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Research Seminar Series: Localities of Welcoming

This seminar series brings together an informal and non-hierarchical network of people living and working in European city neighbourhoods where refugee arrivals are concentrated. It aims to promote and exchange information, discuss long-term strategies for welcoming and working with refugee communities, and develop a critical framework of ideas in this field.

Description

The Localities of Welcoming Network is an initiative led by Professor Sue Clayton, Goldsmiths, University of London, and Professor Anna-Louise Milne, University of London Institute in Paris, to support transnational dialogue about the effects of border regimes. It is also supported by a steering group that includes Theodoros Fouskas (University of West Attica), Maria Pisani, (L-Università ta' Malta) and Pru Waldorf (Refugee Solidarity Summit).

As media attention veers ever more abruptly from one site of immobilized immiseration to another – from officially designed EU Hot-Spots in Southern Europe, to long entrenched scenes of border conflict, to new outposts of the increasingly punitive conditions of human mobility for many people in the world – the Localities of Welcoming Network proposes to continue the work developed through the COVID-constrained months via a series of online discussion sessions linking particular locales marked by the effects, adaptations and innovations resulting from new patterns of intensified mobility and imposed immobility.  

Localities of Welcoming brings together an informal and non-hierarchical network of people living and working in European city neighbourhoods where refugee arrivals are concentrated. It aims to promote and exchange information, discuss long-term strategies for welcoming and working with refugee communities, and develop a critical framework of ideas in this field with a particular interest in intersections between refugee-oriented work and other strategies for critical opposition, including Black Lives Matter actions or the Gilets noirs in France.   

Across Europe, in large and medium-size cities, particular localities have become synonymous with citizen-led actions in the name of safe passage for refugees and the right to rebuild one’s life in peace of mind and body. What factors have contributed to this clustering of welcome? How do they compare in different national and institutional environments? What circulations link them?

You can read more about these meetings and the work they intend to do on the Warden of Goldsmiths, Frances Corner’s blog here

Format

These are online discussions which gather activists, scholars and people living in forced displacement and inflicted immobility. We aim to include people from across the full spectrum of migration experience and study, to discuss the complex dynamics of interpersonal, organisational and discursive experiences in localities of intensified hostility and determined welcoming. 

Please note that you will need to register via Eventbrite. Registered attendees will receive an email with the link to the Zoom platform a few days and a few hours before the event starts.

Programme

Events

Check our upcoming and past events. Missed one of our events? Simply click on one of our past events below to view event details and access the recordings. For the archives of the 2020-21 series, please contact the Network organisers directly.