James Holston

James Holston is a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is affiliated with UC Berkeley's Department of Anthropology, where his work focuses on urban anthropology and the politics of citizenship.

Holston's primary ethnographic research site is Brazil, particularly São Paulo. He has conducted extensive fieldwork there on urban peripheries, legal rights, and the emergence of new forms of democratic citizenship among marginalized urban populations.

"Insurgent Citizenship," published by Princeton University Press in 2008, analyzes how residents of Brazil's urban peripheries created new forms of legal and political membership outside the formal channels of the state. Holston argues that these grassroots struggles have reshaped the meaning of citizenship in modern Brazil.

Holston uses the term to describe how urban residents in Brazil mobilize outside established legal frameworks to claim land, housing, and civil rights, thereby generating new conceptions of democratic citizenship. The concept highlights how citizenship is not simply granted by the state but actively produced through grassroots struggle.