Abstracts accepted in English.
Olivia Casagrande
Viola Castellano
Viola.Castellano@uni-bayreuth.de
Nir Cohen
Tatiana Fogelman
Fabio Vanin
This dual session brings together presentations and discussions that examine cities’ centrality in fostering inclusiveness and equity but also in entrenching exclusion and marginalization. Despite embracing a multi- and inter-scalar understanding of citizenship and borderlands, we focus specifically on urban citizenship and urban borderlands due to increased and – from the perspective of everyday life – decisive relevance in contemporary politics of rights and belonging.
The first session focuses on the making and unmaking of migrant urban citizenship in (post)-pandemic times. Urban citizenship has become a productive lens through which to think the contentious spatial politics in the age of neoliberal urbanism. This in particularly true in struggles involving international migrants. Indeed, their precarious status motivated much of the early work that sought to replace legal conceptualizations of citizenship as contingent upon national status with everyday agent-based articulations of urban-residence-based rights. Studies have focused on the embeddedness of migrant citizenship in the ordinariness and everydayness of urban life, but also on their struggles at times of slow emergencies just as much as broader crises. The latter often make opportune moments for new practices of solidarity and help transform ideas about migrant belonging in the city but might be both exceptional and/or prove unsustainable. Worse still, crises situations may be used by sociopolitical agents as fitting contexts within which to push for further erosion of migrants’ right to the city. Taking the notion of crisis critically, in this session we seek contributions that speak to the overarching nexus of migrant urban citizenship and “crises”. We encourage ‘traditional’ paper presentations, but also other, more performative presentations centering on topics such as digitalization of (urban) migration governance, urban political contestations and conflicts migrant sexual citizenship in the city, public arts and performances of urban citizenship, and the role of NGOs and other actors in the making of migrant urban citizenship.
The second session addresses ‘urban borderlands’ as an analytical key concept for collaborative research practices at the crossroad of geography, urbanism, and anthropology, focusing on their complex socio-spatial configurations, investigating the physical, social, and symbolic aspects they entail. During the last years, the concepts of ‘border’ and ‘borderlands’ have become key within both geographical and anthropological studies focusing on frontier, migration, nationalism and (in)security. Yet, the most interesting feature of borderlands is the entanglement of their imaginative and concrete aspects, and the interdisciplinary shift required to grasp their complexity. Not to be conceived of only as national frontiers and geopolitical borders, ‘borderlands’ represent spaces of friction, encounter, and tension, which can be found also in the inner territories and the urban realm, unfolding their multi-scalar and social production. The thematic session aims at discussing methodological and theoretical tools to investigate ‘urban borderlands’ with a focus on their transactional nature and the urban areas. Those are spaces that can include physical divides, areas of transition, tension, mixture and negotiation and spaces that are lived and perceived as borders. We welcome analysis/studies/papers on how fractures are produced, reproduced, and overcome leading to processes of exclusion, marginalization and precaritization endured by certain population groups, looking at the same time at ‘urban borderlands’ as potential laboratories for new modes of coexistence.