From Citizenship to Belonging

Abstract When speaking to participants in our UK fieldwork in 2021–2022, citizenship was important but mainly thought of in terms of a formal, legal phenomenon. When talking about tax, participants seemed more comfortable speaking of belonging. An abductive approach was used to make sense of what the participants told us. Fiscal citizenship, which is where this project started, is used by scholars to capture rights and obligations associated with payment of taxes, often by reference to the social contract. Belonging, however, appears to us to be a richer concept with which to explore fiscal relations, in this case for middle-class professional immigrants to the UK.