Programme Leaders: Jan Willem Duyvendak and Christian Bröer.

Under conditions of increased mobility, globalising production and consumption, informalisation and the emergence of new political contestations, people value their world in new ways. What's more, they find themselves positioned differently in it, often unequally. 

The Citizenship & Culture programme group examines how globalisation and economic transformations, demographic changes and welfare state restructuring have given rise to many new factors. These include class differentials, social and health risks, cultural hierarchies and deliberations and conflicts over citizenship and belonging in Western nation-states, particularly in urban neighbourhoods. To understand these changes, the group combines work on numerous sociologies - sociology of citizenship, of the welfare state, of risk, of emotion, of social movements along with urban sociology, migration sociology and cultural sociology.

Using a range of analytic and interpretive approaches, the group analyses how these changes affect social structures concerning class, gender, religion, sexuality and ethnicity, and how they translate into the spatial make-up of cities in advanced economies. A shared aim is to convey how people locate themselves and others in new social hierarchies, how emotions are managed, how people create meaningful places and how they protect or expand their rights. Of interest are possible articulations or conflicts between the various aspects of citizenship. The programme group investigates the work and impact of cultural analysts - ranging from journalists to fashion designers - in a transnational perspective. Researched, too, is the interplay between the management of health, risks, trust and citizens' active involvement. The group includes specialists in mixed methods, interviewing, ethnography, participant observation, case studies, discourse analysis, comparative studies and much more.