Anna Björk, MA
Ph.D. Candidate
Political Science
Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy
University of Jyväskylä
E-mail: anna.k.bjork@jyu.fi
Research interests
Ph.D. project “The politics of citizenship tests: Time, integration and the contingent polity”
My Ph.D. dissertation (forthcoming 2011) assesses the widely adopted practice of citizenship tests from the rhetorical point of view. The tests are seen as a forum for politicking with national narratives rather than actually testing anything apart from the candidate’s literacy and short-term memory. The study approaches the political language used for debating this practice from a temporal angle, through which one of the central concepts of the debates, “integration”, is problematised. The primary material is taken from the Hessian state parliament, in which citizenship testing was debated as a potential option for reforming the naturalisation legislation. The analysis of these debates is further linked with the academic commentaries on the tests taking place in other countries. The “politics of time” aspect is applied throughout the study into these sources.