Statelessness Working Paper Series No. 2015/04 in an equal manner.31 I want to suggest that only attaching significance to this kind of speech and action overlooks alternative ways of claim making, as political acts, which sit outside of normative practices but can nevertheless be interpreted as acts of citizenship. ‘Acts of Citizenship’ is a concept popularised in the book by the same title edited by Isin and Nielsen32 that queries existing notions of citizenship as only a “formal and enduring legal and political status within the boundaries of representative democracy and the (nation) state”.33 Conversely, acts of citizenship create actors and scenes where subjects who may not be citizens can enact themselves as if they were. These acts, which may not be intentional, produce what Isin and Nelson call ‘activist citizens’.34 In contrast to active citizens who act out a previously written script such as voting, taxpaying and enlisting, activist citizens participate in writing scripts creating and acting in a scene. Just as the nature of citizenship expressed as political membership finds its meaning in the answerability of an action, so too acts of citizenship are inherently intersubjective and dialogical.35 Consequently this interconnectedness allows non-citizens to join a body politic. The case study of Preah Thnov demonstrates how a Christian school became a new site36 of contestation and belonging. The scale37 of this contestation stretched across global boundaries and both the new site and the scale of contestation were produced by acts of citizenship. Acknowledging acts of citizenship is important when thinking about the issue of statelessness as they point towards strategies of ‘everyday resistance’;38 creative and innovative deeds that increase the possibility of people being able to constitute themselves as citizens who are heard in public, and provoke dialogue on issues39. The next section will illustrate this point. 4. Case Study: Preah Thnov Since 2012 I have had communication with a community of Vietnamese living in Preah Thnov, a village in Cambodia. Children of Preah Thnov with undetermined nationality who cannot afford the bribes and payments to teachers are denied access to Cambodian schools. In 2014 I conducted a one month pilot study using participant observation and semi structured interviews to research the ‘capacity to aspire’40 amongst the children of Preah Thnov. Further fieldwork is being undertaken at present for my PhD thesis. During my time in Preah Thnov I observed the daily lives of the children, in particular their behaviour at a school established and run by Vietnamese volunteers who provided free education to the children. The school was attended by around 100 children a day, some as young as three years old, most coming from Preah Thnov. The children were split into three sections: Kindergarten, middle 31 Isin & Nielsen (n 4). ibid. 33 H Oosterhuis, ‘Book Review: Engin F Isin, Greg M Nielsen (eds.), Acts of Citizenship, London and New York, Zed Books.’ [2009] Medical history 605 <http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0025727300000697> accessed 21 November 2015. 34 Isin (n 9). 35 A Reinach, ‘The Apriori Foundations of Civil Law’ (1983) 3 Aletheia 1-142. 36 “The fields of contestation around which certain issues, interests, stakes as well as themes, concepts and objects assemble”, Isin (n 9) 370. 37 “The scopes of applicability that is appropriate to these fields of contestation. When we use already existing categories such as states, nations, cities, sexualities and ethnicities, we inevitably deploy them as ‘containers’ with fixed and given boundaries. By contrast, when we begin with ‘sites’ and ‘scales’ we refer to fluid and dynamic entities that are formed through contests and struggles, and their boundaries become a question of empirical determination” ibid. 38 JC Scott & BJ Kerkvliet, Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance in South-East Asia (Frank Cass 1986). 39 Oosterhuis (n 33). 40 A Appadurai, ‘The Capacity to Aspire’ in V Rao & M Walton (eds.), Culture and Public Action (Stanford University Press 2004). 32 4