Joe Biden’s presidential victory has brought temporary relief for many undocumented and mixed-status families in the US. Biden promised to reverse several of Trump’s executive orders on immigration and refugee policy within his first 100 days in office including reinstating the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, ending the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) also known as “Remain in Mexico,” and creating a “road map” to citizenship for the approximate 10.5 million undocumented immigrants in the US. While Biden’s immigration agenda contains federal and local level priorities, little emphasis has yet been placed on the bilateral scale with the US’s southern neighbour, Mexico. Yet, bilateral immigration negotiations should be a priority for administrations on both sides of the border. In …

My new book Cultural Citizenship in India: Politics, Power, and Media (Oxford University Press, 2016) analyses the role which cultural participation, understood in terms of media representation, plays for citizenship. Drawing on the hypothesis of Mitra (2012), that citizenship is a two-dimensional concept, comprising of a legal right to the soil and a moral affiliation to it, the book explores the question of the ways in which people ‘belong’ to a nation as citizens. Based on the assumption that the nation is an imagined community created through discourse (Anderson, 1983), the moral side of citizenship is understood in cultural terms, and in analogy to the two-dimensional model noted above, is explored in terms of the rights and duties granted to groups …