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‘Living Rights’, rights claims, performative citizenship and young people – the right to vote in the Scottish independence referendum

Sanghera, Gurchathen; Botterill, Katherine; Hopkins, Peter; Arshad, Rowena

Authors

Gurchathen Sanghera

Katherine Botterill

Peter Hopkins

Rowena Arshad



Abstract

This paper examines the rights claims-making that young people engaged in during the 2014 Scottish independence referendum when the right to vote was extended to 16- and 17-year-olds for the first time in the UK. Understanding citizenship and rights claims-making as performative, we draw on the novel idea of ‘living rights’ to explore how young people ‘shape what these rights are – and become – in the social world’. They are coexistent and situated within the everyday lives of young people, and transcend the traditional idea that rights are merely those that are enshrined in domestic and/or international law. We explore the complex and contested nature of rights claims that were made by young people as ‘active citizens’ in the lead up to the referendum to illustrate how the rights claims-making by young people is bound up with the performativity of citizenship that entails identity construction, political subjectivity (that challenges adultcentric approaches) and social justice.

Citation

Sanghera, G., Botterill, K., Hopkins, P., & Arshad, R. (2018). ‘Living Rights’, rights claims, performative citizenship and young people – the right to vote in the Scottish independence referendum. Citizenship Studies, 22(5), 540-555. https://doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2018.1484076

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date May 31, 2018
Online Publication Date Jun 18, 2018
Publication Date Jun 18, 2018
Deposit Date Jun 5, 2018
Publicly Available Date Mar 29, 2024
Journal Citizenship Studies
Print ISSN 1362-1025
Electronic ISSN 1469-3593
Publisher Routledge
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 22
Issue 5
Pages 540-555
DOI https://doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2018.1484076
Keywords Citizenship; claims-making; living rights; performativity; referendum; right to vote
Public URL http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/1196637

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Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
© 2018 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.







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