THE POLITICS OF WAITING FOR CITIZENSHIP: EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCES OF SINGLE PERMANENT RESIDENTS IN SINGAPORE

Abstract

Citizenship and waiting are multidisciplinary concepts that have advanced over time. This thesis valorises emotional aspects of citizenship to destabilise citizenship as governance. As the literature on citizenship and its emotional logic converges upon the analysis of transnational families and citizens or foreigners, this thesis fills the empirical gap by examining the emotional experiences of single permanent residents (PRs). Furthermore, geographical engagements with waiting have recently emerged but remain relatively neglected. To embolden the intersections of citizenship and waiting, this thesis explains how PRs and their liminality provide an empirical bridge between the sub-disciplines. This thesis seeks to interrogate how emotions constitute the everyday lives of single PRs vis-à-vis state approaches. Employing the politics of waiting as an analytical lens, it aims to glean new insights on the geographies of citizenship through examining PRs’ emotional experiences when they are placed in a state-defined space of waiting for citizenship. Using discourse analysis, it uncovers how waiting can be used to understand state discourses on PRs. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to investigate emotional experiences associated with citizenship and waiting. Respondents were narrowed to young, highly skilled and single PRs to explore how economically-desirable transnational singles emotionally respond to state-sanctioned immigration policies in view of transnational familial constraints, if any. This thesis argues that the metaphorical space of waiting is relationally produced as incomplete, agential and conflicted. State discourses cast PRs as incomplete citizens-in-waiting, situated in a liminal passage along the linear pathway to citizenship. This disenfranchisement has emotional manifestations, which single PRs negotiate to produce an agential space of waiting despite familial constraints. By illuminating the relational abstract border that partitions incompletion/completion, this thesis asserts the space of waiting as conflicted, where the co-existence of incompletion and agency calls for a reconciliation of governance and emotional experiences in the geographies of citizenship.