Children’s prosthetic citizenship as ‘here-and-now’, ‘not-yet’ and ‘not-here’. the case of the mobile preschool

Using the case of the mobile preschool we focus on how children’s prosthetic citizenship is constructed in relation to notions of mobility and place in the accounts of Swedish mobile preschool professionals. Mobile preschools are preschools in buses that visit different places in and around the city on an everyday basis. Analysis of interviews and workshop discussions with mobile preschool professionals shows how three different conceptualisations of children’s ‘proper’ citizenship operate in parallel in these accounts – children as ‘not-yet-citizens’, children as ‘not-here-citizens’ and children as ‘here-and-now-citizens’. These different conceptualisations are constructed in relation to the everyday mobility of the mobile preschool and notions of places as more or less beneficial for children’s proper future and Swedish citizenship, and reveal how mobility is not only a consequence of citizenship relations but also constitutive of them. This paper contributes to knowledge on how mobility and notions of place constitute ideas on citizenship, and how forms and geographies of mobility produce subjects as more or less citizen.