Phenomenology of the stop: street-level bureaucracy and everyday citizenship of marginalized groups
| Author | Muhammad Azfar Nisar |
| Date | 01 June 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0020852318776363 |
| Published date | 01 June 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
International
Review of
Administrative
Sciences
Phenomenology of
the stop: street-level
bureaucracy and
everyday citizenship
of marginalized groups
Muhammad Azfar Nisar
Suleman Dawood School of Business, Lahore University of
Management Sciences, Pakistan
Abstract
Limited access to public space for marginalized groups remains an understudied theme
in citizenship research in public administration. To address this important research gap,
using ethnographic research methods, this article investigates the influence of street-
level policing on the everyday citizenship of the Khawaja Sira – a marginalized gender-
queer group in Pakistan. Everyday citizenship is conceptualized as the inalienable, equal
right of every citizen to be present, visible, and mobile in the public space of a polity.
The discussion highlights that through selective implementation of law, hyper-
surveillance and moral policing, frontline workers can contribute to curtailing the
citizenship of marginalized social groups. Theoretical and practical implications that
underscore the intersections of mobility, everyday spaces and administrator–citizen
interactions are also discussed.
Points for practitioners
•Through selective implementation of law, hyper-surveillance and moral policing, front-
line workers can contribute to curtailing the citizenship of marginalized social groups.
•Access to public space is often disproportionately denied to marginalized social
groups like the members of the LGBT community.
Corresponding author:
Muhammad Azfar Nisar, Suleman Dawood School of Business, Lahore University of Management Sciences,
Sector U, DHA Lahore 54792, Pakistan.
Email: azfar.nisar@lums.edu.pk
International Review of Administrative
Sciences
2020, Vol. 86(2) 316–332
!The Author(s) 2018
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0020852318776363
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•The frontline workers of various departments should be educated about the unique
identity and requirements of marginalized groups to improve street-level ser-
vice delivery.
Keywords
LGBT, policing, public space, street-level bureaucracy
[I]f citizenship is to mean anything in an everyday sense it should mean the ability of
individuals to occupy public spaces in a manner that does not compromise their self-
identity, let alone obstruct, threaten or even harm them more materially. If people
cannot be present in public spaces ... without feeling uncomfortable, victimized and
basically ‘out of place’, then it must be questionable whether or not these people can
be regarded as citizens at all. (Painter and Philo, 1995: 115)
Citizenship research represents one of the central lines of inquiry where the debate
over the legitimacy of public administration (PA) and its relationship with the
public has unfolded over the last four decades. While it has provided important
insights, with some notable exceptions (e.g. Epp et al., 2014), PA research on
citizenship has remained focused on public participation and/or bureaucratic
behavior in formal institutional spaces. Little attention has so far been given to
citizenship within everyday public spaces and its relation to administrative praxis.
While limited PA research has focused on this topic, scholars in other disciplines
have shown that unequal access to space is both an important determinant, and a
critical consequence of, social marginalization (Massey, 1994; Painter and Philo,
1995). Research has illustrated that marginalized groups face material and sym-
bolic exclusion by the dominant social groups limiting their everyday citizenship –
defined here as the inalienable, equal right of every citizen to be present, visible,
and mobile in the public space of a polity. Understanding the experiences of such
individuals, especially in relation to street-level bureaucrats (Lipsky, 1980) imple-
menting urban and spatial laws is an important, yet understudied, aspect of citi-
zenship research in PA.
To address this important gap in previous research, in this article I analyze the
interactions between the Khawaja Sira – a group of genderqueer individuals in
Pakistan – and street-level bureaucrats in everyday urban spaces of Pakistan. My
approach in this article is loosely based on Ahmad’s (2006) queer phenomenology
of ‘being stopped’. Ahmad (2006: 133) notes that a ‘phenomenology of “being
stopped” might take us in a different direction than one that begins with motility,
with a body that “can do” by flowing into space’. Such an analysis further requires
Nisar 317
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