Conceptualizing Citizenship in History: an Inquiry into the Nature of the Discipline of History and its Link to the Social Sciences between 1990-2010.

Abstract

This MA thesis focuses on the use of citizenship in the historical discipline. We analysed 43 articles, published in 6 different journals, and compared the use of the concept of citizenship between different subdisciplines and geographical regions. To do this we formulated three branches - a social, a geographical and a personal - which function as the analytical framework for analyzing the primary sources. We found that in some cases the use of the concept of citizenship in the historical discipline has changed over the period 1990-2010, due to the influence of the social sciences. Especially continental scholars that have a background in social and/or economic history are more likely to use newer concepts of citizenship, which originated from the social sciences. However, most of the articles in this study use a traditional or ‘mixed’ concept, which was not derived from the interdisciplinary field of citizenship studies.