Cultivating Membership in Taiwan and Beyond

This book argues that relational citizenship articulates relational membership for individuals, not as a status granted from the state, but as a multilayered interactive process centered on connections to multifaceted histories, peoples, institutions, and future paths. This theory offers strategies to rethink how belongingness is accomplished.

Citizenship is traditionally viewed as a legal status to be possessed. Cultivating Membership in Taiwan and Beyond: Relational Citizenship proposes the concept of relational citizenship to articulate the value-laden, interactive nature of belongingness. Hsin-I Cheng examines the role of relationality which produces and is a product of localized emotions. Cheng attends to particular histories and global trajectories embedded within uneven power relations. By focusing on Taiwan, a non-Western society with a tradition to adeptly attune to local experiences and those from various global influences, relational citizenship highlights the measures used to define and encourage interactions with newcomers. This book shows the multilayered communicative processes in which relations are gradually created, challenged, merged, disrupted, repaired, and solidified. Cheng further argues that this concept is not bound to nation-state geographic boundaries as relationality bleeds through national borders. Relational citizenship has the potential to move beyond the East vs. West epistemology to examine peoples’ lived realities wherein the sense of belonging is discursively accomplished, viscerally experienced, and publicly performed.

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Multiculturalism, Communication, and Critical Citizenship Studies

Chapter 1: Taiwan—Hybridity of Intercultural Practices

Chapter 2: Relational Citizenship as a Communication Strategy for National Identity and Border

Management

Chapter 3: Citizens as Relational Partners

Chapter 4: Embodied Relational Citizenship in the Public: Place, Visibility, and Emotions

Chapter 5: Relational Citizenship Beyond Taiwan–the United States

Conclusion: Relational Framework in Communicating About Citizenship

Bibliography