Citizenship: Personal Lives and Social Policy adds a new dimension to the citizenship literature by using citizenship as a lens through which to explore the relation between personal lives and social policy. This book focuses on the following domains to consider some of the dimensions of the lived practices and experiences of citizenship: the 'high moment' of working-class citizenship that was embodied in the post-war welfare state; the conflicts and anxieties experienced by children and parents in the transition to secondary school and the struggle of refugees and asylum seekers to gain right of residence in the UK and the possibility of building a new life. The authors draw upon a range of theoretical perspectives, including feminist, psychoanalytic and Marxist, to explore what citizenship can tell us about the ways in which personal lives not only are shaped by social policy, but can become the site from which some of the exclusions embedded in social policy and welfare practice are contested.
