Disaffective citizenship: EU citizens and (non-)naturalisation in the context of Brexit

This paper proposes the concept of disaffective citizenship as the resistance to the affective project of citizenship. By referring to the ways in which research participants resisted or deviated from the affective project in Brexit Britain, we develop a new concept to understand negative affect and resistance to affective governance. We put together data from semi-structured interviews conducted with EU citizens in Britain during and after Brexit, which stem from our independent but complementary projects. Our approach contributes to literature on governmentality and the politics of citizenship, broadening the scope of scholarship on affective citizenship and deepening its relations with the naturalisation process, the political context and the uses of citizenship.