RC21 CONFERENCE 2013
Resourceful cities
Berlin (Germany), 29-31 August 2013
Humboldt-University Berlin, Institute for Social Science, Dept. for Urban and Regional Sociology
Variations of Urban Citizenship and the Struggle for Migrant Rights. Exploring the inextricable connection between institutional landscapes and political agency in the city
This session aims at exploring the relationship between (variations of) urban citizenship regimes and urban struggles for migrants’ rights. As Michael Peter Smith and Michael McQuarrie have recently pointed out in their book on ‚Remaking Urban Citizenship’, struggles for ‘the right to the city’ are inextricably connected to the institutional landscape that shapes, advances or constraints claims for rights and recognition. This is especially true for migrants who, on one hand, are targeted with a range of governmental strategies regulating their rights and obligations as non-citizens or citizens with an ‘ethnic/migrant background’; and who, on the other hand, actively engage in the process of building new institutions and developing strategies in order to ‘incorporate themselves’ and channel their claims into the political arena. This involves grassroots organizing and political mobilization, alliance building among local stakeholders, access to public resources, media, politicians and policy makers, to name just a few elements. On a more fundamental level, this process also shapes the movements of migration, the constitution of migrants as a (political) group in the city, and the formation and fragmentation of interests and identities among migrants and residents alike. Variations in citizenship regimes, in turn, also have to be understood as the result of historically and place specific struggles for ‘citizenship from below’ or ‘insurgent citizenship’ (James Holston). Hence, in this session we want to follow a ‘practice oriented’ approach and explore the local specificities of struggles for migrant rights within the broader framework of ‘political agency and urban citizenship regimes’ in comparative perspective. Lead questions and points for the discussion include (but are not limited to):
- How do different urban citizenship regimes effect the advancement of claims for migrants’ rights?
- What areas and themes are crucial in this field – education, housing, health, etc. – and can we identify historically, nationally or locally specific patterns of migrant struggles for rights, different claims, addresses and institutions?
- How do migrant struggles shape the formation of specific citizenship regimes?
- What kind of claims can be advanced through different institutional set-ups, and how do specific urban citizenship regimes pre-structure the formation of claims?
- Can we identify institutional landscapes that are able to support and advance strong bottom-up organization for migrants’ rights in the city?
- Which role do urban citizenship regimes play for the constitution and also for the fragmentation of interest groups and collective identities?
- And how do urban citizenship regimes and local struggles for migrants’ rights relate to social movements, institutions, laws and regulations on other scales?
We invite applications for papers that present an empirically driven analysis of the questions at stake, and we encourage comparative work that contrasts urban citizenship regimes in various cities and countries. Presentations will last for 10-15 minutes, followed by discussion.
Session Organizers
Prof. Sabine Hess, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Institut für Kulturanthropologie/Europäische Ethnologie, Heinrich-Düker-Weg 14, 37073 Göttingen, T: +49 551 39 25349, E: sabine.hess@phil.uni-goettingen.de
Dr. Henrik Lebuhn, HU Berlin, ISW, Stadt- und Regionalsoziologie, Unter den Linden 6, 10099 Berlin, T: +49 (03) 20934157, E: henrik.lebuhn@sowi.hu-berlin.de
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