Upcoming events
Call for Papers ESA Conference 2024 in Porto – Portugal, 27–30 August 2024
Enacting solidarity and citizenship across social fields and scales
Research Stream 08
Submission deadline: extended until January 29, 2024
Coordinators:
Martin Bak Jørgensen, Aalborg University, Denmark, martinjo@ikl.aau.dk
Sarah Schilliger, University of Bern, Switzerland, sarah.schilliger@unibe.ch
Helge Schwiertz, University of Hamburg, helge.schwiertz@uni-hamburg.de
In the last two decades, the multiplication of crises has increased the challenges for Europe: While the nation-states dominating the European project have hardly been able to find adequate responses to the turmoil, new forms of practicing solidarity and citizenship have been growing at the local level. In this Research Stream, we therefore address contemporary local, city-based initiatives and their responses to the poly-crises. We start from the assumption that research addressing the local scale and its multi-scalar entanglements can help address the pressing challenges of our time. Focusing on scales entails that we investigate how social relations are forged between actors and authorities in different governance structures which can be in conflict with the state level and become an alternative to the ‘nationed geographies’. Taking the notion of sanctuary cities as an example, we can here see a rescaling of the border toward the urban (or local) scale, involving local authorities and non-state actors in urban space. Furthermore, we want to focus the discussion on the little-addressed challenge of developing intersectional strategies, networks beyond borders and new state/civil society-relations.
We are thereby dealing with the following questions:
- How does political activism and organizing work at city and neighborhood level?
- How can different social fields be linked?
- How do local initiatives succeed in networking with initiatives from other localities?
- In how far can we observe new or transforming state/civil society-relations?
We welcome abstracts that address these questions with empirical and/or theoretical studies, including a focus on social fields such as migrant rights, housing, care work, and others, and their linkages.
As part of the Research Stream, we are considering organizing panels with, among others, the following key issues, although other thematic groupings are also possible:
1) „Enacting solidarity and citizenship ‚from below‘: transversal and translocal relations“
(Chair: Donatella della Porta and Mojca Pajnik).
2) „Urban re-articulations of state and civil society: cases of new municipalism“
(Chair: Oscar García Agustín and Martin Bak Jørgensen)
3) „Care as a cross-cutting concept: practices, communities and struggles of care at urban scales“ (Chair: Sarah Schilliger and Helge Schwiertz)
Abstracts could be submitted via the conference platform at www.conftool.com/esa2024 by 15 January 2024. Further details: https://www.europeansociology.org/conference/2024
You can find this call also on our website: https://europefrombelow.net/events-2/
Past events
From Sovereignty to Solidarity – book presentation and workshop with Harald Bauder (Hamburg, July 2023)
12th of July 2023: 18:00-19:30
From Sovereignty to Solidarity. Book presentation and joint discussion with Harald Bauder
Venue: Universität Hamburg, ESA W 221 (Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1, 20146 Hamburg)
In his book From Sovereignty to Solidarity (Routledge 2022) Harald Bauder re-imagines human mobility in ways that are de-linked from national sovereignty. Using examples from around the world, he examines contemporary practices of solidarity to illustrate what such a conceptualization of human mobility looks like. Bauder suggests that urban and local scales, rather than the national scale, is a better way to frame human migration and belonging. The book ultimately proposes that solidarity, rather than sovereignty, offers an alternative approach to imagine how human mobility should, and already does, occur.
He will talk about his book and his theses with Mouna Maaroufi and Helge Schwiertz (both researchers at Universität Hamburg and the project Enacting Citizenship and Solidarity in Europe „From Below“).
Harald Bauder is a Professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies and in the Graduate Program for Immigration and Settlement Studies at X University (formerly Ryerson University) in Toronto, Canada, and a Senior Fellow of the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, Germany. Furthermore, he leads the international project Urban Sanctuary, Migrant Solidarity and Hospitality in Global Perspective (Soli*City).
13th of July 2023: 9:30 – 15:00
“Solidarity and local political initiatives in the social fields of migrations” (Workshop)
Venue: Warburg-Haus Heilwigstraße 116 20249 Hamburg
(U1 and U3 Kellinghusenstraße)
As a follow-up to the presentation of his current book on the previous evening, the workshop with Harald Bauder will provide space to discuss concepts of solidarity, especially in the context of cities. We will examine how practices, relations or institutions of solidarity are created and transformed by local political initiatives in social fields of migration, with a special focus on how migration is linked to social fields such as housing or care. In light of the particular local, socio-economic and institutional contexts, we discuss the analytical potential of different concepts of solidarity (such as transversal or place-based solidarities, solidarity cities), but also consider how research perspectives can be broadened by linking them to other concepts such as (urban) citizenship, commons, or non-Eurocentric terms.
To participate in the workshop, please send an email to ecseuro-office.wiso@uni-hamburg.de (participation depends on the number of available places). For regular updates on our research, please sign up for our biannual newsletter on our website europefrombelow.net or follow us on Twitter @EcsEuro.
The events are organized as a cooperation of the research projects:
Urban Sanctuary, Migrant Solidarity and Hospitality in Global Perspective
Workshop-Program
Workshop on „Post-pandemic transformations of citizenship“ (with Engin Isin)
15th and 16th of June 2023, Aalborg (Denmark)
This two-day workshop, organized by our project partner DEMOS – Democracy, Migration and Movements Research Group, aims at discussing the numerous contemporary breaks and continuities in the meaning of citizenship, especially – but not exclusively – under the impact of recent events.
- Organizers: Dr. Leandros Fischer, Assistant Professor of International Studies, Department of Culture and Learning; DEMOS research group.
- Confirmed keynote speaker: Professor Dr. Engin Isin, School of Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary University, London; chief editor, Citizenship Studies.
The deadline for the submission of abstracts is Monday, the 17th of April 2023.
Please see the Call for papers
Caring Cities conference
We were delighted that two of our team members were invited to speak at the Caring Cities conference. Mouna Maaroufi was on the opening panel „What are Caring Cities? And where does the concept come from?“ and Sarah Schilliger took part in the workshop „Care Work between Community Capitalism and Caring Communities“. Here you can find more information and videos of the event.