and could their actions be heard and be included in the knowledge base of science and policy. However, such a change was not sufficient.
B - Main dissemination activities and exploitation of results
Scientific dissemination
This book closes the PROFACITY program, whose publication accepted by a scientific committee will be published in French and English. The first chapter presents different approaches to "profane in Citizenship," and explains how the notion of profane citizenship and concepts associated with translation milieus and hybrid situations have been formalized to serve as a benchmark in defining and conducting investigations. The following sections highlight four nodes and transversal questions from situations and experiences that formed the sites of investigation.
Sensing dissemination
'As an experiment in evaluating social science research, and in the PROFACITY context, the Sensing procedure was established as a concept that engendered interesting results even though the Consortium's partners criticized Sensing in the first place. This conclusion will overview the research results as against the objectives initially put forward in the PROFACITY Work Plan and the questions therein.
Can Sensing be seen as or become a new methodological approach in the humanities? If so, how does it help, as the first objective to be addressed during WP5, to interpret the degree of reactions of the translation milieus?
Even though not all the consortiums partners interpreted and/or developed the Sensing procedure in the same way, the inclusion of 'sensing' in PROFACITY did engender new ways of:
-getting into contact with research participants;
-doing research as such; and
-challenging and supplementing prevailing feedback procedures.
List of Websites:
http://www.profacity.eu/
http://joaoms.com/profacity>
http://www2.imageurs.com/test/profa/>
http://www.25images.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr>
By concentrating on hybrid social situations (not strictly within the norm), the research project PROFACITY experimented with novel forms of citizenship that modified the borders of legal citizenship. These forms of citizenship involved practical activities that coped with existing systems or milieus, whose challenge was the continuing invention of the democratic principle itself i.e. the 'right to have rights'. Such practices asserted and translated into reality the 'right to the city' (droit de cite) that was not recognized straightaway, which we called profane citizenship. Our intent was to use profane citizenship as an analyzer of democratic ownership.
The research project PROFACITY examined in what way practices of actors who were in situations in which they had to make do with their faults, handicaps, lack of resources, were taken (or not) into account as alternatives to legal citizenship. Qualitative surveys were conducted within the scope of three overlapping research domains (languages and codes; attestations of identity; and tests of urbanity). The results of these surveys were submitted to the professional and institutional representatives concerned (Sensing).
Project Context and Objectives:
Project context
Even though the Lisbon Strategy (2000) defined the zones to which European citizenship would apply in the years to come (work for all, social integration, participation in the society of knowledge), one cannot avoid noticing the difficulty in turning these powerful principles into facts. On the one hand, research into the detailed daily activities of the European Community's inhabitants (working, studying, going into entrepreneurship, living, speaking, communicating, attesting one's identity, discussing, taking sides ) shows that having access to spaces where action and recognition are possible depends on social, national and ethnic criteria quite restrictively. On the other hand, legal citizenship has not produced the effect democracies had counted on: participation in national and European consultations has been weak, and though the trend might be reversed, when people do participate, it is often to oppose what is being proposed or even to reject it outright. Finally, it is apparent that the formal framework of legal citizenship is being outflanked insofar as people take refuge in their communities, or take part in social rebellions, or escape by breaking down psychologically or falling into using emergency expedients (alcohol, drugs, antidepressants), or even explode through individual or collective actions that cast doubt on the very meaning of 'civic' and 'civil' (vandalism, hooliganism, the return of racist acts).
Project objectives
At the theoretical level, we enriched the concept of democratic ownership by referring it to a policy that included human rights and by associating it with practically invisible forms of civil initiatives in situations involving "have-not" people. From this point of view, the concept of translation milieus became the object of an original and productive theoretical construction. The concept of profane citizenship was usefully compared with other entries for citizenship (ordinary, social, participative...) that confronted present-day legal citizenship. This theoretical advance should enable contemporary thought to consider the changing and dynamic transformations of the content of citizenship in the European contemporary context.
Fieldwork
PROFACITY concluded with an inventory in each of its research domains (languages and codes; attestations of identity; and tests of urbanity), confirming the hypothesis that underlay the research project, namely: experiments with novel forms of citizenship, that we called profane citizenship, took place in very specific contexts as both historical backgrounds (covering different periods of history) and national particularities related to the domains played a significant role.
Consortium methodology
We proposed cross-investigations into three research domains (languages and codes; attestations of identity; tests of urbanity). We did not divide the consortium into as many groups of specialists as there were research domains, which would have meant juxtaposing competences and results without taking advantage of our combined analytical strength in the framework of PROFACITY. On the contrary, thanks to a research scheme that mixed specializations at the very outset, from survey design to result presentation in front of Sensing groups, we set up working groups (seminars, mixed research groups, symposia) to guarantee that references, problems and languages could circulate among all the people concerned.
Project Results:
A - PROFACITY scientific posture and main hypotheses
On the profane
If we mobilise the expression, 'profane citizenship', we shall have to explain this usage. The French word, 'profane' encompasses various meanings, covering two lexical fields: on the one hand, expertise, on the other hand, the sacred. And the conjunction between these two fields of reference is not coincidental.
In the first lexical field, profane (or lay) is seen against expertise. A person is called a layman (profane) if they have no knowledge of a science or an art, with the following synonyms: foreign to a discipline, ignorant (a word to be found in both French and English), incompetent, inexperienced, uninitiated, novice. Translating the French word 'profane' poses difficulties - profane may insist on the uninitiated, while lay-man emphasises the practical rooting of a man of the field. This dichotomy between two poles of knowledge - that of experts and that of laypersons - is eminently political and debatable. An author such as J. Rancière (2004), when referring to Jacotot, pleads for the 'equality of intelligences' precisely aiming at challenging the natural and obvious character and the hierarchy between those who know and those who do not know, which is itself indexed to a hierarchy of knowledge.
Anthropology of knowledge and sociology of sciences have also contributed to confusing matters, while calling for a new breakdown between expertise and lay knowledge. Anthropologists such as A. Strauss (1992) or U. Hannerz (1992), who have been interested in relationships between laypersons and professionals or laypersons and specialists, have long shown that there is not a layperson on the one hand and a specialist on the other, but depending on situations, the roles may change. They have also defended the idea that laypersons dispose of knowledge from experience which contribute to collective intelligence.
In the field of the sociology of sciences, for instance in conflicts on interpretation of environmental or medical risks, authors such as B. Wynne or M. Callon have taken on a lay-expert with expertise from the field to whom they attribute rationality (even if its of a different type) and for whom they plead for the right to participate in formulating the truth and policy. B. Wynne (1996) emphasises that knowledge that is turned towards experimenting is flexible, not dogmatic and open, and that this knowledge is complex, reflexive, dynamic and innovative, and that material, empirical and theoretical aspects flow into them Irrespective of qualities or flaws, they are epistemologically alive and substantial. M. Canne criticizes models which brutally or gently and pragmatically deny the layperson any competence for participating in the production of the only valid knowledge: that which may be described as scientific. To the contrary, he pleads for a model of coproduction of knowledge which tends to surmount limits by actively involving laypersons in elaborating knowledge that concerns them (1999).
The second lexical field of the concept of the French world 'profane' coincides with the English term, 'profane' and is related to the sacred. This is the opposition that E. Benveniste takes up etymologically in his son article, 'Profanus et profanare' (1960), insisting upon the proximity and the overlapping character of the sacred - which is withdrawn into the temple so as to participate in a sacred rite (sacere) - and the profane - which remains in front of the le temple (pro fanum), in the public sphere. Tradition, he writes, wanted the flesh of the consecrated animal to be returned to the public sphere after the ceremony, and a great banquet was organised in which everyone had the right to consume the flesh of the consecrated animal. 'The offering is consecrated, and then profaned through its consumption. ' Being profaned is not in opposition to the sacred, but to the contrary, it mean returning the sacred to a primal state, that of the community. 'The quality of profanum does not apply to everything that is not in fact sacred but what has ceased to be so. ' Profanation is the moment of returning to the public sphere from what had separated it, and there is a sort of re-appropriation or re-integration of the sacred within the profane. This form of 'reconciliation' is symbolically denoted by the banquet, the people's consuming of the consecrated meat, i.e. its profanation. Here, we take note that Benveniste specifies that the profane is not only designated by what is negative (what is not sacred) but also by what is positive (what is present in the public sphere - the polis). We also note that while he is committee etymological clarification of the meaning, he manages to establish a demarcation between such things and acts which are hidden from the public, who are deemed to be uninitiated, incapable of attending the ritual, and on the other hand the public sphere as a place which is open to all, rendered public.
From this etymological understanding of profanare as a return to the sacred in the common sphere, G. Agamben (2005) offers a more critical and political understanding of the idea. Profanation ( ) involves neutralising what is being profaned. Once it is profaned, what was unavailable and remained separated loses its aura so as to be returned to use. It is a political operation « which disactivates systems of power and returns those spaces which it had confiscated to common usage. For Agamben, the political, active and radical dimensions are designated by the term, profanare. For this author, to profane is to detach oneself from the control of power, which had confiscated the common use of places, and to return those places to precisely what they are: commonplaces.
If these models, focussed on expertise and the sacred equip us to approach the operability of the 'profane' in politics, a complementary dimension, which also plays a role in issues of citizenship, also seems to be added: the public dimension. With the reflections of the anthropologist, James Scott (2008) as a support, we are encouraged to introduce the distinction between public transcripts and hidden transcripts, as much on the side of those who hold dominant norms as on that who hold non-dominant norms. For crucial stakes (which the surveys in this book take account of in various ways) are to be found in the fact that knowledge, information and data are or are not put in the public domain, made accessible to the public, to the layperson, to the uninitiated or to those who are not in the innermost circle.
Profane citizenship
What openings does the use of the expression 'profane citizenship' make possible? To what extent does this formulation, given the variety of its potential meanings, make it possible to open up new approaches to issues of citizenship, and even answer the question 'what is citizenship? ' How can we imagine and how can we validate answers which are not aimed at reproducing a mechanical dualism, which on the one hand views the institutional and formal vision of law - people are deemed to be citizens if they fulfil the conditions for gaining access to the status of citizenship - and on the other who defend a more 'activist' version of citizenship - people are deemed to be citizens if they, through their own action, manage to open up access to citizenship.
We must immediately avoid a source of confusion: profane citizenship is not intended to designate the citizenship of the profane or of laypersons. If it is true that part of the surveys in this book look at individuals or groups who were not recognised for their competence as experts, our work specifically contributes to blurring this line. On the basis of a position which detaches itself from labelling positions that create a demarcation between experts on the one hand and laypersons on the other, we have emphasised dissymmetry and the reciprocity of perspectives which lead experts in a field to recognise that they are laypersons in another field, and on the other hand, persons who are deemed to be laypersons in one field to be recognised as expert in that field but with another vantage. On the other hand, the contribution of the layperson allows us to formalise and validate statements and practices differently, referring, from the lay point of view, to experiences of citizenship which also generate the effect of framing rendering objective. Thus, the notion of 'profane citizenship' announces a strong programme aiming at renewing the epistemological or even ontological foundations of citizenship. Allow us to explain.
The 'profane' or layperson, in the coordinated meaning of public and uninitiated (someone deemed to be ignorant who has no access to the hidden spaces of the powers over the polis), specifically designates a position which de-naturalises what is presented as obvious and beyond debate in the application of the law. Here, the profane consists of a point of resistance to the effect of authority of knowledge and the expert formatting of citizenship (including citizenship as underpinned by science) and particularly those of the law, political sciences and political philosophy. As researchers in the social sciences, we are authorised to take up and to document those decisive deviations between what is said to be citizenship and what is perpetrated in its name, between a citizenship based upon formal institutional principles and a citizenship which is implemented, politicized, rendered controversial in various fields of expertise and the experience of situations.
A pluralistic work of diverse surveys
The surveys that we are accounting for in this work looked at the issue of profane citizenship from contrasting vantages. For one of the specific stakes of this group work is to have recognised the semantic variety behind this common notion, a movement of positive diffraction which can be illustrated by the question: What does being a citizen and not being a citizen at the same time mean? The answer to this question is not and need not be unambiguous. It is the openness of this term to being used in diverse operative contexts for varying phenomena that proves its heuristic value.
The surveys were conducted from October 2009 to November 2010 in 5 countries: with young immigrants aged between 12 and 22 in the Netherlands (ethnographic survey and questionnaire submitted to 608 native youths and immigrant youths); with (10) deaf students and (16) isolated deaf people in Portugal; with (24) people erased from the citizenship register in Slovenia; with (10) illiterate people in France; with (45) undocumented families, women, youths and single people in France and Belgium; with (20) managers of ethnic businesses/kebabs in Lyon and Amsterdam. The surveys consisted of interviews and studies of the interviewees' environment: interviewees' relatives, associations, collective action groups, lawyers, press and TV journalists, teachers, social workers and sign language interpreters, politicians and public policy-makers. We also observed 46 identity checks at the Part-Dieu railway station in Lyon.
These surveys were conducted on the basis of a conjunction of several methods:
- desk study: review of literature from the press, TV news bulletins, websites, administrative and official documents, statistics, legal texts and laws, court decisions, administrative orders, and lawyers' files;
- quantitative questionnaire;
- ethnographic research: interviews and personal life accounts, participative observations, follow-ups, discussions by means of focus groups, participation in the activity of collective action groups, associations, social services centres or schools;
- synchronic and diachronic approaches; and
- reflective feedback on the surveys: varied forms of discussion sessions about the results of the research into all the fields covered (sensing).
The right to be there. Parts of the surveys addressed the issue of the right to be there. The contribution of the Slovene authors consists of documenting conditions that make it possible for citizens who had citizenship rights under the Yugoslav Federation to find themselves in a situation of illegal residing aliens or undocumented persons from one day to the next, inasmuch as they had been 'erased' from the registers of residents, with rights which were inferior even to those of foreigners since they had not even been given the legal right to enter the territory. It is also around these issues that the surveys on the undocumented in France and Belgium were carried out. Even if these surveys did not restrict themselves to revealing careers or strategies of presence on the territory with a view to obtaining papers to regularise their situation, they took into account the activities, the milieus and the mediation that made the paths those undocumented people take possible. On the margins of the status of formal citizenship, we can find individual, professional and artistic mobilisation which will have an impact upon the conditions of the possible regularisation of status. It is also the point to the survey carried out on identity checks in the public sphere to show how technical and regulatory police and administrative measures (of prefectures and customs) de facto lead to a public policy of controlling foreigners within a territory.
As regards a strictly legal definition of citizenship, the contrasting illumination of those places in which law is executed show that there is not always a clear-cut division between what is 'authorised' by and what is prohibited by law (Jean Carbonnier, 2001). These borders are anything but hermetically sealed, and work carried out by the combined effort of all involved forces, (which in this respect are hybrid because they involve both those persons who are involved in a situation which is not legal as well as their professional or personal supports, and the State officials who are in charge of examining their case and enforcing the law) continues to thicken the ties between the two spheres of law and non-law. These surveys help to complicate all of the sequences implied by these situations, the outcome of which is more or less open, uncertain and experimental, imposing a survey on the meaning of decisions to be taken in a situation of uncertainty upon the actors.
But what is also suggested by the detour by non-law put forward by J. Carbonnier is that law does not sum up every regulatory aspect of access to 'real' citizenship. Thus, we see surveys interested in people whose situation is not legal or persons who are concerned by the various national forms of asylum rights or the right of refugees which depend upon specific law applied to foreigners waiting for their legal situation to be resolved. They show how such places as schools, businesses, health, lodging or accommodation become strategic areas for setting up and experimenting with administrative rules, which are in tension with the implementation of forms of recognition of citizenship.
The right to have rights. If we broaden the question of 'having rights' to 'being able to exercise rights', the answer to the question 'What is profane citizenship' should be asked beyond mere situations involving formal and legal citizenship which has been recognised by the State. What is at issue is in such a case not (only) the possibility of presenting an official legal title recognising status as a member of the 'nation', it is (also) the translation of presence into a right to have access to rights. The legitimacy and practicability of rights to rights (for instance to education, health and work) for people or categories who run up against the difficulty or even impossibility of gaining access to rights interferes with formal rights as recognised by the law. Here, too, a dual intrigue may be illuminated by our surveys: either the law or regulations can be challenged because they obliterate access to rights for certain persons or groups, including citizens; or the tangible conditions of the functioning or practical organisation of such and such a field invalidate the competencies (which are not recognised) of concerned members.
The fields covered by the surveys presented in this work are related to this problematic of rights to rights which concern persons or groups who do not at base have problems of recognition of their formal citizenship, but who experience the limitation prohibiting their access to rights for which they believe they have legitimate expectations. This is for instance the case of the deaf, who while being formally recognised as citizens run up against many obstacles or barriers to exercising their rights as citizens in the way they are taken account of. Our study shows how this issue of the right to rights is not asked independently of the models of how the instituted society takes care of them and the outcome of controversies in the spheres of both experts and laymen (such as hearing devices, recognition of sign language, bilingualism). The comparative surveys conducted with isolated deaf people and schools that do or not recognize sign language, showed that where it is recognized, sign language plays a significant role in the process of socialization of deaf children and contributes to integrating deaf children both into the hearing realm and groups of deaf people. Conversely, the survey focused on isolated deaf people that do not sign, showed that they are deprived of a reference linguistic community, a socializing group of people that can sign, and in spite of all their efforts, they are subject to discrimination.
Similar questions, which however do not necessarily appear in the public arena (or differently, if at all), are raised in the surveys on illiteracy. Here, again, the concerned subjects are not necessarily not in possession of formal legal citizenship, however they run up against obstacles to the full exercise of the rights of person because of their particular relationship to a command of the written language. In contrast to what is possible in the world of the deaf, there are no groups of illiterates, but instead strategies to make their illiteracy invisible (even among family members) which make it possible for them to live and survive, sometimes even to live well and to protect their ways of muddling through which allow them to conceal this aspect of their lives.
By way of contrast, these two situations show what is at stake even in the way these issues are addressed publically. If on the one hand, this may show a sort of public recognition of persons or groups and the assertion of the desire to take account of their respective specificities by identifying them as a 'target group', it can also ipso facto present forms of discrimination of these persons or groups by setting them apart from their formally recognised citizenship. Our surveys, by going quite far in the scale of observing individual and inter-individual situations, point to the sequential networks which interlink situations and contexts, and the effectiveness of non-law in the implementation of rules allowing for (or prohibiting) access to rights. These situations then appear to be hybrid to the extent that they create an interaction between aspects that depend upon the major formats of public action or the institutions on the one hand, and aspects that depend upon initiatives taken by the concerned persons or groups, or their representatives and their supports.
Freedom(s) of the city and the right to be. In the secularised States of contemporary Europe, the issue of regulating cultural differences is framed both by legal and regulatory conditions depending upon national contexts, and by rules which J. Carbonnier refers to as 'non law'. School, the municipality, health, culture and commerce are all fields which are subject to this dual jurisdiction. One of which emanates from public authorities and is translated (or not) into public policies which either homogenise or particularise the diverse origins of citizens. The other emanates from individual or group initiatives. In both cases, these practices of law and non law render public a presence which is anchored in diverse histories and traditions with which they entertain various relationships. The question 'What does it mean to be a citizen and a non-citizen at the same time' also crops up in these situations, when citizenship is seen in its cultural, historic and memorial diversity, challenging all principles of reference to nationality and its uniqueness. The issue of law is not challenged directly, since the concerned persons or groups may be in a situation of regularity within the legal frameworks of formal citizenship. What is at issue in these situations are the practical and legal conditions for framing these various forms of taking part in the public sphere and the extent to which actors who are making use of their competencies and asserting a right to have rights, a right to initiatives, a right to contribute, a right to be there and to show enterprise are actually able to act.
The two fields of investigation mentioned above are contrasted. In the case of ethnic businesses, our investigation started from the urban presence of these businesses and their role in the way the city functions and their visibility, and aimed at documenting how these initiatives taken by people or communities which often stem from immigrant populations and have formal citizenship are integrated into diversified urban forms of consumption, movement and life. Not only did the investigation document this phenomenon but it also showed the resources, the competencies and the activities necessary for people taking the initiative of setting up and giving a lasting form to these economic and commercial forms, which attract a variety of customers and also offer a place for a public and customers whose religion or culture is Muslim. While the public discourse of town planners tends to refer these questions to the domain of private 'entrepreneurial' activities, our survey has shown how to the contrary obstacles and successes in showcasing a 'halal' convention allow them to make these urban forms prevail in contemporary cities, despite the controversies in the 'public debate' which such practices give rise to. From this point of view, the capacity to respond to diverse styles of consumption and procuring supplies on the part of diversified urban populations is related to the public assertion of a right to have rights. However, the resonance of this conjunction, in terms of 'cultural citizenship' resounds differently depending upon the public cultures which are taking effect, which are both urban and national cultures.
In the survey of the life patterns of young foreigners in the Netherlands who drop out of the school system prematurely, the question is put from another vantage. Given the observation that neither Dutch school nor Dutch society has the capacity to make these young people comply with the 'national' norm on a sustainable basis and that society itself is producing an otherness which may represent a danger for public order, the Netherlands' (social welfare) State has set up a series of initiatives to try to deal with these situations. Either it acts upstream, in schools, or downstream, so as to improve conditions for gaining access to the employment market. The questions that arise are then the following: To what extent are such top-down initiatives effective? To what extent will they have an effect upon the youth? Are they convincing? Do they produce results? The also looks at bottom-up initiatives, coming from the groups themselves who assert a right to be present in Dutch society which respects their cultural identity (for instance access to jobs for young women of Muslim origin). Here, the survey is broken down into various objectives. On the one hand, it aimed at understanding factors of 'social dissidence' for young people who undergo exclusion and the citizenship of which is viewed by Dutch society as being problematic (even when they are formally citizens). It also aimed at reproducing the points of view of these young people, which are distinct from those of their teachers, regarding their own situation and future in Dutch society. Finally, it aimed at documenting public initiatives of veiled young women who are trying to conquer a right to difference and recognition in the Dutch public sphere.
The questionnaires and ethnographic surveys showed that, regarding the future of these young people at school, in society and in the labour market, teachers are pessimistic whereas these young people are quite optimistic. They draw such optimism from the patterns of their parents at school and in society, and from the support they get from their families that consider their educational and social achievements of paramount importance. However, even though they remain confident, such optimism is restrained by the lack of concrete support from their parents in their work at school and in the guidance on courses to be followed, by the negative experiences they go through and by the discrimination which they say they are subject to. Contrary to the judgments that prevail in Dutch society, they assert their attachment to their town quarters, and claim their behaviours and the right to organize themselves as they want. At odds with conceiving citizenship based on the pre-requisite of assimilation into Dutch society, they consider that they can be Dutch citizens without having to give up their groups orientations which they do not consider as an obstacle to their participation in Dutch society even if they criticize some aspects of it. The points of view of these young people on themselves and their participation in society differ from those of their teachers. These experts - although they wish they would help these young people see through - are influenced by the public discourse on immigration, and have a tendency to attribute educational problems to the individual rather than to the school system. This results in hindering the development of full citizenship while the points of view from these young people are not fully taken into account and challenge the meaning of 'being a Dutch citizen'.
Because of their very contrast, these two fields of investigation make it possible to document a public dimension of citizenship which is manifested beyond the formal right to be legally recognised as citizens. At a collective and public level, these two case studies point to standards of business, the city and culture when cultural differences are asserted or even displayed, thus making inherent tensions within the cultural complexities of societies that claim to be pluralistic and democratic even more acute. What is at stake through the negotiations of a right to difference and to participate is experimenting with forms of citizenship and the public life, putting differentiated practical value systems to the test and transforming them at the same time.
Translation milieus
So as to establish what processes are at work between legal citizenship as defined by the law and the infinite diversity of acts and initiatives in society and ordinary life, the investigation has equipped itself with the notion of translation milieus, which it has devoted care to documenting and examining as a problematic. The notion of translation milieus aims at going beyond taking account only of experts in citizenship, whether professionals or activists in non-profit organisations acting by way of solidarity. It suggests remaining close to the course of action and experience of initiatives or groups rather than focusing on scenes of participative democracy, hybrid forums or scenes of consensus, aiming at integrating the point of view and action of ordinary citizens (Callon et al., 2001). Finally, this notion is not limited to emphasising the unexpected participants of individual actors and groups, supposed to be autonomous so as to assert the right of points of view and interests that otherwise would not be taken into account (Rancière, 1995).
The notion of translation milieus was more an incentive for producing descriptions or operations of translation, which are neither identified or related to patented translators nor considered in the sole format of a chain of intermediaries retranslating the words and positions of persons into a position of visibility or official status, whether bottom up or top down. The idea of translation milieus, put forward for further elaboration, is not to be confused with that of the sociology of translation and the theory of the actor-network of Michel Callon (1989), in which a multiplicity of associations of human and non-human actors, adopting strategies and alliances, forming complex maps of networks of actors, help us to recognise resistant forms of reality and truth. If the idea of a translation milieu does not restrict translation to actors alone, the operation of translation within the sole mode of cooperation is not limited to looking for a consensus on behalf of populations who are marginalised or excluded from citizenship. The idea of translation milieus is to the contrary an incentive to produce open descriptions of translation operations, and not descriptions oriented around the normative horizon of broadening the possible meaning of the norm, 'citizen', or through the ambition of introducing situations of marginality into a formal framework. It should also make it possible to carry out investigations and understand how and through which operations translations which deny citizenship were made possible, or who diverging interpretations of acts or representations of citizenship are produced.
The notion of translation milieus also refers to an ecological conception which makes us speak of language as a milieu, law as a milieu, the city as a milieu, or scenes of shared interpretations as a milieu. It conjointly induces us to pay attention to actors who translate while making milieus or make milieus while translating, as well as the cognitive or event-oriented operations of translation. Its conception, which is both flexible and oriented, has given it the status of a sort of guide for paying attention to spaces, moments, operators and operations. It showed its validity both as a tool for exploration and analysis of various field of investigation and objects of research, while taking account of their singularity and their national contexts. At the same time, it went through the investigations like a concept to be elaborated, the contours of which remained to be specified and which had to be given consistency.
At the beginning of our research, differences in perspectives emerged which we need to recall here so as to take account of where we came from, which questions were asked and which paths were taken. From the beginning, translators were listened to, including operators which were as diverse as professions, competencies, scenes, objects, procedures and expertise. Nevertheless, the gamut of translators, the places they occupy and the roles they play, as well as the operations of translation they participate in, required specification and examination in their situations.
The investigation in Belgium on the undocumented led us to take account of organisations and networks with humanitarian and religious conceptions as translation milieus; one example is the Protestant Social Centre, which plays an active role among undocumented foreigners. Socio-artistic networks which develop artistic creativity for and with these foreigners, who are themselves producers of artistic creations and recognised as such, produce a translation milieu and give other versions of experience. But this role in translation milieus is reinterpreted, questioned during the scenes in which researchers or members of civil society share their experiences, their interpretations, discuss their conclusions and actions, of which they 'look for the meaning', and that they may help to change the functioning of and their way of seeing social realities.
The survey conducted in the Netherlands on young non-European foreigners who had dropped out of school led us to go beyond a conception of translation focusing upon teachers and professionals in education and social action who follow up and accompany these young immigrants. The translation milieu becomes the space for updating things which have not been specified by thought or influences of public or political discourses on modes of thought and analysis of educational milieus. Following investigation and upon the basis of its findings it can also become the space for expressing paradoxes and contradictions between perceptions and interpretations of the place and future of young immigrants in society by themselves or by professionals.
The investigation conducted in France on illiterates, who do not present themselves as a group and refuse to be marked, registered or rendered visible as illiterates, raised the question of milieus in which practices would or would not be translated into citizenship. Translation milieus as they were approached in this case are not formed around measures on behalf of the illiterate but upon the basis of the initiatives of the latter. They aim at becoming indistinct parts of society in which they take part, by maintaining networks and extending them on the basis of commercial and non-commercial exchanges. There is thus no pre-existing translation milieu which is delimited and fixed. Discovering translation milieus may mean exploring the locus of family bonds and social networks, social experiences and exchanges such as a 'protecting milieu' as much as a 'translating milieu'.
Translators who make it possible to translate initiatives and mobilisations into citizenship cannot be the only ones to be taken into account. Well intended modes of translation should be investigated. Acts, strategies through they manifest their ownership in the social space, whether indirectly or not, cannot be considered independently of the institutional systems with which they are in tension. Finally, concurrent translations which may take the form of cooperation, but also of conflict, controversy, or incomprehension, or other translations that do not aim at broadening citizenship, but to the contrary restricting it or even depriving people of it, should also be examined.
The investigation of the erased in Slovenia led researchers to wonder how the apparently administrative act of the pure and simple erasure of non-Slovenian Yugoslav citizens had been made possible. The description of the erasure and its effects in terms of translation milieus led to the analysis of the discourses which contributed to this or which subsequently were opposed to it while acting as vehicles for divergent ideologies. The approach in terms of translation milieus made it possible to show how these discourses refer to one another upon the basis of a higher hierarchical discourse. The hypothesis was that arguing this dominant discourse had become invisible and that its suppositions which defined what was or what was not a citizen following the break-up of Yugoslavia and the independence of Slovenia, were accepted by common sense without being questioned. Part of the investigation consisted in seeking out an unstated argumentative sequence, which is subsequently imposed not as a supposition but as an explicit fact. But the initial approach also became more complex with the compilation of substantial documentation throughout the investigation. This showed how, from an initial situation in which 'they were all citizens of Yugoslavia', a large variety of produced argumentative sequences were affected by other discourses, which led to inflections of the notion of translation milieus, related to the authors of the statement and towards understanding the intertextuality of the discourses.
Doing translations. These questions and approaches in each investigation made it possible to reconsider and reformulate what could act as a translation in such a situation or for such and such a population, from what, by whom, how and in which terms. They also made it possible to grasp the translation milieus which are not part of the usual repertory of scenes of democracy, public debate or recognised and instituted resources of public and social life. Finally, the formation of translation milieus was envisaged at the interface of worlds with different perspectives, the interpretations of which are in tension and interaction, at the conjunction of discourses, objects, and scenes in which they are made visible and invisible. This is the case of certain milieus which are both places and objects of perspectives and interpretations in interaction, of interconnections, negotiations and co-productions. Law, the city and language are thus considered to be translation milieus.
For undocumented foreigners in France, uses of law and rights in society are not limited to experts. Such uses unveil translation milieus that produce their own interpretations of the law and stress the uncertainty therein. These situations, these experiences and these measures of testing access to legal citizenship designate a multiplicity of practical procedures residing by legal, political, economic social or media supports which implement logics of interaction and coordination, alliances and conflicts, visibility and invisibility and complementarity. These use of law and of rights, which does not exclusively come from support groups, legal exports or mere representatives of the administration manifest tensions between various interpretations of citizenship. They also illuminate practices with their share of what is implicit, what cannot be said or is hidden and contradictory interests. Finally, they point to the need for and demand for new norms, as well as new forms of normative elaboration.
In the case of the kebab businesses, it is the city and its resources of urbanity that appear as the translation milieus to be explored. Thus, one must grasp how commercial offers are appreciated or not by those who go there, what type of contribution is recognised or attributed to them, to what extent their civility is referred to a common good of urbanity and not only private or community strategies for settlement. What is at stake through these approaches also is aimed measuring to what extent this quality is recognised or not, if it interferes and if it concerns institutions of the governance of agglomerations, both in their functions of maintaining public order and maintaining and promoting the quality of life of the urban dwellers.
In the case of identity checks in the public sphere and all the more in a train station, a place of passage and movement, it was suggested that the situation of checking identities by the police be observed as a translation milieu. Here, we can see the effects of a policing of citizenship with its instruments, with civil servants, their techniques of control and selecting people for controls, their files and interconnections, their forms of presence and management of situations in visible and tangible terms. However, this milieu is not only that of the police. The situation publicly shows what should happen discretely behind the scenes and outside the vision of the public. This milieu is not just that of the police doing its job. People being checked are a part of it, just as the public, passers-by who are more or less concerned with or indifferent to the scene. Beyond this, the train station itself is the translation milieu of citizenship.
Hybrid situations
The investigations presented in this work finally highlight a common notion designated by the term, hybrid situations. These situations are hybrid in many respects: in respect of legal citizenship, conception and enforcement of rights, configurations of actors, and scales set in given societies. They concern both individuals or groups that, in spite of being legal citizens, are not or feel not recognized as full citizens, and, conversely, individuals or groups that have not or have been deprived of legal citizenship and participate in the community all the same, feel or claim the right to be recognized as citizens not in the strictly formal framework of citizenship. Therefore, hybrid situations are about de facto or de jure citizenship that recognizes the right to be there and the droit de cite. Such citizenship and the rights attached to it are no longer just granted, claimed and gained, but are now also asserted, exercised, used and negotiated by a configuration of actors that do no longer stand in a face-to-face situation with the State or between experts and laymen. Individuals, groups, collective action groups, institutions and their representatives interact with each other in hybrid situations. Their schemes for action hinge on multiple interests, rules, norms and laws whose interpretations differ from one actor to another, and involve a varied range of scales and territories.
Hybridity stems from all these elements and their layouts in situations, and this is the content of such hybridity that our investigations aimed at showing and documenting. In each context and each situation, attention must be paid to forms of hybridity in order to be able to single out the actors and their cohabiting, cooperating, opposing or negotiating schemes for action, the competencies and the rules that result from joint production both in the realm of law and non law.
Situations in investigations then show that this droit de cité does not only depend upon a right acquired upon birth or through naturalisation, but is also obtained through work which is carried out in situations and contexts by mobilising actors, places, mediation and representations, according to social logics which have to be discovered and documented.
Inside and outside institutions. These situations may involve agents, operators and contexts which are on the one hand related to public or private institutions, which are supposed to take charge of the matters at hand in one way or the other. But on the other hand, they might also enlist persons, groups or their representatives (for instance in non-profit organisations or professional associations) who are immediately concerned with these issues and who take 'initiatives' on them, on their own behalf or on behalf of groups within the broader family or groups of peers. In the former case, there is a trend to apply instructions, established roles, and administrative or market logics; in the latter, there may be logics either of compliance or resistance to what is expected of an ordinary citizen, his or her conduct and his or her participation.
Institutions are no more disembodied than non-profit organisations. These organisations are implemented by workers or agents of the institution or the organisation, who depending upon the case at hand dispose of certain margins of manoeuvre for carrying out their function. By the same token, people involved who take initiatives are not totally outside all institutions. They have to come to terms with the 'harder' or softer aspects of rules and law, and must find forms of accommodation throughout the constraints with which they are confronted, for if not they incur risks of exclusion.
Thus, networks of ramification are woven, which are also hybrids and bring together heterogeneous human and non-human elements, files, agendas, techniques, meetings, regulations, legal provisions, economic and urban constraints, etc. Moreover, these hybrid situations are contextualised and are to be found in places, over durations, and in frameworks which leave their mark on both the material and symbolic formatting of the situations at hand. In this respect, elements from the strict reference to law (such as the case of the erased in Slovenia) or other more ideological or political elements (such as the existence of a nationalist current of opinion) may contribute to the concrete formatting of hybrid situations.
Hybrid expertise. The hybrid character of situations also concerns the knowledge and competencies at hand. There too, knowledge which is elaborated in an original way, depending upon a great level of technicality (for instance in law or medicine) can cohabit with practical knowledge or the hands-on approach described in French by the expression, 'savoir-y-faire' (to take on a distinction made by G. Delbos, 1983), which does not necessarily requires academic training, even if 'profane' or lay knowledge is as much a repository of abstraction and rationality as expert knowledge (Wynne, op. cit.). What also characterises this knowledge in hybrid situations is that they are not necessarily unequivocally attached to 'bearers' of knowledge. We may, in this respect, refer to a logic of distributed knowledge, depending upon the context, and vis-à-vis which laypersons may adopt the position of experts and experts the position of laypersons (Cahiers Profacity n°6, 2011 ; Battegay A., Coelho O., Vaz H., 2012).
How are varying types of expert and lay knowledge combined and linked in these fields which have been investigated? Are they practiced separately or are they distributed over various members of a family, of a group marked by interiority, networks of mutual assistance, or professional or political support groups? Are they mobilised homogenously and continuously, or are they differentiated according to embedded time sequences? In the field of the deaf, the investigation shows how the different models of taking charge (medically or socio-anthropologically) do not mobilise the same forms of expertise, both from the vantage of the medical corps and that of the families or the deaf persons themselves. Not only do we see that we are not dealing with the same forms of expertise, but we are not dealing with the same combinations of expertise. In the field of rights to urban recognition, forms of initiatives tend to mobilise the entrepreneurial competencies which are confronted with legal, economic, financial and business issues, but also require the capacities to occupy visual positions in the public arena on sensitive issues and make attractive commercial propositions.
Between positions and discourse. Hybridity, in the situations examined in this work, may finally apply to the duality of positions and discourse. Persons and/ or operators engaged in these situations are so engaged in various positions and in various capacities, including the researchers who are conducting the investigation. The discourse and points of view which have been collected during this investigation are marked by differences in positioning. It is thus fair to talk of a distribution of points of view. But mapping points of view is complex. There may be relations of power between places, and this may be translated in proceedings established upon the basis of situations - effects of authority or influence, the imposition of silence on certain aspects, shameful or unspeakable areas, spaces of revelation, etc. There may also be distortions between an expected and an expressed viewpoint, discrepancies between places occupied and positions taken, and between explicit and implicit forms of partiality.
B - Main scientific results
Surveys of the different case studies designed were carried out by appealing to a mix of different research disciplines, and by using the concepts of profane citizenship and translation milieus that could apply to those situations and experiences differently. The surveys resulted in contextualized definitions of profane citizenship in the light of experiences and operations. Firstly, we will describe the contours of these contextualized interpretations by showing how the concept of profane citizenship was interpreted, and what was the heuristic, methodological, documentary, and conceptual profit from the research strategy. Secondly, we will present several models of profane citizenship whose construction was fuelled by those surveys. These models should account for rather theoretical work proposals than set paradigms. Thirdly, in this concluding section, we will present configurations of translation milieus that emerged from our research approaches of contextualized profane citizenship. Finally, we will address the relation between science, making sense, and citizenship. In this respect, we will not intend to establish any normative scientific posture or normative theory of knowledge as far as profane citizenship is concerned. We will raise open-ended questions at work within and between the different investigations carried out in the framework of PROFACITY.
Interpretations of profane citizenship
The notion of profane citizenship was understood and reinterpreted in various ways in the investigations which were carried out. Nevertheless, in their approach and conceptualisation, all researchers regarded as pertinent the fact that profane citizenship made it possible to deviate from the purely legal conception so as to conceive of citizenship or forms of citizenship which were at work. They also retained the need to eliminate an ambiguity which links the idea of profane citizenship to the understanding of experiences of 'vulnerable groups'. Such an association might let us believe that the notion of profane citizenship is only limited to 'vulnerable' groups which for various reasons are on the margins of legal citizenship, and that it essentially designates the practices through which these 'groups' assert their participation in and contribution to the life of the polis in contrast to or apart from legal definitions of citizenship.
Profane citizenship in models
From these investigations, or as an echo of them, several proposals of models of profane citizenship were sketched out. Here, we shall try to present four, treating them less as definitive models than as possible ways of giving form to the prolongation of the investigations and their contributions. This gamut of interpretations can be described as being limited on the one hand by the approaches of profane citizenship which attempt at least to fix the contents and delimit the contours, and on the other hand by conceptions that turn profane citizenship into a heuristic category of methodology as much as of analysis, opening up to the understanding of singular forms of participating in the life of the polis.
Profane citizenship and translation milieus
In hybrid situations in which forms of citizenship are experienced or tested, translations take place which initiate, accompany or participate in profane interpretations of citizenship. These processes of translation of citizenship, carried out upon the initiative of actors which go beyond the usual, official or institutional non-profit organisations, intermediaries or interlocutors for the concerned groups and individuals, are activated by a number of operators and operations, which have effects of requalification or disqualification in tension with official citizenships. At the end of this route in various fields of investigation, the configuration and scope of these translation milieus and the profane interpretations of citizenship they produce can be specified.
Making science and making meaning: one of the stakes of what is profane in citizenship
The contours of profane citizenship and translation milieus as they have been sketched here leave the paths of contagion or democratic appropriation uncertain. It is true that the idea emerges that these paths are not in a direct linear relationship: they do not follow paths which have been traced by intermediaries who would make products of experience pass from bottom to top or from top to bottom, and the translators who play a role in transformations of citizenship are confused neither with professionals, nor with non-profit organisations. Nevertheless, several positions are emerging through these investigations as to how science and meaning can be made in the problematics of profane citizenship. For the notion of profane citizenship involves at least four aspects, which appear to be remote from one another but which are present in this work, sometimes in the form of mutual tension.
Potential Impact:
A - Policy advice and policy implications
In order to sketch the possible policy implications that could be drawn from the PROFACITY project, it is necessary to reiterate its main focus: 'profane citizenship' referred to the different ways the actual concept of citizenship could be transformed by actions of people who are considered as 'profane' - i.e. without an expertise concerning the situation they experienced - and are excluded from regular rights or barred partial access to take part in society and to contribute to it. Profane citizenship was therefore not so much a well-defined state of citizenship, but rather a continuing process of reflecting on and of (re)constructing current forms of citizenship, a process based on the actions of persons organising their 'rights to have rights' where these rights seemed to be missing or to be out of reach.
In the PROFACITY research project, by dealing with different matters varying from illegality to deafness, we developed three lines concerning policy implications that could be inferred from such a perspective:
-The first line is to look at the national level and the EU level for the necessary support of new constructions of citizenship by deploying experts and by reconsidering expertise in a different way.
- The second line concerns the establishment of so-called translation milieus (translating environments), in which experts and non-experts, citizens and non-citizens cooperate in varying ways in order to develop new forms of knowledge and create innovative practices of citizenship, and their role in stimulating, sustaining the empowerment of the actors concerned.
- The third line concerns the policy implications that could be formulated regarding the (scientific) methods ('sensing') used to enhance the involvement of experts and non-experts, citizens and non-citizens in research practices, which also includes the research strategy, in hybrid situations, to take account of the lesser visible actions that are contributing to new forms of citizenship.
Some guidelines could be elaborated and refined in connection with PROFACITY.
One of the main findings was that scientific or professional experts should not have dominated when attempting to resolve questions of exclusion or marginality, in short, about forms of citizenship, but they should have been part of the problem to be analysed. Expertise or specialized knowledge was involved in the construction of the boundaries between normality and deviance, between belonging and exclusion. These implications had to be disentangled, and only then could these experts reflect on their role as contributing or not to the policies and the practices of (non-)experts/(non-)citizens, and could their actions be heard and be included in the knowledge base of science and policy. However, such a change was not sufficient.
B - Main dissemination activities and exploitation of results
Scientific dissemination
This book closes the PROFACITY program, whose publication accepted by a scientific committee will be published in French and English. The first chapter presents different approaches to "profane in Citizenship," and explains how the notion of profane citizenship and concepts associated with translation milieus and hybrid situations have been formalized to serve as a benchmark in defining and conducting investigations. The following sections highlight four nodes and transversal questions from situations and experiences that formed the sites of investigation.
Sensing dissemination
'As an experiment in evaluating social science research, and in the PROFACITY context, the Sensing procedure was established as a concept that engendered interesting results even though the Consortium's partners criticized Sensing in the first place. This conclusion will overview the research results as against the objectives initially put forward in the PROFACITY Work Plan and the questions therein.
Can Sensing be seen as or become a new methodological approach in the humanities? If so, how does it help, as the first objective to be addressed during WP5, to interpret the degree of reactions of the translation milieus?
Even though not all the consortiums partners interpreted and/or developed the Sensing procedure in the same way, the inclusion of 'sensing' in PROFACITY did engender new ways of:
-getting into contact with research participants;
-doing research as such; and
-challenging and supplementing prevailing feedback procedures.
List of Websites:
http://www.profacity.eu/
http://joaoms.com/profacity>
http://www2.imageurs.com/test/profa/>
http://www.25images.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr>
