Citizenship beyond the normative script: young immigrants’ volunteering as a practice of ‘citizenship from below’

Immigrant volunteering is usually absent from the debate on the reconfiguration of citizenship ‘from below’. Indeed, it has been generally considered a conservative force, if anything, an instrument of fuller integration. Building on 25 interviews with young migrant volunteers, this paper aims to fill this gap. It shows that, even if immigrant volunteering may reinforce some conventional categorizations, it achieves the primary result of showing that people with an immigrant background deserve to be fully recognized as citizens. Moreover, voluntary work appears to shape how young immigrants perceive both their belonging and citizenship in a way that defies restrictive politics of belonging and traditional conceptions of citizenship.